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Levelland Texas Incident (November 1957)

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dreeness

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A few multiple-witness sightings of UFOs:

... Levelland (1957) ...

Further reading:
link
 
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Levelland Incident
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The Levelland, Texas Landings - 1957

One of the most baffling and most publicized cases of a close encounter of the second kind occurred in 1957 at Levelland, Texas. Actually, there were no less than eight well-documented reports of the same craft, and seven more that were unverified; the seven called in by anonymous persons.

Some of those who made their reports have kept their names secret.

Sadly, this is the case in many UFO reports. Many of those who had thought they were doing the right thing have regretted their decisions later because of public ridicule.

However, the Levelland case has many respectable witnesses who have come forward, especially several members of the Levelland Police Department who witnessed the fantastic sights of November, 2, 1957 in the town of about 10,000. ...
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https://www.ufocasebook.com/Levelland.html
 
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One case that doesn't get mentioned much any more is the 1957 Levelland, Texas sightings:

planet-flipside.com/index.ph ... -levelland
Link is dead.

They just don't make UFO sightings like that anymore. It leads me to suspect that, whatever we called UFOs 40, 50 or 60 years ago are now gone.

For archival purposes, here's the text from the MIA webpage ...
A Classic Encounter. Roadblock, The Levelland Texas UFO.
By Joe Harvat

Levelland, Texas is a somewhat unimaginative place. East-West streets there have numbers and north-south streets have letters. Even its name is a bit lacking in originality – after all, it sits on “level land.” The town is home to some 14,000 no-nonsense folks who farm, refine oil or maybe go to school at South Plains College. It seems like an unlikely place for bizarre doings. Yet for one Saturday night, fifty-three years ago, Levelland was the capital of the Twilight Zone.

That night was November 2nd, 1957 and, truth be told, it was pretty dreary. Skies were overcast and drizzly – the kind of weather that just chills you to the bone. Levelland police patrolman A. J. Fowler was no doubt happy to be tucked in the station house that night. Yes, it was Saturday night but, in Levelland, Texas, those rarely amounted to much.

Back then, Levelland lay at the crossroads of State Highway 116 (now Route 114) and Route 51 (now U.S. 385). West of town, 116 heads for a wide-spot in the road called Whiteface, and it was on this dark stretch of two-lane that something unknown made its first appearance.

Farmhand Pedro Saucedo (sometimes called Siado), and his buddy, Joe Salaz, were west-bound, the headlights of their old pick-up truck barely illuminating the Texas night. It was 10:30 PM and they had the road to themselves. Suddenly, Saucedo spotted what looked like a flash or flame up ahead and off to his right. He thought it might be lightning but he quickly realized the glare originated from some kind of flying object that was rapidly closing on his position. At the same moment, the pick-up’s engine sputtered and died, the headlights flickered and went out. As the truck coasted silently to a stop, the men got out, transfixed by the approaching light.

In the darkness, Saucedo struggled to make sense out of what he was seeing. Certainly this was a UFO and seemed torpedo-shaped, yellowish-white in color. Saucedo then began to feel intense heat and his first panicked reaction was to drop flat on the ground. Within seconds, the object passed over the men with a roar and a rush of wind, then darted swiftly toward the eastern horizon. With few reference points, estimating its size and speed was tough, but he thought it might have been a couple hundred feet long with speed comparable to a jet fighter.

To the dazed men’s surprise, the headlights of the truck blinked back on. Saucedo tried the ignition and had no trouble re-firing the engine. His first thought was to spread the alarm, so he and Salaz drove as quickly as they could to the public phone booth in Whiteface.

It was 10:50 when the telephone rang at the Levelland Police Department. Officer Fowler had barely picked up the receiver when Saucedo excitedly poured out the details of his harrowing experience. Fowler tried to calm Saucedo down, half convinced the man was drunk but, after he hung up, he wasn’t so sure. Around 11 o’clock, he decided he’d better give nearby Reese Air Force Base a call. After all, Reese was home to the 3500th Pilot Training Wing. Just maybe, Saucedo had witnessed a plane crash.

