UFO believers in Circleville having their moment
CIRCLEVILLE — The first sign that something was amiss at the Hartinger home about 1 a.m. on that long-ago February night was that Pal, the family’s beloved collie, just wouldn’t stop barking.
The next thing Pete Hartinger knew, his brother had shaken him awake, dragged him from his bed and pulled him toward a second-floor window. And there it was: the brightest light he had ever seen in the sky, holding steady maybe 1,000 feet up. Hartinger — a 17-year-old high school junior back on that Feb. 27 in 1958 — watched in wonder as the saucer-shaped object floated over the local feed mill before drifting out of sight.
But his life-changing moment wasn’t yet over.
Hartinger recalled what happened just seconds later. “A totally different object came back. It was a reddish-orange object, a circle just like the setting sun. It stopped and hovered in midair … and the top half folded down onto itself.”
Then it tilted toward the ground and was simply gone.
“That just blew my mind,” said Hartinger, now 79. “That, to me, was a no-doubter. People ask me all the time, ‘Do you believe UFOs exist?’ No, I don’t believe. I know.”
That was one of four sightings that Hartinger has had, the first having occurred just five days prior when he and a buddy were headed to a high school basketball tournament at the Pickaway County Fairgrounds.
By the time he graduated from high school in 1959, Hartinger had joined a national UFO research group, and he hasn’t stopped studying unidentified flying objects since.
By January 1989, he was fully embedded in the culture and had found two other men in Pickaway County — Jon Fry and Delbert Anderson — who shared his interest. Together, the three friends founded the Roundtown UFO Society (RUFOS), which still meets on the second Thursday of every month.
In 31 years, only six meetings have been canceled, and a meager $10 will buy you a lifetime membership.
>> Video: Founder of UFO group discusses sighting on Pickaway County farm
These days, the research and work that the society does is in high demand because UFOs are, shall we say, having a moment.
The Department of Defense in April authorized the release of three videos of sightings by Navy pilots — one from 2004 and two from 2015. In one of the videos, as the object is shown on the screen, a pilot can be heard saying: “There’s a whole fleet of them,” before continuing, “My gosh. Look at that thing, dude.”
Then The New York Times and The Washington Post wrote high-profile stories about once-covert government programs that studied such craft. In July, the Times spelled out that the government’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force still exists under the Office of Naval Intelligence. At least some of the government’s findings from over the years are expected to be released publicly sooner rather than later.
All this is a long way of saying that the members of the Roundtown UFO Society are enjoying their own kind of moment as well.
“I think this is the biggest story of our lifetime,” said Hartinger, who after a stint in the Army spent 20 years with the Ohio Air National Guard and retired after 33 years with the DuPont chemical plant in Circleville, the city he’s called home for most of his life. “Our goal is to condition the public to not be skeptical.”
And people these days are most assuredly hungry for information.
At 35, Cameron Jones is among the younger members of the society (there are about 70) and runs its social-media accounts. In the four weeks between the July and August meetings, the reach of RUFOS’ tweets almost doubled, and the group had 65 new followers in that time, a record.
“The news about a classified briefing used the term ‘off world vehicles not made of this earth,’ and it set the world ablaze,” said Jones, a writer and part-time restaurant server from Circleville. “It’s not just a funny and silly topic anymore to be made fun of. The news coming out of the government is legitimizing, and it means more people are curious.”
Ohio is almost always is in the top 10 in an annual ranking of states based on the number of UFO sightings, and the number is up even more this year. There are two national clearinghouses for people to report sightings: the National UFO Reporting Center, which anyone can access, and the member-based Mutual UFO Network. Between the two, there were 405 sightings reported in Ohio in 2019. This year through July, there already had been 252.
The RUFOS members speak in acronyms and have encyclopedic knowledge of sightings, encounters and contactees (those who claim contact with extraterrestrials), with each person able to remarkably tick off names and dates and locations going back decades.
At the group’s most recent gathering, held at the shelter house of Circleville’s Canal Park instead of the local library because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hartinger sat on a wooden folding chair with his briefcase full of files and clippings on a small card table in front of him as he led the meeting.
He and the 12 members who attended discussed recent television programs and news stories (a new paranormal show in July used a tweet from RUFOS, which was exciting); reviewed the latest published books (“Roswell: The Ultimate Cold Case” was a hit); debated recent research (MADAR units, anyone? They track magnetic anomalies) and heard a treasurer’s report (About $127 is in the account and will help cover monthly fees for the post office box and a subscription to a professional journal.)
Although it is rare, sometimes nonmembers bring their own stories of encounters or sightings to the meetings. Jones, who also serves as RUFOS’ chief investigator, hopes that more people will come forward now as the stigma from what he called “the old flying saucer days” is reduced. No one had a tale to tell in the August meeting.
And once a year, the group meets on what is considered hallowed UFO ground in Pickaway County: the farm northwest of Circleville that used to belong to Bruce Stevenson.
It was about 2 o’clock on a February morning in 1948 when Stevenson walked out the back door of his farmhouse on Route 56 and headed to his barn to check on farrowing sows. Then he saw it.
“I hadn’t gone very far when I noticed this thing — this saucer or whatever you want to call it. It was near the roof of the hog house,” he told the Circleville Herald in 1952 when recounting the details publicly for the first time. He said the craft was silver, with a glowing bright-amber light.
“There’s no use saying now why I didn’t run and call others,” he recounted for the Herald. “Somehow I just stood spellbound, almost in a daze.”
Hartinger speaks more quickly with excitement and grows animated when he recalls the conversations he had with Stevenson over the years. Too often, he said, people don’t just focus on the amazement of the sightings and instead get worked up over whether UFOs equal extraterrestrials. They shouldn’t, he said.
“The truth is, we don’t know what they are,” Hartinger said. His preferred theory? Time travelers.
Alexander Wendt is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Ohio State University who has long studied and written about UFOs. He knows the Roundtown society members and said their excitement and enthusiasm over all these latest developments is not an over-exaggeration.
“There is a certain sense of growing vindication as this stuff comes out,” he said. “It’s ‘Oh, look, holy moly! This is what I have been saying all along!’ You can’t just write everyone off as fantasy-prone individuals anymore. The world is looking at UFO research in a whole new way.”
For more information on RUFOS, visit www.roundtownufosociety.com or find the group on Facebook. Anyone is welcome at their meetings.
hzachariah@dispatch.com
@hollyzachariah
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