Local history: What was that? Famous UFO sightings in Akron-Canton area

What on Earth were they? The descriptions varied. 

They glowed, pulsed, gleamed, hummed and shimmered. They hovered, rotated, glided, darted and soared.

According to local observers, the mysterious objects looked red, blue, green, orange, yellow, silver and white. They appeared as cylinders, spheres, cones, ellipsoids, pyramids, crescents and diamonds.

As a Pentagon task force prepares to issue a U.S. intelligence report this month on “unidentified aerial phenomena,” we have to wonder: Will Ohio be mentioned?

The Akron-Canton region has had its fair share of UFO sightings over the decades. Here are some of the ones that stood out.

First sighting

An Akron toddler was the first to see the light.

“Moon, moon!” exclaimed Elizabeth Shaver, 2, as she pointed west July 4, 1947, on Crestview Avenue. 

She was in the arms of her father, Dr. Forrest Shaver, a manager at B.F. Goodrich, who was arriving home at 8:30 p.m. with his wife, Ruth, after going for a ride with Goodrich manager Harry E. Hoertz and his wife, Nellie.

Dr. Shaver turned around and saw “a light moving up from the horizon,” and urged the others to look. They watched the bright object sail overhead and disappear in the east.

Shaver said it “looked like a balloon with a light inside,” but it was moving too fast to be a balloon. Harry Hoertz said it looked “like a light with some kind of a propelling device on it.” His wife saw “a disc moving along on its edge.”

It was Akron’s first recorded sighting of a “flying saucer,” and it took place only a week after U.S. pilot Kenneth Arnold had inadvertently coined the term while flying a plane June 24, 1947, near Mount Rainer, Washington. Arnold reported seeing a group of nine objects that resembled pie plates, discs or saucers. Similar sightings swept the country, creating a national frenzy at the dawn of the Cold War.

Looking skyward

Hundreds of reports were filed in Ohio over the ensuing decades.

Worried citizens flooded the sheriff’s offices in Summit and Stark counties with calls Nov. 4, 1952, after they saw a carousel of bright lights in the night sky. Four UFOs appeared to be circling overhead, but Canton police solved the mystery. Giant floodlights were sweeping the sky for a promotion at the Country Fair Shopping Center on Tuscarawas Street West, and the beams were bouncing off clouds.

Louisville gasoline truck driver William Young reported seeing a flying disc Aug. 19, 1953, at the Atlantic Refining Co. on Route 532 north of Mogadore. “It was round and flat and silver colored,” Young said. “A plane couldn’t have moved that fast. I just happened to look up and there it was, zipping along in the east. Looked like it was about over Deerfield.”

Gus Spayne, owner of the Lyn Theater in Akron, saw a UFO with his wife, Beatrice, about 4 a.m. Oct. 13, 1957, at their home on South Plaza Drive in Coventry Township. “I glanced out the window and there — in the general direction of Barberton — I saw this thing in the sky. It looked like a sun with the bottom cut off and had a tail.”

Barberton industrialist Joseph M. Momchilov and his wife, Fay, were entertaining guests Harold and Nettie Indoe when a strange object crashed the party Sept. 25, 1959. At 11:15 p.m., they observed a spiraling object in the starry sky above the Momchilovs’ backyard in Medina County’s Westfield Township.

“It was about 20 feet around, oval-shaped, and flare lights stuck out from the rim on both sides, giving off a golden glow,” Momchilov reported. “The thing hovered about 200 feet in the air and moved back and forth in the sky for about five minutes. Then it disappeared into the southwest.”

The couples jumped into a car and drove south on Route 224 to track the object. They turned south at Friendsville and saw the thing in a field about a mile down the road.

“It was spinning clockwise,” Momchilov said. “Then it rose vertically right off the ground, hovered in the air a couple of seconds and began rotating counterclockwise. Then it disappeared straight up. I don’t believe in flying saucers, but I saw something.”

Other oddities

Barberton motorist Joseph Studenic told police Jan. 27, 1960, he was driving on Summit Street at 6:15 p.m. when a UFO swooped down and hit his car, smashing the windshield and damaging a door. Investigating officers were unable to find the hit-and-run object.

Former World War II pilot Ernie Stadvec saw “a brilliant green-and-white object” while flying two passengers 5,000 feet over Northwest Akron about 10:15 p.m. July 4, 1961. “Suddenly whatever it was dived toward us and I thought it was going to hit us. But it stopped just as suddenly, made a 180-degree turn and climbed out of our vision into a haze layer.”

Carl Rice, manager of Valley Hills Mobile Park on Sandy Lake Road in Rootstown Township, reported that he, his wife and two employees saw a strange glow in the sky about 6 p.m. Jan. 2, 1963. They watched it for 15 minutes as it flew southwest, and it appeared to have six to eight red lights in a crescent shape. “It gave me an eerie feeling,” Rice said.

A fireball interrupted a bingo game May 17, 1964, at the fire station in North Lawrence in Stark County. Some players cried out when they saw a white-and-orange ball in the sky. The object reportedly hovered overhead for a few moments before vanishing in a lake.

