Ohio And The Great UFO Chase Of 1966

In 1966, a Portage County Ohio Sheriff would become the talk of the nation when he (and his partner) would be sent to investigate an abandoned vehicle. Once they had arrived at the scene, the two men spotted lights coming off some kind of aircraft or spaceship that was unlike anything they had ever seen before.

Roughly two decades after the infamous Roswell Incident in New Mexico, the news media was hardly a stranger to the spectacle that can come from spotting extraterrestrial activity, and for the most part they had learned to ignore it. Most UFO reports came without any kind of proof and came from people who were mentally unstable (or drunk) or otherwise had mental health issues.

This time, things would be different. This time, the reports came from someone who seemed credible, and who didn’t have any agenda. And, if you can’t trust two troopers and a few other various law enforcement officials, then who can you trust?

April 17, 1966

Dale Spaur and Wilbur “Barney” Neff were working the night shift for the Portage County Sheriff’s Office when a call came in about an abandoned car left on the side of the road. They were dispatched to the location on State Route 224, just east of the town of Atwater, where they immediately spotted the vehicle.

What really caught their attention, though, were some lights behind a clump of trees that were slowly climbing. And that’s when they saw it – an aircraft that looked like nothing they had ever seen before. “It looked kind of like an ice cream cone tipped over on its side,” Spaur would say. It had a pointed stick like thing on the rear, and it sounded like an overloaded transformer.”

It was headed straight for them.

Well, overhead anyway. As it passed over the two Deputy Sheriffs, they said they could feel heat radiating from the craft.

Unsure what to do next (this sort of thing clearly isn’t in the Sheriff Office’s Playbook) they radioed into headquarters, who told the guys they needed to follow the thing, whatever it was.

Dale and Barney turned their cruiser around and started to follow.

Meanwhile, Dale and Barney’s chief, Gerald Buchert had been out on patrol when Dale and Barney had radioed in. He rushed home to grab his camera and before getting back in his patrol car managed to snap a photo or two of the object as it hovered approximately a mile or so from his house. The photo, once developed, clearly showed some sort of metallic half-football shaped craft over a range of trees.

At one point, the command came from Buchert to try and shoot at the thing, but that order was almost immediately cancelled, just in case this thing was a weather balloon. Or, something else…

The pair chased the unknown craft down State Route 224 for several miles, until they came to the town of Deerfield. There, the craft seemed to fly in a southern direction, so they hopped on State Route 14 and kept pursuing.

They would later comment that it felt like this craft, whatever it was, and whoever was manipulating it, was playing some kind of “cat and mouse” game with them. If they would speed up, so would the craft. If they slowed down, it would, too. At a few points the sheriffs would have to stop at a stoplight or slow way down because of traffic, but so would this flying craft they were trying to pursue.

Still following Route 14, they were joined at the intersection of Route 165 by East Palestine police officer Wayne Huston who followed in his own cruiser. Now Dale and Barney had another problem they were facing – their car was slowly running out of gas, as cars sometimes tend to do.

State Route 14 became State Route 51 when it crossed the Pennsylvania state line (or Constitution Boulevard as it’s also called today). When they finally had to stop for gas, they were joined by another police officer, Frank Panzanella. All four men stood outside their vehicles looking at the … thing, which for just a moment seemed to stop. They then saw that a pair of Air Force jets were approaching from just over the horizon.

Then, suddenly, the craft flew directly upward and disappeared.

Almost immediately, Dale and Barney became famous. First with the local papers, then within three days, the nationals. A week later, they were getting calls from around the world.

Project Blue Book

By the time Dale and Barney got home the following day, the newspapers were reporting that two officers had chased a UFO for miles. Dale and Barney wanted to ignore all the publicity they were getting – it had been a long, slightly confusing night for them, and they just wanted some rest.

But rest would not come for Dale. Not for a very long time.

Shortly after he had gotten home, he received a call from Major Hector Quintanilla who was then the head of an Air Force department called Project Blue Book. From the tone of his voice, Dale could tell Quintanilla wasn’t happy.

“Tell me about this mirage you saw,” was apparently what Quintanilla wanted to know with a palpable tone in his voice.

During their conversation, Quintanilla tried to downplay everything Dale had tried to tell him, suggesting that the object the men saw was most likely Venus and saying things to make Dale doubt what he had really seen.

The following day, Dale got another call from Project Blue Book, this time from an officer named William Weitzel, and while he was a little less confrontational, he seemed to be of the same thought as Quintanilla.

For several days, the local press would cover various aspects of the story, hounding Dale (as well as the other officers involved in the UFO chase) with relentless phone alls and requests for interviews. This was especially true for the Cleveland newspaper.

The day following the UFO chase, reporters had talked with Gerald Buchert and learned about the photograph he had taken. Buchert quickly got the photo developed and sent a copy to the newspaper. When Quintanilla learned of this photograph, he seemed to become enraged and demanded the photograph to be handed over, along with the negatives.

There was just one problem – The Cleveland Plain Dealer had already gotten the photo, and in print, had already described it. Project Blue Book officials were, however, able to force the paper to not print the image, as they had intended to do. But, as for the description, that had already gone to press and had already been read by subscribers.

Living In Hell

Life for everyone involved had changed after spotting the UFO. Suddenly thrown into a national spotlight, several of the officers didn’t mind giving interviews or being quoted in the papers, and one or two may have even relished the attention. The same cannot be said for two of them.

Gerald Buchert was caught between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, he had seen the object with his own eyes (and his own camera) but he also seemed to have governmental officials at his throat trying to suppress any factual information and trying to make the incident seem inconsequential. He wouldn’t speak much about it, as if he was prevented from doing so. When a reporter asked his wife for a comment, she said that because of all the media attention, because of the volume of calls from the Air Force – it was like the two of them were “living in hell”.

Dale, likewise, wasn’t having much fun either. From the moment he returned home, he just wanted a good night’s rest and to put the previous day behind him. Instead, he was barraged by phone calls from reporters and government officials, every time he spoke with someone he knew, he said it felt to him like they were judging him. People would refer to him as one of the “UFO Officers,” which he hated. He just wanted to be left alone.

Dale never said that he believed in aliens or even that he thought that was what they saw. But that’s how he thought people perceived him. In the days following the chase, he would go from being aloof to showing signs of nervousness. Over time, his nerves would turn into rage.

Within a year of the chase, he would be arrested after beating his wife. Before he knew it, she was filing for divorce, he was let go from his job, and he would do nothing but sit in his rented room, living on one sandwich and one bowl of cereal per day. With what little money he made from his pension, minus what he had to pay in child support – he was left with nothing.

His wife even blamed their divorce on the UFO chase and its aftermath, saying that he was a different man after that, unable to cope with the stress and the endless hounding and the way even complete strangers looked at him like he was crazy.

Close Encounters

In 1977 (so, a few years after The Portage County UFO Incident) filmmaker Stephen Spielberg released his iconic science fiction-thriller Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The film features one scene that is said to be inspired by the Portage County UFO Chase, in which a small group of police officers follow alien spacecraft through the countryside, across the Ohio state line, and ending … well, in the movie it ends with one of the cop cars driving off a cliff, not in a Pennsylvania gas station, but close enough.

It’s also worth noting here that this particular scene in Close Encounters isn’t the film’s only connection to the State of Ohio. It’s director, Stephen Spielberg, was born and raised in Cincinnati.