In the 1950s and 60s UFO sightings were becoming a very common occurrence in the United States during the height of the Cold War. The US Air Force, dealing with a massive influx of reports of civilian sightings, set up Project Blue Book to catalogue and record these eye witness accounts. The project ran from 1947 to 1969 and recorded 12,618 sightings, with 701 being classified as ‘unidentified’. As you can discern, most of these sightings were either deemed not creditable or plausible explanations were offered, but some were indeed unexplainable. One such sighting occurred at Park Hills, Kentucky on Sunday, April 14, 1968 when a UFO was witnessed by around a dozen residents of the Dickmans Apartment complex. Of these witnesses were my mother (aged 28), and two sisters (aged 8 and 11).
Dickmans Apartments, Park Hills, Kentucky circa mid 1960s
Dickmans Apartments, Park Hills, Kentucky circa 2021 via Google Maps
During the 1960s families would often have cookouts together in the courtyards of apartment complexes like Dickmans. On this warm spring evening, mothers and fathers grilled food and conversed while the children played games like Red Rover. All was calm and normal until the unexpected happened. My sister Jackie was the first to see it. She yelled to everyone, “Look!” and pointed toward the sky. My Teri recalls that she could sense it even before her sister Jackie saw it and described hearing a low pitched humming sound from above. Looking up, and to her amazement, she saw a hovering disc overhead. Teri states that “everyone was stunned” by what they saw. Over 50 years later she can still describe what it looked like. I reached out to her recently and this is the emailed response of the account I received:
I remember it was a beautiful Spring evening, shortly before dusk. Several families in our apartment building decided to have a grill out together. The adults sat out on the apartment steps and on the benches, sipping ice tea; smoking and watching us kids playing Red Rover;Red Rover' I Dare You To Come Over, in the grassy courtyard. I remember hearing a strange slight humming sound overhead, but Jackie was the first one to point up to the sky. What I saw was something out of a science fiction movie. I remember the stab of fear that came over me. But mostly I was intrigued by the sight of the silver saucer hovering overhead. It spun in a slow, circular motion and had a very slight wobble to it. The lower part of the saucer was circular and larger than the upper deck. Its edges were slightly rounded. The underneath side was not flat but shaped like a soup bowl. The upper deck was round but smaller than the lower part, lighted squared shaped windows with slight, rounded corners were wrapped all the way around the saucer. It appeared to be about 200ft up and quite large. Then, suddenly without warning, it flew off to the right, over neighboring apartment buildings and was gone in the blink of an eye; leaving behind no contrails. I remember turning around to see if the adults had seen it. I could tell by the expressions on their faces they had. We had no explanation for what we had witnessed but it is something we will never forget.
After reading this you might say UFO sightings are a dime a dozen, and in many cases this would be correct, but what makes this account so interesting is that it was witnessed by so many people but the story does not end there. Just hours later, at approximately 12:30 a.m. on Monday, April 15th, six Cincinnati policemen reported seeing a UFO hovering over Sawyer Hall (a men's dormitory), 2910 Scioto street (now a Lane), located on the campus of University of Cincinnati - only 7 miles away.
Below are actual articles from The Cincinnati Enquirer from April 16, 1968 and the Cincinnati Post from April 17, 1968. Both of these articles describe what the officers saw that night; how the object looked, moved, and behaved; and also discusses the involvement of one Leonard H. Stringfield who was the co-coordinator of the federal ‘Colorado Project' which “investigates reports of unidentified objects”. From my understanding, The Colorodo Project was affiliated with Project Blue Book but if anyone has better information on this, please leave a comment and correct me.
According to a police report by patrolman Wiliam Wright who described the object as being “cone-shaped, about 12 feet tall and had a diameter at its widest point of 10 feet” further stating, “It switched alternately from a bright glow to a dim glow” and “it moved in a weaving manner”. The article also adds more clues from Stringfield who describes the object as: hovering, having swift movements, maintaining a brilliant light, and moving in defiance of prevailing winds which he concluded could not have been a balloon.
Interestingly, another news article from April 17, 1968 stated that, “a plastic bag attached to a scorched can of Sterno was found near the stadium on the University of Cincinnati campus.” Stringfield responded to this by saying, “I think someone was perpetrating a hoax to discredit the earlier UFO reports by several policemen”. The fact that someone would go to the trouble of doing this seems unlikely but stranger things have happened and perhaps it was just a coincidence.
In conclusion I would like to state that I absolutely believe my sister's account. She saw it along with around a dozen other individuals, that is not in dispute. But the one thing I found interesting were the slight discrepancy from my sister's description to that of the six officers, with size and the windows being the main ones. Honestly, I think this has a lot to do with the altitude of the object and perhaps the vantage point of the observer, and the fact that one sighting was during daylight and the other at night. Of course another possibility is that it was another UFO all together. If it was another object, was it affiliated with the one seen over Park Hills? Perhaps the smaller object seen over Sawyer Hall was traveling with the larger object over Park Hills and just wasn’t seen by the residents of Dickmans? We may never know. But if it was another individual object - meaning multiple UFOs - along with multiple, credible witnesses then that would put this incident in the category of a minor UFO flap.
