Ravenna Revisited - The Portage County Police UFO Chase.

Karl, thanks for the excellent research, thread, and follow-up to keep what I think are the most important sightings, visible. There has been a thread regarding a white umbrella in a back yard that garnered a ridiculous 90+ pages. And quality, important threads like this one, are the ones that should have over 100 pages of discussion.

Skeptics stay out of threads like these - you won't find a witty resolution to a sighting like this by certain people on this board, who seem to revel in tearing apart sightings. They avoid threads like this like the plague, and let them drift into obscurity.

The thought it could be Venus is laughable, and that they would even discuss that as a possible solution is an insult to the intelligence of those involved. Sort of along the same lines of Tehran '76, where people (including Oberg) suggested it was Jupiter.. and that radar locks, witnesses (civilian and military), failing electronics on two jets, etc.. were all the result of planets, meteor showers and poor electronics on jet fighters. The lengths skeptics go to discredit sightings boggles the mind. I don't mind discrediting sightings that actually can be explained with mundane solutions, but it is frustrating when skeptics go to ridiculous lengths to concoct a solution to these sorts of sightings, just for the sake of doing so.

a reply to: fleabit

Appreciate (and totally agree with) your comments mate - there's also an extremely strange object involved in the case below which has a few parallels with the Portage case (7 deputies from 2 counties chasing UFOs ) - apparently EM effects were reported on the police radio and 'the light given off by the objects was so intense you could read a newspaper by it' - I don't think that was the planet Venus either.

Link

Cheers!

Commentary of the case with timeline of events:

I need to book mark this page with a bunch of unrelated non sequitur thoughts that need correlating later.
Why did this story start in Ravenna?
Why did edgar Alan Poe write The Raven in 1850?
Why did the chase cross the Berlin reservoir?
Why did the chase not end in Munich?
Why did the Dow Jones stock index close down 92.55 yesterday?

a reply to: Cauliflower

No idea mate.

There's some very good relevant audio found in the thread below though.

Section L : Disc 8 : Cops & Saucers


20: Portage County (Ravenna), OH. 04.17.1966. Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur and Mandalay Village Police Chief, Gerald Booker, give their narratives of the UFO chase incident on WKSU radio. 15:15


21: Portage County (Ravenna), OH. 04.17.1966. Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur is interviewed by
Marc Candusso from the Flying Saucer Investigations Committee of Akron, OH on April 19,
1966. 65:00


22: Portage County (Ravenna), OH. 04.17.1966. Major Hector Quintanilla, Jr., USAF Project Blue Book, takes Officer Dale Spaur, Officer Barney Neff and others statement at the Ravenna, OH police station on May 11, 1966. Quintanilla tells them they saw either a satellite or the planet Venus. 55:00


23: Portage County (Ravenna), OH. 04.17.1966. NICAP's William Weitzel asked Dale Spaur, etc., following their meeting with Major Hector Quintanill, Jr. for their reaction as to Quintanilla's explanation of their case. 14:30

Huge audio archive of UFO history - now online. Many rare recordings, collated by ufologist Wendy Conners

Cheers.

Recent Beaver County Times coverage with Brian Seech.




Rare WKSU Radio interview with Spaur and Booker (anyone in a position to download this one?)

Portage County (Ravenna), Ohio, April 17, 1966. Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur and Mandalay Village Police Chief, Gerald Booker, give their narratives of the UFO chase incident on WKSU radio

Students claim to have made Portage County UFO out of a weather balloon, auto antenna, transistor batteries and bottled gas.


Newsclipping

originally posted by: karl 12


Rare WKSU Radio interview with Spaur and Booker (anyone in a position to download this one?)

Portage County (Ravenna), Ohio, April 17, 1966. Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur and Mandalay Village Police Chief, Gerald Booker, give their narratives of the UFO chase incident on WKSU radio

Karl you really are an amazing researcher !


That is a great find, thank you for posting !




Here's 2 more interviews from other police officers that reported seeing Floyd near Akron ...

Akron, Ohio, April 18, 1966. Police Officer Gary Youst of Akron, OH is interviewed by Marc Candusso of the Flying Saucer Investigations Committee, regarding his sighting of a huge UFO over a church while on patrol

Link - www.youtube.com...

Akron, Ohio, April 18, 1966. Police Officer John Bickett is interviewed by Marc Candusso of the Flying Saucer Investigations Committee, regarding his sighting of a huge UFO over a church while on patrol

Link - www.youtube.com...

There is also a second recent (1994) large mass UFO sighting in NE Ohio where the UFO was chased by police officers with the audio of their real time radio coms.

www.history.com...

