From a person who staged UFO hoaxes with friends as a teenager to a U.S. Navy radar operator who spotted about 100 objects over 10 days appearing to descend from “low earth orbit,” the speakers at this year’s Chehalis Flying Saucer Party discussed a wide variety of topics related to UFOs.
In 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) disclosed several videos of UFOs — or unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) as they are now officially referred to by the DOD — encountered by Navy pilots in 2004 along the southern California coast.
Disclosure was the theme of this year’s Flying Saucer Party, which approximately 600 people attended Friday and Saturday in downtown Chehalis to commemorate Chehalis pilot Kenneth Arnold’s historic 1947 UFO sighting, according to Lewis County Historical Museum Executive Director Jason Mattson, who helped organize the event.
The event also featured four speakers, including retired U.S. Navy Senior Chief Kevin Day, who deployed six times over his career as a radar operator, and saw the objects encountered by those Navy pilots in 2004 on his radar screens.
Long before that sighting’s disclosure, it was on June 24, 1947, during a routine flight from Chehalis to Yakima to refuel before heading to Oregon when Arnold saw nine metallic objects flying in an echelon formation stretching nearly 5 miles.
He timed the objects as they flew from Mount Rainier toward Mount Adams to estimate their speed, which he believed to be around 1,500 mph, more than twice as fast as any known conventional aircraft.
In fact, the sound barrier had yet to be broken. That happened later that year in October when the famous U.S. Air Force pilot Chuck Yeager exceeded it for the first time flying his Bell X-1 at 767 mph.
To this day, nobody knows what Arnold saw in the skies above Mount Rainier, which eventually came to be known as “flying saucers” after an East Oregonian article used the words “saucer-like aircraft” to describe them the day after Arnold’s sighting.
Back in Chehalis last weekend, hundreds celebrated his sighting with events including an “alien invasion” costume parade and of course the “saucer drop,” a tradition which is believed to have actually started during Chehalis’ old Krazy Days in the 1960s and 70s.
Speakers then took to McFiler’s Chehalis Theater’s stage on Saturday, Sept. 14, to share their experiences and thoughts on disclosure. Aside from Day, other speakers included Charlton “Chuck” Hall, Steve Edmiston and Connie Willis.
‘Tin Foil Aliens’ and the spectrum of belief
First to take the stage Saturday was Charlton “Chuck” Hall, a retired psychotherapist and author of the book “Tin Foil Aliens,” in which he recounts his youthful adventures with friends during the 1970s creating UFO hoaxes and pranks.
Hall also discussed what he called the spectrum of belief along with how to discern credible sightings from hoaxes. For him, it all began in October 1973 with the tin foil alien incident, more commonly known as the “Alabama Metal Man.”
“Anybody recognize this picture? That is a friend of mine from junior high,” Hall said. “I’m not going to name names to protect the guilty.”
Their original plan was to prank neighbors by using a balloon as a UFO and dressing someone up in a space suit costume. The costume was made up of mylar blankets and duct tape along with welding gloves and boots.
After the balloon got reported as a UFO, Jeff Greenhaw, who was the Falkville, Alabama, chief of police at the time, responded to the call and saw Hall’s friend standing near the road. He got out of his car and attempted to contact him, which prompted Hall’s friend to panic and run back toward their van that was hidden in the trees.
Greenhaw attempted to pursue but broke his vehicle’s axle attempting to drive across a field, and Hall and his friends were never caught. Even though Hall has admitted to this hoax, Greenhaw believed he really did see an alien being that night, and took several polaroid photos of Hall’s friend in costume before he ran, creating believers in the Alabama Metal Man.
This is where the spectrum of belief comes into play.
“When I start talking about this, people automatically assume I’m saying there’s no evidence for UFOs whatsoever, all that stuff,” Hall said. “All I’m saying is let’s look at the evidence on both sides before we make a decision.”
Instead of believing every reported sighting, he pushed for thorough investigations and remaining skeptical while still being able to accept if a report has no conventional explanation.
