We interrupt our regular programming to bring you these updates on UFOs in and around the Greater Cincinnati megalopolis.
Kenny Young, a video production specialist and founding member of TASK, short for Tri-State Advocates for Scientific Knowledge, stated that his respect for the mainstream medias coverage of unexplained aerial phenomena reached a new low recently with the print and electronic reporting on what he calls "The Middletown Case."
For a week in July -- commencing immediately after the release of the movie "Independence Day" -- Middletown police received nearly 100 calls from people who wondered what that red hovering light they were seeing in the night sky was. Two Middletown officers watched it hold stationary over the Middletown Hospital for 45 minutes on July 5.
After about a week of sightings, a pilot buzzed the object, got a good look at it and decided it was a bunch of helium-filled balloons with several red flares dangling from it, wired so that, when one flare went out, another would ignite. TASK member Dale Farmer, still in his pajamas, wielding a camcorder, caught up with the pilot late one night on the runway of the Hook Field Municipal Airport in Middletown and interviewed him extensively.
"The sightings were widely reported by the citizenry -- but, until TASK got to the bottom of it, no one in the media cared," Kenny says.
"Once it was explained, there was a disproportionate amount of coverage. I got calls from USA Today, AP, even CBS News. The media is not eager to advise the public of all the sightings we get that we can't explain. That, to me, is the weird part."
"Anyway, we have some leads on who launched those helium filled balloons. Serious leads. And they may face criminal charges, you know, like inducing panic or felonious mayhem or something, because there were flares falling on households."
October is always a busy month for sightings. Kenny has no idea why that is. It just is. This October is no exception.
At 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 10, a police officer in Clermont County - whose identity Kenny prefers to withhold, as he does with all his sources, watched a "funky green light" disappear from view as he was driving along Ohio 727. Three hours later, a woman saw an oval-shaped light `half a telephone pole high' on nearby Woodville Pike.
A woman driving along Ohio 68 north of Bellefontaine reported three UFO sightings in a half-hour on Oct. 15 - all involving some form of slow-moving, low flying red light and a triangular object. Kenny says the object was last seen low in the sky near the Kenton (Ohio) Airport. This is a case TASK maybe close to solving. You can read more about it on the TASK's Web page.
A case Kenny doesn't expect to solve anytime soon revolves around a strange series of sightings in Brown and Ross counties in the early evening of Oct. 16. A reddish-orange light was first seen by a husband and wife near Aberdeen. The wife was reported as being "near hysteria."
The husband and wife called friends in Ripley, who stepped outside and saw a reddish-orange light heading their way from Manchester, sort of zigzagging in no logical pattern.
About 65 miles away, in Chillico the, dozens of callers lit up the switchboard at WKKJ-FM reporting more of the same.
"This doesn't seem to be a flare from a balloon -- it was seen in too wide of an area for that," he says.
"Plus, this performed 'abnormal ballistic conduct,' as we would call it."
Original file name: CNI - Ohio UFOs
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