Investigation Team: Dave Miller
Date: August 1967
A Dayton, Ohio couple, who I will call Bob and Carol Thomas, were traveling by car to the northwest from Phoenix, Arizona during the second week of august 1967 at approximately 3:00 to 4:00am. The couple traveled at night due to the heat of the day. It was a crystal-clear night. The moon was ¾ full and at a 35-degree angle on the right side of the car. The moon was magnified or larger than normal. Two tiny puffy, cumulus clouds were in the sky off to the left side of the car. In the rural desert, as they neared the city of Wickenberg, Bob saw a white light (no colored lights) streak across the sky for about five seconds from east to west (right to lefty) passing a few degrees below the moon.
“We were in a Ford pick-up truck which had a lot of windshield so we clearly saw the object,” explained Bob. “It went at a tremendous speed and as it went west it made a 90-degree turn (to the left and downward to the south) and hide behind the cloud. Then it zipped to the second cloud and stopped. I saw the object enough to see the curvature of the white light but not the entire object.” Bob described it as sort of arrowhead shaped.
Bob has been employed as an assistant systems programmer at DESI since 1962 and always has been interested in aircraft. He was a student pilot with 30 hours of flight time. Since he is familiar with aircraft, what he observed in Arizona that night was not a conventional type of airplane that did those maneuvers or could go at that speed.
