Post by uforn on Oct 21, 2010 18:27:49 GMT 1
UFOS: UP CLOSE IN SCREVEN COUNTY
The Screven County UFO, as drawn by an artist for the Statesboro Herald.
By JIM MILES
Frank and Wanda Alcorn had recently returned to Screven County, located in rural eastern Georgia, after years of living in the metro Atlanta suburb of Clarkston, where Frank had been a police officer. He had taken a job as deputy sheriff in neighboring Effingham County and the family was renovating an old house on Hershel Bazemore Road. It was located a short distance from Wanda’s brother, Emerson Scott, near Newington and the Savannah River, five miles from Sylvania.
After the Alcorn’s and Scott’s had enjoyed a family cookout at a nearby pond on Monday, July 12, 1987, the Alcorn’s reached home about 9:45 p.m.
“We pulled in to our driveway with our kids, Lee and Tracy,” said Frank, “and sitting out in the field beside the house was this huge craft, clustered with lights.”
The car’s headlights flashed across the object as it sat in the field beside a barn.
“We didn’t hear a sound,” Wanda added. “It was an incredible sight.”
She heard no aircraft noises and noted an absence of wings and a tail on the object, describing it as “shaped like a huge cylinder, dark yet metallic, shaped like a tank on a gas truck. And it had three large red lights with a cluster of white lights underneath.”
After the UFO slowly began to rise to an altitude of 10 feet, it hovered a short time. It moved and rose again, just clearing the trees and power lines. The Alcorn’s heard a short, low zipping sound and the craft suddenly accelerated and “just vanished,” Wanda stated.
Wanda ran to the telephone and called her brother, whose home was across a wooded lot. As they had approached their own house, Emerson and his family had seen a large object with lights descending silently behind the trees in the direction of the Alcorn’s house.
When the field was searched by the family on the following morning they located three large depressions in the soil arranged in a straight line. The impressions, assumed to be from landing gear, were either square or rectangular and measured nine by nine feet, nine by twelve feet, and nine by nine feet. Sixty-nine feet separated the first and last markings.
The Alcorn family was sitting on the back porch at 9:45 p.m. the next day when an identical UFO descended and hovered over a field behind their home. The object slowly drifted around their house and nearly settled down at the same spot as the previous night before departing in the same fashion. Witnesses included a deputy sheriff and a paramedic.
Wanda Alcorn, Margie Scott, and Wanda’s mother spotted the same craft as they were returning home from church. Margie, driving, attempted to follow the object to the Alcorn house but the UFO outpaced her. She arrived at home to find the ship hovering over the trees and described it as bright, with red and white lights.
There were 40 to 50 witnesses to Tuesday night’s show. Nearby, Mac and Shirley Mahaffey, owners and operators of WSYL in Sylvania, observed it for two minutes cruising majestically over woods a quarter mile from Poor Robin Ferry. Their description of an enormous ship with the same light pattern and zipping sound matched the one seen by the Alcorns.
Over the next several nights a new phenomenon, which came to be known as “dancing lights,” was seen by many. Those lights appeared to dance horizontally back and forth over the woods, then approached the observer before drifting away and diving into the trees, which lit up the forest.
“The lights are white and there is one huge one maybe a mile, mile and a half away,” Wanda said. “It keeps going higher and higher and when it does it keeps getting brighter and brighter.”
On Thursday morning Sharon Sheppard was taking her son Richard into the Jackson School when they spotted a silver cylinder hovering nearby at low altitude.
“It was clustered with brilliant lights, even though this was during the daytime,” she related. “It had no wings, and it made no noise.”
Cars by the hundreds lined both sides of the road leading to the Alcorn’s house. Strangers camped in their field, including one little old lady who spent three days, and called from around the world to request personal interviews. College students wanted to write their thesis about the phenomenon. Many people, astronomers, scientists, ministers, cultists, and spiritual healers, in short the whole gamut of weirdness, wrote letters soliciting information or forwarding their own theories and literature.
“It’s really put a strain on our family,” Wanda said. “At times, we’ve come home and had people waiting for us in our yard, people we’ve never seen before. I’ve had people just show up in the hallway of our house without knocking or asking.”
On July 24 a man reported a sighting at the Savannah River near U.S. 301 to the Screven County Sheriff’s Office. His UFO, egg-shaped and larger than a helicopter, alternated a band of green light at the base with an orange colored band. It hovered for a short time, then moved silently at tree top level across the sky near the man’s home.
The phenomenon came and the phenomenon went, leaving puzzled witnesses and no explanation, which is the usual modus operandi for the paranormal.
Source:
brownsguides.com/weirdgeorgia/2010/10/19/ufos-up-close-in-screven-county/
