SUBJECT: UFO UPDATE FILE: UFO1164
REGISTER-GUARD, Eugene,OR - JAN. 22, 1990
Remember the New Year's Eve UFO sighting by a group of Eugene partygoers,
reported here last Monday? Enough others have called or written since then to
convince me that there was something in the sky that night. But what it was
remains-as it always does in UFO stories-a tantalizing unknown.
Sherill Bowers reported last week that she and a group of 20-30 people at a
party at East 15th and Moss watched five lights move slowly, in varying
formations, across the sky for about twenty minutes after midnight. Robert
McCaffrey, a real estate salesman who lives in the Ferry Street Bridge area,
said five people at his house saw the same thing. The large bright lights
appeared in the south and moved north, he said.
"What we were looking at was an almost perfectly diamond-shaped formation,
and finally a fifth light appeared like a tail on a kite," he said. "What was
striking was there was absolutly no sound. "When they came overhead of us, they
split formation, two lights in one line, two in another," he said. "My son
(Sean, 16) ran in and got his camera and took two or three photos."
Sean's pictures show two bright spots-slightly squiggly, because of the
camera movement-in the sky. But the photos wouldn't reproduce well in the paper.
McCaffery said the lights dissappeared over the Coburg Hills after about
ten minutes. Nancy Dear, a teacher who was at the McCaffrey's party, gave a
similar description. As Bowers had, she phoned every agency she could think of
in a futile search for an explanation.
Betsy Steffensen and anither group watcher the lights from the panaoramic
view at her house on Skyline Boulevard. Binoculars didn't help in
identification. "When we put the binoculars on them, they were still just these
lights," Steffensen said. Eugene poet Ingrid Wendt and her daughter saw them
from near the University of Oregon's Hayward Field. Runners Marcia and Bill
McChesney watched them from across the river.
"We were returning to our friend's party after running the Midnight Run in
Alton Baker Park," Marcia McChesney said. "The strongest drink we consumed that
evening was coffee." But the sightings seem to have been limited to the Eugene
area. There have been no reports from elseware in the state. At the University
of Oregon's Pine Mountain Observatory nead Bend, for example, research assistant
Doug Hawkins said he was working that night and saw nothing but stars and
planets.
McCaffery dosen't belive the lights were anything extraterrestrial, but
he's still curious. "This has just had us all baffled," he said. "There has to
be a logical explanation."
If only one of those lights had dropped a bottle-with a message in it...
=END=
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