Hello and welcome to the program UFO Warning.
In this episode we're talking about the Wytheville UFO
sightings. That's correct, the Wytheville
UFO sightings. This actually took place in 1987
down at Wytheville, VA. I found this first article over
at unsolved.com. The title says Whitefield UFO
Sightings and the case details start off telling us that
Whitefield, Virginia is a small town nestled in the foothills of
the Blue Ridge Mountains. Country music station WYVE calls
itself the voice of Whitefield for most days.
Life there is usually quiet and uneventful, but that was not the
case on the morning of October 7th, 1987.
Radio reporter Danny Gordon checked in as usual with the
County Sheriff and heard an unbelievable tale.
According to Danny, three wife county sheriff's deputies all
claim to have seen a UFO. So there you have your three
reliable witnesses. I guess quote.
It was a filler piece that came on at the end of the news, which
I usually relegate to something that may be unusual.
Like we had one police officer who killed 5 chickens at once
with two shots. And that was a story that ran as
kind of a ha ha piece. And this was another ha ha
piece. And being a very skeptical news
man, it was definitely not in my lead part of my news.
Well, it kind of tells you this guy's opinion.
He's pretty biased toward not believing UFOs.
Even though he has three reliable witnesses in the form
of deputy sheriff's who all claim to have seen this UFO, he
chooses not to believe them. So we have kind of have an idea
where he was coming from on this that goes on and says.
However, Danny's ha ha piece sparked some unbelievable
listener responses. Reports of UFO sightings poured
into WYVE. With the switchboard jammed,
Danny set up a spatial call in program for the following week.
Being a brass tacks journalist, I always believed there was a
plausible logical explanation and I felt at the time that it
was military of some nature and that we would find the reason in
a short period of time. Danny thought the UF OS weren't
most likely experimental aircraft being tested out of
Virginia's Langley Air Force Base, but he was reportedly told
by the military that there was no testing going on.
As more and more residents came forward with their stories of UF
OS, the military finally came up with an explanation.
While you bug these guys long enough, they're going to come up
with an excuse. They said the cause for the UFO
sightings was not an experimental aircraft, but were
there planes refueling? But according to Danny Gordon,
that explanation was impossible. I called the Pentagon and talked
to the Air Force general there who told me if they're refueling
under 13,000 feet, then somebody's butt's in a sling.
And to this day we don't know if they were refueling at 5000
feet. But at the same time, I have
asked if it is military, then I'll back off the story and
leave it alone if you tell me, because I'm a patriot.
And each time I'm told it's not us, we're not doing it, and we
haven't been doing it. Well, they're at a loss,
clearly. And I find it interesting that
this journalist, just their first, their first inclination
is to volunteer to the military, not to inform the public of
what's going on because they're a patriot.
Interesting take on that. On October 21st, just two weeks
after the first sighting, Danny and his friend Rodger Hall drove
to the area where most of the sightings had occurred.
According to Danny, they brought along a 35mm still camera as
well as a video camera, so he's starting to see the guy does
have some curiosity about this. Give him credit.
He's taking his friend out there to the site at least, and he is
going to do some actual investigation, he says.
We were headed home after two hours of fruitless searching and
I just happened to look to my left and saw a very unusual
object coming across the horizon.
I pulled off to the side of the road in a hurry, jumped out, he
got out of the right side. As he got out I noticed the
craft coming at me was very large, it had a Dome shape to
the top of it and no winks and had what appeared to be a strobe
putting up multi coloured lights on the right side of the craft.
As I watched the sky from the left came the red ball.
As the big mothership went into a small skiff of clouds, the Red
Bull docked with the craft. We looked at each other and
realized no pictures. The camera was not in my hand.
The camera was not in his hand, and we both knew we blew it.
The next night, Gordon and Hall went out again.
This time they did take photographs with the film still
undeveloped. Danny Calder press conference
for the following day, October 23rd, 1987.
The night before the press conference, I received a phone
call from somebody who refused to identify himself, and he said
that I need to be aware that the CIA and the federal government
were very much interested in the Wythe County UF OS.
I started to wonder what I'd stepped into and my wife was
urging me to back off, to leave it alone, and I was receiving
some anonymous phone calls saying it's not for your place
to be messing in defence matters.
