I'm calling because I need to finally tell someone what really happened that night. Not what the Air Force said. Not what the papers twisted around. What actually happened. My name's Derek, and back in April of 1966, I was a deputy sheriff for Portage County, Ohio. Me and my partner Bobby were working the night shift, and we'd been hearing chatter on the radio all evening about strange lights. Some woman had called in reporting something over Summit County. We laughed about it, you know? Another UFO call. We got those every so often. Around five in the morning on April 17th, we got dispatched to check out an abandoned car on Route 224, just east of Atwater. It was that time right before sunrise when everything's still pretty dark, but there's just enough light that you can start to make things out. We pulled up behind this car on the berm, and I got out to run the plates. I always look behind me. That's just good police work, right? You don't want anyone sneaking up on you. So I'm standing there by the trunk of this abandoned car, and I glance back toward this wooded area on the hill next to the road.
That's when I saw it. This light, rising up from behind the trees. At first I thought maybe it was a helicopter or something, but it was moving too smooth, too quiet. It came up to about tree level, maybe a hundred feet up, and then it started coming toward us. I told Bobby to look over his shoulder. He was still checking out the abandoned vehicle, hadn't noticed anything yet. When he turned around, he just froze. His mouth dropped open and he didn't say a word. The thing kept getting brighter as it approached. The whole area started lighting up like it was daytime. I looked down at my hands, at my uniform, half expecting to see them on fire or something because it was so bright and I could feel warmth coming off this thing. But nothing was burning. The only sound was this hum, like an overloaded transformer. You know that sound when a transformer's about to blow? That low, heavy hum that you can feel in your chest? That's what it sounded like. And then it stopped. Right over the top of us. Maybe 150 feet up, hard to say exactly. But close enough that I could make out the shape of it. It was huge, maybe 40 or 50 feet across. Dome-shaped on top. The light was so bright it hurt to look at it directly. Made your eyes water.
Bobby and me, we both had the same thought at the exact same time. Get to the car. Get something between us and whatever that thing was. We scrambled back to the cruiser and jumped in, and I grabbed the radio mic with my hands shaking. Called it in to dispatch. I remember saying something like, 'We've got the UFO in sight. It's right above us.' The dispatcher was Sergeant Schoenfelt, he was off duty but he was at the station that night. He told us to follow it, keep it under observation, try to get a photo unit out there. As soon as I said that over the radio, the thing started moving. Went from hovering directly overhead to gliding east, smooth as silk. No wobbling, no jerky movements. Just this perfect glide maybe 250 feet away from us now, still lighting up the road and the fields. So we followed it. Turned south on Route 183, then back east on 224. The whole time this thing was pacing us, staying off to our right, maybe 300 to 500 feet up. The ground underneath it was lit up like someone was shining a spotlight down. I kept thinking, this can't be happening. This isn't real. But Bobby was seeing it too, and the radio was going crazy with other units trying to catch up to us.
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