As for how to separate what’s real from what’s a hoax, Hall told those in attendance to keep an eye out for things like copy cat sightings, clickbait headlines, influencers trying to increase followers, lack of collaboration with authorities and if the person making the claim is trying to make a profit.
The USS Princeton radar operator’s sighting
Back in 2004, Kevin Day was approaching the end of a 22-year career in the U.S. Navy as a radar operator. Day had deployed six times throughout his career and cumulatively spent years at sea as part of various carrier strike groups.
“I have to tell you, I have never seen anything like this in all those hundreds and thousands of hours,” Day said. “And oddly enough, this was my very last time at sea.”
While U.S. Navy pilots encountered what would later be described as a “Tic Tac” following the DOD’s 2017 disclosure of footage of the object recorded by those pilots, Hall was also seeing things he couldn’t explain on his radar screens.
The pilots were with VFA 41, a Navy fighter attack squadron that was part of the carrier air group aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz. Hall was a radar operator aboard the USS Princeton, a guided missile cruiser that is part of the Nimitz’s carrier strike group which was on a training exercise off the California coast.
“I was a radar operator and I was the flight air intercept controller,” Day said.
During what was supposed to be a training exercise, unidentified objects suddenly began descending from above 80,000 feet, the ceiling of where Day’s radar equipment could see.
“I look up on the screen, and, ‘What in the, what?’ So I went over to the ballistic missile defense guys and said, ‘What do we have here?’” Day said. “And they said, ‘Well senior chief, we have objects coming down from low earth orbit, and we don’t know what they are.’”
He informed the ship’s captain of the radar contacts and agreed the training exercise needed to be put on hold so the pilots could attempt to intercept one of the objects.
The reason they needed to investigate is the Navy had issued warnings to local civilian aviators to stay away from the area they were training in, as the airspace above a carrier strike group is heavily monitored and guarded for both security and safety reasons. He also considered if his system might have been malfunctioning.
“We brought down all of the systems on the entire (carrier) strike group, recalibrated everything, brought it all back up, and those contacts were even clearer and sharper,” Day said.
Eventually, the F-18 pilots were able to make contact with one of the objects, which easily evaded the pilots’ attempts to follow and track them, then disappearing into the ocean.
Following the first sighting, groups of these objects kept appearing over the next 10 days, appearing to descend from space in groups of five to 10 at a time.
“If you added up all the groups over the course of 10 days, there were about 100 of these objects, there really was. If the data ever comes out, you’ll see that yourself. But every single one of these disappeared off my radar in the same exact spot in the sky, which was about 60 miles north of Guadalupe Island off the coast of Mexico,” Day said.
Following the sightings, DOD officials seized all the recorded radar data and other evidence from the carrier strike group, including the footage released in 2017. Day left the command and retired from the service.
Former DOD official turned paranormal investigator Luis Elizondo checked out the area off the coast of Mexico along with noted musician turned UFOlogist Tom DeLonge following an interview with Day after he retired.
“They went out there and they talked to the fisherman, and the fisherman were like, ‘It’s about time someone came out here and talked to us. We've been seeing these things for 100 years,’” Day said. “According to (the fisherman), they come out of the sky and they drop straight down into the water, don’t even make a splash.”
To this day, Day still wonders just what exactly it was he saw descending from space over those 10 days at sea. He does have his own beliefs about what he saw.
After doing his own investigation came to believe in the theory some believe in the UFO community — that what people think are aliens is actually super-advanced artificial intelligence (AI). With our own AI technology still in its infancy, he thinks these objects could be here to help it advance.
“And I’m speculating, I know this,” Day added.
Day stated he chose to go public with his story and continues to tell it because he hopes to help push toward full disclosure by the DOD.
Despite this, he believes that disclosure actually isn’t actually in the hands of the authorities at all, but instead in the hands of whoever, or whatever, these anomalous objects are.
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Look for recaps on the other speakers — Steve Edmiston and Connie Willis — in the next edition of The Chronicle.