So now he's getting these anonymous phone calls
threatening him, claiming to be some sort of, I suppose, quasi
representative of the DoD and the CIA.
Kind of weird, kind of scary maybe.
After the press conference, Danny discovered that his house
had been broken into. Although nothing was stolen,
Danny was convinced that someone was looking for his photographs
when when developed, the pictures revealed only vague
streaks of light in the sky. But six weeks later, Danny had
another opportunity to photograph the UFOs.
He was out shopping with his wife and daughter when they
encountered some unexpected visitors.
We looked very quickly and saw what I thought was one large
object, which later appeared to be 4 flying disc shapes.
As soon as the objects were photographed, they disappeared
from view. When the pictures came out they
showed 4 definite shapes of objects in the sky.
But the most impressive point in the four photographs, the
objects appeared to change shape or life formations with one
click of the camera. They go from a teardrop shape to
a round ball shape, then they go to a flying saucer like disc
shape and then they go to an egg shape.
As they go out of sight, there you go.
Classic shape changing, very, very weird stuff.
The people of Whiteville knew something extraordinary was
happening in their small town. Within a three month period,
there had been more than 1500 sightings.
One of the first occurred near Interstate 81, a mile from
downtown Whiteville. Eyewitnesses said the craft
resembled A brightly lit spinning carousel.
Immediately, other sightings were reported.
One local resident, Patricia Acre, experienced a total of 10
UFO sightings. I'm not mistaken about what we
saw, Absolutely not, because we've never seen this before.
The best way I can describe them is that they were sort is that
they sort of look like a cross between a helicopter and an
airplane with no noise. Don't we hear that all the time
now when these things are called drones?
But you notice no noise. Then there was Mary Jane
Williamson's sighting, which happened directly above her
house in the center of white fill.
It had all the white lights in the front, just a big semicircle
of white light, and it was just huge.
I mean, it was just absolutely huge.
You just had this feeling of something really, really big
just moving, just drifting over your head and no sounds or
anything. Three months after the initial
wave of sightings, Danny was packing for a broadcasters
conference in Virginia Beach. It was there that he was to
speak about his UFO coverage. Quote, I received a phone call
at home from a retired military intelligence officer.
And first he told me to make sure that I taped the
conversation so he could put the date and everyone to be aware.
And I said, why do you want to take this?
And he said I want your friends to know that if something
happens to you that I forewarned you.
He told me that because of his investigations into the UFO
field that they had hit his son and caused his son to die with
some kind of virus connected to leukemia.
He said that he had information that the federal government was
not very happy with my UFO investigations.
He said they want to quiet you. Less than one month after the
disturbing phone call, Danny had two surprise visitors at his
home. The two suited men said they
were newspaper reporters and stayed for approximately 45
minutes. According to Danny, one of the
men interviewed him while the other roamed through the house
snapping photographs. They told me when they left they
would send me a copy of the article so I could peruse it,
and when I didn't get one, I called the newspaper and they
said, well, these two guys are not on our payroll.
They don't work for us. So who they were I don't know.
But they were in my house, saw my pictures, saw my negatives,
talked to my family, took pictures and then left.
But they were not with the newspaper.
A few weeks later, Danny sit down to organize and catalog his
UFO photographs. When I got to the canister which
had the UFO negatives, I quickly opened it and found some UFO
negatives. But the one negative with the
shots from the shopping mall was missing.
Now I felt like maybe there was something in those photographs
that I was not seeing. So I took the photographs to
some other people to look at it. We used magnifying glasses and
and we measured angles trying to find out why these photographs
were so important. And we've yet to discover why
anyone would want to steal that set of four in a series of
photographs of the UFOs. 2 months later, the stress of the
late night phone calls, the home break in, the strange visitors
and now the missing negatives finally took a toll on Danny and
he had a heart attack. Wow.
Doctors later determined that the attack was brought on by
severe exhaustion. Danny was warned that continued
involvement with the UFO controversy could kill him.
If I had my choice, I I'd not report on the UFO story again.
