West Seattle, Washington UFO Report

     
                      West Seattle, Washington UFO Report
                            Saturday, March 5, 1988

      PART I:     Narrative of principal witness, male, age 43
         Transcribed from notes by Dr. Donald Johnson, March 13, 1988
     
           At approximately 9:30 p.m. I left the ARCO convenience
      store at the southwest corner of Fauntleroy and SW Alaska St.
      and noticed the object while facing east.  It was "sitting"
      [hovering] over towards the golf course and club house.  I live
      on Fauntleroy and Dawson, about 4 blocks south of Fauntleroy and
      Alaska.  I looked at it, then looked away then back for about 3
      or 4 seconds.  It wasn't sitting on the ground, but if it had it
      would have crushed the clubhouse, because it would have been
      right over it.  [Later at the clubhouse he revised this comment
      to say that it was probably not over the clubhouse but in a
      clearing between the highway and the golf course to the right of
      the clubhouse--an area some 500 yards long and 100 yards wide. 
      It is important to note that if the UFO had been near the ground
      in this area it would have been hidden from view to the south by
      trees, to the north by the West Seattle high school stadium, and
      from 35th S.W. by a hill.]  It was huge--I don't know what a
      "mothership" is (we get our terminology from TV), but it was
      like a mothership, it was big.
     
           [Later at the intersection he described the size of the
      object as stretching from a rotating motel sign on the left to a
      tall evergreen tree on the right, a distance that would be
      covered by 3 inches of a ruler held at arm's length.  His
      estimate on the report form that the apparent size of the object
      was as large as a 12" ruler held at arm's length was therefore
      an exaggeration.]
     
           I shouted back and called [his girlfriend's] attention to it. 
      It moved to the left, then to the right, then it moved away and up
      until it was out of sight.
     
           While we were watching it we stood in the middle of the
      intersection and nearly got run over by two or three cars.  One
      guy who almost hit me honked and said, "are you nuts?", and I
      said, "no man, look at that".  He stopped and said "is someone
      hurt" and then he saw the object.  He saw it while it was in
      motion.  We watched it until the damn thing disappeared.  The
      other witness--a guy 25 to 30 years old, heavy build with a
      blond mustache, 5'9 to 5'11, well dressed in sweater and
      slacks--said, "somebody's playing a joke, right?", and I said,
      "No, I've been watching it for about 30 seconds."
     
           I didn't hear anything like a hum or a buzz like you would
      get from an airplane.  There was nothing.  [When questioned
      about his note on the sketch made earlier that said "humming
      sound":]  I heard a humming sound like the electric [cooling]
      fan on a car after the engine is turned off, but it was probably
      the car of the guy who stopped.  I'm almost sure the sound
      didn't come from the object.
     
           The other guy said he was on his way to Jake O'Shaunnessy's
      Restaurant to meet someone and had to get going.  I said I was
      going to go down to the golf course and check that out.  I went
      down to the clubhouse parking lot, there were only two cars
      there, parked in front of the clubhouse.  I didn't see anything
      more unusual there.  The stadium lights were on at the West
      Seattle High stadium there at the park.
     
           The first thing I thought when I saw it was that it was a
      carbon arc [searchlight], and I was looking around first for a
      carbon-arc searchlight to see if there was some source of the
      light.  I used to be a projectionist and used to work on the
      carbon arc.  You could project the pictures on the clouds with
      one of those things if you wanted to.  But it was definitely a
      physical object.
     
      [Asked about the weather conditions that night:]  There was a
      full moon that night.  The moon looked huge that night.  It was
      clear, there were sparse clouds but not "en masse" so you
      couldn't see the sky.
     
           I hadn't been drinking and I don't do any drugs.
     
      [Asked about his line of work:]  I run a shoe repair concession
      with two other men in the Nordstrom's Men Shoe department, and
      I'm a part-time musician (percussion and piano).
     
      [Asked about his familiarity with UFO literature:]  We saw the
      Betty and Barney Hill movie, I used to watch a TV series in the
      '60s called Project Blue Book, one of my favorite movies is "The
      Day the Earth Stood Still", and I read Shirley MacLaine's book
      "Out on a Limb".
     
      [Asked about a description of the object:]  The object was
      metallic blue color.  It was shaped like this [makes an ellipse
      in the air with his two hands], but it wasn't flat like you
      would think a flying saucer should be.  It had greenish yellow
      lights in a row--six of them the same size.  There were three
      rings of rotating white light:  the one on the left was rotating
      counter-clockwise and the one on the right was rotating
      clockwise and the one on the bottom was probably rotating
      clockwise.  It had a blue thing on top like the radar detector
      on an AWAC aircraft.  It may not have been attached.





                      West Seattle, Washington UFO Report
                                 March 5, 1988

      PART II:    Narrative of second witness, female, age 33
            Transcribed from notes by Dr. Donald Johnson, March 13, 1988
     
      [The first three paragraphs are a narrative from a phone
      interview with this witness on Friday, March 11th:]
     
           While crossing the street with my boyfriend from a corner
      24-hour convenience store we saw a huge, metallic
      spherical-shaped object surrounded by a bright blue light over
      the West Seattle golf course and Camp Long.  The object was as
      wide as a football field is long.  We heard a humming sound, and
      estimated it to be only 300 yards above the golf course.
     
           We were nearly knocked down by a car because we were
      standing there in the middle of the street kind of mesmerized by
      the sight of such a strange object so close to the ground.  The
      driver of the car pulled over and stopped.  We watched the
      object together for about 30-40 seconds.  It moved very quickly
      right, then left--in sort of a zig-zag--and then it was gone.
     
           I'm in my thirties and I work as a transit operator for
      Metro [the regional bus system].  I've never seen anything like
      it despite driving buses late at night for many years.  After
      the sighting we discussed the sighting with the other man and we
      decided not to report it.  Later on I decided that we ought to
      report what we had seen to someone, and I looked up "UFO" in the
      white pages and found the number for the UFO Reporting Center
      and called it.  I'm sorry now that the other witness drove away
      before we could get his name.  We called to find out if anyone
      else had reported it and were surprised to hear that no one else
      had.
     
      [Narrative from March 13, 1988:]
     
           I was still in the store when he saw the object from
      the sidewalk.  I don't know how long he'd seen it before
      he yelled at me.  But when he got my attention he pointed
      over in the golf course direction.  I saw it when it first
      started to move.  When it moved up, it moved sort of away.  I
      guess east.  The more we talked about it the more we felt that
      we should call somebody.  I called the UFO Reporting Center late
      on Monday morning.  I wanted confirmation that "yes, we did see
      this strange object, because other people saw it, too".  He went
      down to the golf course, I just went home.  I have a
      two-and-a-half-year-old and he was asleep in the car and I
      didn't want to get too close.
     
           My parents are Jehovah's Witnesses and they have a
      religious interpretation for these things, they say that they
      are "spiritual manifestations" [Note:  the notetaker missed some
      of what the parents' explanation was at this point, however, the
      gist of what she said was that she was skeptical of her parents'
      interpretation.]