Fowler’s line rang again about an hour later. Another excited man was on the other end, this time it was Jim Wheeler who hailed from Whitharral. Some details of Wheeler’s story are missing but it’s clear he was driving on 116 approximately four miles east of Levelland when he encountered a very large object sitting on the highway ahead of him. The thing glowed brightly like a neon sign, so bright that it illuminated the ground around it. It looked to be egg-shaped and, like Saucedo, he estimated it to be two hundred feet long.

As Wheeler’s car approached, its lights and engine had also failed. He got out of the disabled vehicle but the strange object immediately rose off the ground. It hadn’t gained much altitude when, to his amazement, its light winked out. There was no indication that it had flow away – it simply disappeared.

This second call left Officer Fowler scratching his head. He had only a few minutes to wonder though, because his phone jangled to life again around midnight. The story was now getting familiar – this time, Jose Alvarez had come across an unknown object sitting on the Highway 51, eleven miles north of Levelland near Whitharral. Some of the details of this incident are now lost. All that’s known is that the witness’s vehicle was temporarily disabled while the object was in close proximity.

Just a few minutes later, Newell Wright, a 19-year-old Texas Tech freshman, was cruising on 116 nine miles east of Levelland when his car engine began to sputter. To him, it sounded like he was running out of gas but then the car’s volt meter did a strange thing. Its needle shot all the way to “discharge” and then back to normal. Immediately after, the motor stalled and the vehicle coasted to a halt. After a few seconds, the headlights failed too.

Alone on the highway, Wright hopped out of the car and opened the hood to reconnoiter the situation. He found no loose connections to explain his predicament, so the boy closed the hood and turned around. For the first time, he caught sight of a large, oval-shaped object perched on the road ahead. Wright described it as being about 125 feet long and made of material that looked like aluminum. It glowed with a spectral blue-green light.

Needless to say, the thing gave Wright quite a scare. He dove back into his car and tried in vain to restart the engine. He eventually gave up, helplessly watching the eerie scene for several minutes. Finally, the UFO began to ascend and, as in Jim Wheeler’s case, it vanished.

Hockley County around Levelland is a checkerboard of two-lane roads. The asphalt is flat, straight and empty, the perfect place for a trucker to make time – unless, of course, the road is blocked by a 200-foot long, egg-shaped object. Such was the case on Route 51. At around 12:15 AM, Frank Williams, a trucker from Waco, placed a panicked call to Officer Fowler. He had just encountered the object at an intersection a few miles northeast of Levelland. From his malfunctioning rig, he had watched the object glow intermittently like a neon sign and with each pulse, the truck’s headlights would go dim. When Williams finally climbed down from the cab, the UFO roared to life, lifting straight up and then departing at high speed.

Fowler could no longer deny that something truly strange was going on. He broadcast a radio message to the department’s patrol cars asking whether anyone had observed anything unusual. The response was immediate – two officers replied they had seen brightly-lit flying objects but neither had experienced any electrical problems.

The minutes ticked by and Fowler telephone didn’t ring – but the object was still hard at work. It turned up next around 12:45 AM, spotted by motorist, Ronald Martin, close to where Pedro Saucedo had his initial sighting. According to a police report filed the next day, the object was first seen in flight, glowing orange. This time, however, it slowed as it approached the witness and came to a soft landing on the pavement about a quarter-mile away from his now-disabled vehicle. Details of this incident are frustratingly sketchy, but Martin reported the object changed color to a bluish-green once it settled onto the ground. It is also interesting to note he thought the object was only eighteen feet in diameter – an estimate based on the width of the roadway. Its glow, however, was bright enough to illuminate the cab of his truck.

The object stayed on the ground only a few moments. It soon ascended, changed its color back to an orange-red, and made a rapid exit. After that, Martin stated, his vehicle functioned normally.

By 1:15 AM, Officer Fowler was back on the phone, listening to an agitated James Long recount how he had run afoul of some unknown object sitting on the Oklahoma Flats Road (now called Farm Road 1490) north of Levelland. Like the others, his vehicle’s electrical systems had failed, only to function normally after the UFO departed.