It's just been too hard in my life and created too many
problems. Don't look up, because once you
look up and you tell somebody what you saw, your life has
changed forever. Danny Gordon says that today
Whitefield has moved on from his days as a UFO town and is now
enjoying its booming arts and business communities.
But if history is any indicator, sometime soon, in another small
town, someone else will look up and his or her life will never
be the same. That's actually some pretty
frightening stuff there. Yeah, very, very strange.
Let's take a look at this other article about this mass UFO
sighting from 1987 down there in Whitefield, Virginia.
I found this take on the same sighting over at
astonishinglegends.com. Kind of a little bit off the
beaten track type of website, but it says Wytheville UFO.
This is dated October 4th, 20/24/1987.
Brought many new things to the world.
The Lost Boys, Apple's first Computer and Guns and Roses
debut album. But it also brought an
incredible UFO flap to the small town of Wytheville, VA.
In fact, it got so intense and there were so many different
crafts in the area that even Unsolved Mysteries covered the
phenomena in one of their episodes.
Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Whitefield was not
what you'd call a bustling place, and certainly not a place
on the map when it came to legend tripping.
But that changed on the morning of October 7th, 1987.
Danny Gordon, a local radio operator, checked in early with
the County Sheriff for any news that happened overnight.
That's when the first tale landed.
There, 3 White County Sheriff's deputies all claimed to have
seen a UFO. Danny decided to cover the piece
on the news as an interesting tidbit, but shortly after he
finished his spot, the piece sparked an unbelievable
response. Throughout Whiteville.
Reports of UFO sightings began to pour into the radio station
WYVE. It was so relentless that the
switchboard jammed and Danny had to work to set up a special
dedicated call in program to cover the calls on October 17th.
This just shows you how many people were seeing these crazy
things. This is unique because at the
time Danny confirmed he was a skeptic.
This was good news. It was engaging his audience and
making some ways. But he truly believed there was
a terrestrial explanation and the one thing they had in
common. There was nothing in common.
In fact the sightings were in the UFO gambit.
But here's some of my favourites.
A UFO lit up like a Christmas tree with red, green and white
lights. There was a giant egg shaped
craft. There was silent giant black
triangles and something described as ominous cubes.
These things are coming in all different shapes and sizes.
Going back to Danny, even after the October 7th, Spatial figured
that experimenting or testing new crafts were being tested at
Virginia's Langley Air Force Base.
However, he called the base and couldn't quite come up with
anything. So on October 21st, him and a
friend decided to drive out to an area by the town where many
reports occurred. They hung out for a while and
didn't see anything until I did. He reported on Unsolved
Mysteries. We were headed home after two
hours of fruitless searching and I just happened to look to my
left and saw a very unusual object coming across the
horizon. I pulled off to the side of the
road in a hurry, jumped out, he got on the right side, and as he
got out I noticed the craft coming at me was very large.
It had a Dome shape to the top of it, no wings, and had what
appeared to be a strobe putting out multi colored lights on the
right side of the craft. As I watched the sky from the
left came the red ball. As the big mothership went into
a small skiff of clouds, the red ball docked with the craft.
We looked at each other and realized no pictures.
The camera was not in my hand. The camera was not in his hand.
And we knew we both blew it. Yeah.
Then it goes on and talks a little bit more about these.
It says between October and December 1987, more than 1500
UFO reports would be submitted. No explanation or hotspot
theories were ever proposed or discovered.
Now there is now even a White Fill UFO Fest commemorating the
flap. But when it comes to white fill,
this isn't the only strange event that occurred.
The Octagon Mansion, the History Museum is supposedly haunted.
The Grand Mansion too and was covered on Ghost Hunters.
Interesting stuff. It's kind of funny how a lot of
times this paranormal stuff does seem to overlap.
So I want to finish up with this newspaper article from back on
October 19th, 1987. This is from the Times Dispatch
that says staff writer Mark Homburg.
Title says UFOs. If you're crazy, I'm nuts too.
Got a couple illustrations here. Composite drawing of recent
Richmond sighting. One of them's kind of a big
cigar, almost blimp shaped, and the other one looks like a giant
flying saucer perhaps. Article begins.
It says Rural Retreat Police Chief Bob Lewis wishes he could
find a lid for the can of worms he opened two weeks ago when he
spotted an unidentified flying object.
