SUBJECT: VALLEY PEOPLE SHARE CLOSE ENCOUNTERS FILE: UFO1286 NEWS CLIPPING SERVICE DATE OF ARTICLE: March 5, 1989 SOURCE OF ARTICLE: News Tribune LOCATION: Tempe, Arizona BYLINE: Bill Roberts ======================================================== (C) Copyright 1989 ParaNet Information Service All Rights Reserved. THIS FILE WAS PROVIDED BY THE UFO NEWSCLIPPING SERVICE AND PREPARED BY PARANET ALPHA -- PARANET INFORMATION SERVICE PARANET INFORMATION SERVICE BBS PARANET ALPHA DENVER, COLORADO NOTE: THESE FILES ARE NOT FOR REDISTRIBUTION OUTSIDE OF THE PARANET INFORMATION SERVICE NETWORK ======================================================== VALLEY RESIDENTS SHARE CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH UFOS First of two parts By Bill Roberts Tribune writer Are unidentified flying objects simply the bogy that lives within each of us? The one that believes something dark and evil waits beneath the bed at night? That suggests the sounds outside are more than leaves whipped by a midnight storm? That envisions the tree itself, given the proper moonlight and blackness, as a gnarled, shriveled body with a soul all it's own? Or are UFOs real? Do saucerians far beyond our earthly mental abilities study us as we do monkeys at the zoo? Do they walk among us? Or attempt to communicate? Or occasionally steal us in the night? If there is a line between such neatly opposing viewpoints, then the stories that follow almost surely grow from it. They come from reputable people--and more of them than ever are coming forward today--with detailed accounts of close encounters they dared not make public in a less sympathetic era. "I don't go out and look for UFOs, and I don't go out of my way to be up on them," says 38 year old Lyn Caldwell, a secretary in the flight controls department of the McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Co. in Mesa. "But I know what I saw. What I saw was so clear and precise." Caldwell and the others are not connoisseurs of UFO tales, nor do they live on distant continents. They are from Apache Junction, Tempe and Mesa. In each case, their UFO encounter was a memorable but one time experience, not a regular diet sandwiched between reading the palms and studying the stars. Moreover, they are family people with professional reputations at stake. To tell their stories, they say, is to subject themselves to ridicule and criticism. Several said they didn't care anymore. Perhaps most importantly, many of their stories are remarkably similar in description and detail, though they never have talked to each other. What Caldwell knows she saw, as did others that day in Ohio, was an oblong, silver object that hovered about 150 feet above them. There were no death rays there or masked invaders, just simple flashes of colored light coming from an object that vanished half an hour later at interstellar speed. Her story begins in suburban Toledo in late 1972. Her husband at the time, a Toledo police officer, was driving their 1969 Shelby Cobra toward St. Lukes Hospital to visit her brother. She was riding beside him. Caldwell says she spotted an object not quite as large as a blimp moving above them. Red, blue and white lights pulsated from capsule like windows across a clear, afternoon sky. When they arrived at the hospital, the object hovered just beyond the parking lot. It would move slowly, then it would stop. It made no noise, she says. "It was low enough that we could see the windows and the lights coming out of them," says Caldwell. "Maybe 15 or 20 other people in orderly outfits gathered in the parking lot to watch it. It was still, then it went straight up. It was like it evaporated. It was gone. When it was over, the man next to us said, 'They're going to think we're nuts.'" Like the others Caldwell says she has seen only one UFO. She and her husband were reluctant to discuss what they saw, and nothing about it was printed in Ohio newspapers. Another woman who now lives in Mesa was taking care of her four young children in Marion, Ohio, about the same time. Her encounter 100 miles south of Toledo was similar to Caldwell's. Three years later in the Panhandle of Texas, a woman who today is a Tempe clothing store manager, describes a similar vehicle that landed near her home. What these people have in common is this: They kept their stories private and only reluctantly discuss them now. What their minds saw at the time remain very clear to them, but something else also happened. The sightings evoked a common emotion that set them apart from the "normal crowd" and made them alone in the experience. ================================================================= ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************