"Police tapes, video, and the testimony of a radar operator suggest something very strange was seen over Ohio in 1994; Holland, Michigan in 1994; and Millstadt, Illinois in 2000. On December 14, 1994 police departments in Trumbull County, Ohio and surrounding areas start getting 911 calls of strange lights in the sky. Police in multiple jurisdictions report seeing strange objects, even chasing them. Sergeant Toby Meloro of the Liberty Township Police Department was one of the first to respond. The tapes of Meloro’s stunning conversation with a police operator as he sees the object are featured in the show, along with an interview with Meloro himself, who says the object he saw looked like a large, pulsating light. For the first time, a National Weather Service radar operator comes forward to describe the radar signatures he saw that night. Says Jack Bushong, “I’ve never seen anything move so fast."



sirstoria.com...

a reply to: easynow

Hey brother Easynow very good to see you mate and thanks for the nice compliment - absolute credit to the folks at UFOHistory for compiling such a great and important audio collection and the 'Law Enforcement and UFOs' playlist really does contain some corkers (so let's hope YouTube doesn't delete the channel).

It's one thing reading about this case and another thing hearing about actual events first hand in the Officer's own words - found the Spaur interview a truly fascinating one and there are so many low level / close range / illumination aspects to this case that think it's fair to say the nature of the object involved really does remain a true 'actual unknown' U.F.O.

Very good catch with the Akron police videos mate (object 'as big as the church') - I missed those the first time round so many thanks for posting them. Also saw there was another vid featuring the Weitzel interview with the main police witnesses just after dealing with Quintanilla - apparently they thought 'his mind was already made up' and his debunk was 'just a way to write it off the book'.





When it comes to the time period then it does explain in this APU research presentation how Klass and Menzel finally managed to wangle their way into Project Bluebook under the reign of Major Hector Quintanilla - probably the reason why there were so many highly dubious UFO explanations (and so much nasty character assassination of UFO witnesses).

Also found it interesting that 'Condon was heavily influenced by Klass' and there's an intriguing statement below concerning Ivan T. Sanderson (who had close ties to British Naval Intelligence) which indicates they might have had Condon 'over a barrel'.

"Ivan Sanderson knew Condon and the story was as you know that he was asked to do a 'job' or take the consequences of bring investigated for his past. Whatever the motivation he undoubtedly did a good job for his unseen masters"

Berthold Schwarz M.D.

Dr Condon - "one of the weakest links in our atomic security.”

Cheers!

a reply to: karl 12

Hey brother Easynow very good to see you mate and thanks for the nice compliment - absolute credit to the folks at UFOHistory for compiling such a great and important audio collection and the 'Law Enforcement and UFOs' playlist really does contain some corkers (so let's hope YouTube doesn't delete the channel).

Your welcome karl and lately I'm really busy trying to survive in this crazy world lol ... which doesn't leave much time for research unfortunately. I believe those audio files are online, on an archive page somewhere but can't find it at the moment. If I had to guess I'd say that's where UFOHistory got them, I'm just happy to find them on youtube because they're easier to find and share. I have copies of the video files relevant to the Portage case so no worries about those vanishing forever.

And yea your right, that playlist is certainly intriguing www.youtube.com...

It's one thing reading about this case and another thing hearing about actual events first hand in the Officer's own words - found the Spaur interview a truly fascinating one and there are so many low level / close range / illumination aspects to this case that think it's fair to say the nature of the object involved really does remain a true 'actual unknown' U.F.O.

Agreed ... the object involved in this case was a real UFO, that's why they had to debunk it and make the story go away.

I had a close encounter experience with the same kind of craft so that's why I'm so interested in this case and others like it.

Very good catch with the Akron police videos mate (object 'as big as the church') - I missed those the first time round so many thanks for posting them. Also saw there was another vid featuring the Weitzel interview with the main police witnesses just after dealing with Quintanilla - apparently they thought 'his mind was already made up' and his debunk was 'just a way to write it off the book'.

Thanks, I thought it would be good to add those to the discussion simply because it's more witness testimony.

I don't really blame Quintanilla personally, I'm sure he was just following orders.

The fact they had a debunking campaign (and still do) just proves the phenomena is real.

When it comes to the time period then it does explain in this APU research presentation how Klass and Menzel finally managed to wangle their way into Project Bluebook under the reign of Major Hector Quintanilla - probably the reason why there were so many highly dubious UFO explanations (and so much nasty character assassination of UFO witnesses).

Also found it interesting that 'Condon was heavily influenced by Klass' and there's an intriguing statement below concerning Ivan T. Sanderson (who had close ties to British Naval Intelligence) which indicates they might have had Condon 'over a barrel'.

It's absolutely terrible what Klass did to people and obviously he was a very nasty person

I don't think Condon had a choice, he had to debunk or the school would be defunded.



If there wasn't anything to it, there would be no need to debunk it.

so in my opinion ... It's just more proof !