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
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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.

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