I didn't see anything, He joked as he opened the door of his
modest brick home to confront another reporter.
He stepped into his front yard and glanced at the mountains on
the edge of the on the edge of town.
Man, I wish I hadn't said a word to anybody about it.
Lewis is 1 of dozens of Southwest Virginia residents who
are certain they've seen large silent objects hovering or
creeping along in the crisp air over the multi colored
mountains. He carefully looked at each of
the composite drawings of other recent sightings made by Times
Dispatch artist with the help of the witnesses.
I don't know what it was I saw up there, he said calmly after
looking the sketches over. But that's it right there.
He jabbed a finger at one of the drawings, a black and white
version of the cone shaped object drawn by the artist.
It wasn't a depiction of one of the White County sightings, but
a drawing of an object spotted over Richmond skies.
A Southside woman was driving north toward Richmond on
Interstate 95 Wednesday night. The following is her explanation
of her close encounter. I sound crazy, I know.
When I saw it, I thought, this isn't me seeing this.
It wasn't all the way dark. The news had just finished.
I was driving to Cloverleaf Mall to go to the Toys-R-Us.
Right past the Willis Rd. exit. The boys, aged 2 and 4, started
being calm. That's highly unusual, the kids
said. Look at all those lights, mommy.
The traffic slowed, my radio stopped working, and my lights
got dim. The charge light came on.
I looked over and oh gosh, oh gosh.
I started ripping apart my glove compartment looking for my
camera. She pulled her car over.
It was about as high as the telephone wire, maybe lower, and
it was about the size of that house.
She pointed at her back door to a house about 1000 square feet
in size, 50 yards away, and it was that close.
The lights were flashing red, blue-green, yellow, so it was
beautiful. There was no noise.
The sky was so quiet I didn't want to take my eyes off it.
Other cars had pulled over. I asked one of the drivers, Am I
crazy? She said.
If you're crazy, I'm nuts too. She continued to watch for about
two minutes. A round and red object, much
smaller and glowing brightly, approached the larger object as
if the two were playing hide and seek, she said.
Once the small object found the other, both disappeared
instantly, followed by a shower of white lights like a tangle of
shooting stars. She then tried her ignition.
The car started right up. No one else called to
substantiate the Richmond story, but have the wife UFOs straight
E. After nearly a dozen interviews
with UFO spotters there, a clear picture emerges.
The UFOs are silent except for an occasional little hum.
Reminded me of a little bee or something.
Patricia Akers said she and her family saw 2 airplane shaped
objects before Sun Niles more than a week ago, flying low at a
low speed. She and her husband Elmo helped
with the other composite drawing.
The UFOs can hover or fly so slowly that they appear to be
hovering. The objects appeared in groups
of two or three. The red, green, yellow and white
lights usually don't flash. Many spotters believe the
objects are part of a secret military project.
Dogs, usually alert to visitors, haven't paid any attention to
the UFOs. The objects are being spotted by
people who have never seen a UFO before.
Witnesses say they feel the objects are not hostile.
In fact, most smile while discussing their encounters.
It's hardly a laughing matter. Residents of wife are no
strangers to aircraft, particularly military planes on
maneuvers, and they say what they have been seeing are not
normal aircraft. They'll jar your windows out,
Elmo Aker said of the military aircraft that frequently fly by.
This one didn't hardly make any noise.
What struck me was it was flying so slow.
I didn't see how anything that big could stay in the air going
that slow, He said. It was larger than a bomber.
The Acre sighting was rare in that it was still daylight,
although the light was fading fast.
If I'd seen it one after dark, it would have scared me to
death. Missus Acres said as it was, her
children were terrified and cried.
Daddy, get out here. She said many of the other
sightings coincide with that one.
Lighting patterns match almost exactly.
It was big. Lights are flashing all the way
around, said Gerald Musser, who spotted the object while bow
hunting for a raccoon down in Black Lake.
It was a humongous thing. Then came another right behind
it. Just a straight in, a straight
arrow. He then saw a big reddish orange
ball. My buddy said it was, their
mother said with a laugh. Bill Rosenbaum was watching the
baseball game Wednesday night when he stepped outside to get a
little air. He said he saw two objects
almost exactly like those Muster saw.