Canton Patrolmen Anthony DiMarzio and David Pfisterer were called May 14, 1966, to the Towne Manor Motel near Central Plaza after employees and guests reported seeing a strange light moving from west to east about 2:30 a.m.

The police gawked upward and saw a blue-green object with a white ring around it. 

“It was right over the motel,” DiMarzio reported. “It was up as high as the stars but brighter. You know, the stars are just like dots, but this was glowing. Stars don’t glow.

“It was moving constantly toward the northeast. It was moving slowly and then it circled all the way around and then headed back northeast again, going slowly, then faster and finally — pfftt — it shot out of sight like a bullet.”

Police in pursuit

Akron Patrolmen John Bickett and Gary Yost were in their police cruiser about 1:30 a.m. Nov. 7, 1966, when Yost saw “a big, bright orangish-gold thing” hovering about 200 feet above Triplett Boulevard at Quayle Drive. 

“That thing looks like the bottom half of the harvest moon,” Yost said.

“The moon is behind us,” Bickett replied.

The officers described the object as being 70 feet long and 20 feet in diameter.

“Believe it or not, we’re following an object in the sky,” Bickett radioed dispatch.

The officers traveled down Triplett, turned left on Canton Road and right on Albrecht Avenue to the city limits where the object disappeared.

“You read about these things, but when you actually see it, you have to believe it,” Bickett told the Beacon Journal. “It wasn’t swamp gas, I’ll tell you that.”

Natural phenomena such as the northern lights, cloud formations and spontaneous combustion of marsh gas were among scientific theories behind some UFO sightings. 

Air Force investigators attributed others to weather balloons, high-flying aircraft, optical illusions, satellites, blimps, meteors, fireworks, the planets (especially Venus), searchlights, mirages and hoaxes.

Famous case in Portage

Our most famous UFO incident, one that inspired a scene in the Steven Spielberg movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” began April 17, 1966, in Portage County.

Deputies Dale Spaur and Barney Neff were driving on U.S. 224 near Randolph when a dispatcher announced that a woman had reported a bright object “as big as a house” in the sky. The deputies chuckled at the tale and then stopped at 5 a.m. to investigate an abandoned car along the road.

As they inspected the vehicle, Spaur said he heard a humming noise and saw a dome-shaped object emerge from woods. The deputies said it was 40 feet across, produced a blinding white light and climbed 150 feet.

“It was so bright you couldn’t even look up at it,” Spaur said. “It was like looking at a welder.”

The deputies said the UFO was round on the top, flat on the bottom and resembled the head of a silver flashlight. A 15-foot antenna-like object extended down from its base.

The deputies radioed the sighting to a Ravenna dispatcher and began chasing the object east at 80 to 100 mph. Forty miles away in East Palestine, Patrolman H. Wayne Huston joined the pursuit after hearing radio chatter.

The officers ended the 86-mile chase in Conway, Pennsylvania, northwest of Pittsburgh, after running low on fuel. At a gas station, they pointed out the object to Conway Patrolman Frank Panzanella, who watched with them as the UFO rose straight up and vanished into the sky.

According to the Air Force, the men were chasing Venus.

“I’ll go to my grave before I change my story,” Spaur later told a reporter. “I can live with that saucer, but I can’t live without the truth. If I tried to pretend it didn’t happen, it would make a lie out of my life.”

Not all government officials were skeptics. Ohio Gov. John Gilligan reported seeing a UFO with his wife, Katie, while returning from a Michigan vacation in October 1973. They were driving south on U.S. 23 near Ann Arbor when they saw it.

“It was a vertical beam of light, amber colored,” Gilligan said.

He said they watched it for about 35 minutes and “seemed to gain on it.”

“It would fade out and get brighter,” Gilligan told reporters at a news conference. “I frankly don’t know what it was.”

Saucer investigator

Medina resident Americo E. Candusso (1922-2015), a teacher who served as chairman of the Akron-based Flying Saucer Investigating Committee, examined UFO claims for nearly 30 years before the group folded in 1990.

He said that 90% of UFO sightings had some logical explanation, but it was the remaining 10% that intrigued him. At his group’s peak in the late 1960s, hundreds of people attended meetings and thousands reported sightings.

One of his favorite cases was a 1961 account of four teenagers on an overnight camping trip at Firestone Metro Park.

One of the youths, Gerry Tultz, later explained: “About 3 in the morning, we were awakened by a tremendous light. And then we saw four bell-shaped, metallic, robot-like things. They seemed to be watching us. They were about 11 feet tall, had square heads and black faceplates instead of features. We got out of there fast, and they followed us all the way to Wilbeth Road. They didn’t seem particularly unfriendly.”

Candusso urged government officials to tell the truth about UFOs. He believed  authorities were covering up information that should be released to the public. With the Pentagon’s new report, his wish may come true posthumously.

“The people making the reports are sincere in their belief that they’ve seen something out of the ordinary,” he said. “It’s too big and too widespread and has been popping up all over the world for far too many years to be a hoax.”

Mark J. Price can be reached at mprice@thebeaconjournal.com.

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