He ran over and woke up his neighbor, and together they
watched the objects make a slow tour of the Ridge above his
house. Rosenberg described his
encounter while playing pool in his basement.
I'd given anything if he'd land over there, he said as he
hunkered down for a shot on the 12 ball.
I'd go with him in a minute. That same night, Jack and
Carolyn Ellison spotted objects creeping through the air above
their mobile home on the outskirts of Rural Retreat.
The composite sketch of what they saw matched that of the
Acre sighting. Retired from the Air Force,
where he worked on flight simulators, Ellison is no
stranger to aircraft. I told her, his wife, that maybe
that's some of the new Star Wars defense drawl.
Ellison, the next day when that stealth bomber went down, made
me think about what I'd seen. Betty Patterson saw the same
thing the others did, except she noticed that the smaller glowing
ball coming out of the top of the larger object, the little
one, flew off a little bit and curved toward Cripple Creek.
The big one followed it. It was strange, it was like you
were being stared at, She said. She too heard a low humming
sound after the UFO left. Missus Patterson remembered
thinking, I don't believe this is bull, and went outside to
look up into the crystal clear skies to see if she couldn't
spot the object again. The air was crisp, the stars
were brilliant, everything was quiet.
Then the hog snorted. She remembered.
It just scared me to death. Wow, Isn't that something else?
The cool thing about going back in these old newspaper articles
is, is seeing the, the real reaction these people had in
real time. It's just, it's just such a cool
thing to see with these things. Yeah, there's a bunch of cool
articles about. There's, there's one last one
I'll look at. This is from October 14th, 1987.
SW Times Pulaski written by Joe Heldreth Another UFO sighted in
wife. So you kind of get the idea of
these things were just being seen all over the place.
The sightings of unidentified flying objects continue in Wife
County and now include an incident where an object rent a
car off the road. The Wife County Sheriff's
Department says this past weekend an out of state family
which was visiting here reported their car was harassed by an
unidentified flying object and forced out of the road.
The car was near the S&D Grocery and Hopkins Motel and Graham's
Forge when a low flying object came at the car flying directly
over it. The object was described as Oval
in shape with red and white pulsating lights.
The area the lights showed was from 6 to 8 feet wide.
The family reported the UFO hovered at a distance for five
to 10 minutes, then took off toward Pulaski County.
The family says the flying object gave off no noise as it
disappeared. The out of state family
reportedly was not aware of any other UFO sightings at the time
of the incident. Other sightings of UFOs were
reported this past weekend over Ivanhoe, Piney and Wytheville.
No explanation has been offered for the sighting.
Isn't that something final? Let's wrap it up here with this
this last little excerpt. Marines, mum, other military
deny involvement in Whitefield UFOs, it says Officials of the
US Air Force, Army and Navy have told Senator Paul Tribble of
Virginia that they are not the source of many UFOs spotted in
White County, Virginia since October of last year.
According to Whitefield's principal witness, Danny Gordon,
the Marines haven't replied at all to Senator Tribe's inquiry.
Senator Tribe questioned military authorities at the
urging of White County residents to determine if military was
involved. As Gordon and others have
suspected they may be stonewalling, but in fact the
military is not the source of objects.
Gordon questions why they don't show more concern.
Doesn't that sound familiar? Uncountable numbers of witnesses
have reported UFOs in and around Whitefield, usually seen on
Wednesday nights and described as saucer shaped, oblong and
dumb, topped often with many brilliant flashing lights.
Gordon said this got a picture of this Danny Gordon fella here?
Yeah, it just sounds just exactly like the drones to me.
Of course, we didn't have drones back then, so people didn't know
what to call them. We always go back to the to the
default position. Well, this must be some kind of
a top secret craft when they tell you how these things are
changing shapes right in front of you.
So they're they're beyond anything that we have.
They almost, they're almost reaching like this level of, of
paranormal. That's what it seems like to me.
It's just so strange. They just are not conforming to
our definition of, of reality or the laws of physics whatsoever.
But some really cool sightings down there in Whiteville,
Virginia back in 1987. Until next time, this is UFO
warning over and out.