Fowler quickly relayed Long’s story to Hockley County Sheriff Weir Clem and Deputy Pat McCulloch who sped east on Oklahoma Flats around 1:30 AM. Some four to five miles out, they too encountered the oval-shaped light “looking like a brilliant red sunset across the highway.” The law officers estimated the object was 300-400 yards from their cruiser and illuminated the road ahead of them for a couple of seconds. Highway Patrolmen Lee Hargrove and Floyd Gavin were a few miles behind the sheriff but they reported seeing a bright flash of light, low in the sky and moving quickly from east to west. Minutes earlier, Levelland Fire Marshal Ray Jones also spotted what he called a “streak of light” while on the same road. His car seemed to sputter and his headlights dimmed, but it never fully lost power.

By the time A. J. Fowler ended his shift Sunday morning, he logged no fewer than fifteen calls from excited, frightened people – all reporting strikingly similar encounters. He had little doubt that, for two and a half hours, a truly anomalous object had played hopscotch in the skies around Levelland. Even back then, the news spread quickly. The little town was soon swamped with reporters and curiosity seekers. Among those who showed up was Air Force Sergeant Norman Barth of the 1006th Air Intelligence Service Squadron. He performed a brief and woefully incomplete investigation of the incidents, then almost sheepishly offered-up an explanation of “ball lightning.”

This assessment was initially endorsed by no less a person than Dr. J. Allen Hynek who, in 1957, was the Air Force’s top UFO consultant. Years later, he confessed he’d hardly looked at the evidence at the time. In retrospect, Dr. Hynek admitted it seemed quite unlikely there was a meteorological explanation to the case. Eminent UFO researcher, Dr. James E. McDonald, reviewed relevant weather data in the 1960s and concurred there was no evidence to support the formation of ball lightning in the area on the night of November 2-3, 1957.

Sadly, most of the principals in this fascinating case are now deceased. In the intervening years, follow-up investigations were conducted by organizations like NICAP and MUFON, turning up intriguing new testimony that suggests burn marks may have been found near some of the purported landing sites. Another investigator was told by relatives of Sheriff Clem that even his brand new, Plymouth Fury squad car had lost power when in proximity to the UFO. Still, there are so many tantalizing questions that remain – questions that, fifty-three years later, will never be answered. As a result, the Levelland case is still filed under “UNKNOWN” and it remains one of the most baffling Close Encounters of the Second Kind on record. ...
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SALVAGED FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE: https://web.archive.org/web/2010102...ide.com/index.php/ufosalienslink/57-levelland
 
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A personal favorite of mine is the 1957 Levelland, Texas incident. It had multiple credible witnesses who reported actual objects on the ground and EM effects... but not sure what you can do with the case 61 years after the fact.

I still like Socorro too, even after recent, inane attempts to debunk it as a college prank.

One that hasn't been talked to death that I think is interesting is the Roaring River, Missouri case from 1966. Multiple witnesses, physical effects, and photos.

http://www.ufocasebook.com/roaringriver.html

This was one that Ted Phillips investigated back in the day. He probably still has a box full of evidence in his basement that he collected at the site.
 
Those are all interesting cases...

The other two are also well documented with pics and plenty of witnesses.

[The] Levelland case is similar in that it's almost as if these 'craft' wish to be seen and make an appearance. Why not remain somewhat in the background and do their exploring or whatever away from human eyes?

What's their intent? Are they putting on a show for us..?
 
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Here's a good one which was posted on Kevin Randle's blog - filmed interviews with witnesses to the 1957 Levelland sighting, prior even to the Air Force investigation, including Sheriff Weir Clem.


Given as Levelland is a very patchily documented case, any additional information is good to see.
 
I was quite surprised we didn't have a thread about this one already. This is the case where a series of motorists and truck drivers encountered a bright, egg or torpedo shaped object on the roads around Levelland, Texas, culminating with the local sheriff seeing...well, something.

FgsaFMhVEAAfvui.jpg


So, yes, this one still makes a lot of ufologists' "top ten" lists. Hynek and McDonald liked it. Kevin Randle still does, and published a book on it last year. The case was always big with ETH proponents - no obvious "high strangeness", arguable 'intelligent control' of the object/s, loads of witnesses, and car stopping. How long is it since there was a decent 'car stop' case?

In reality there are quite a few problems with most of the evidence - there was a decent article in Magonia some years back explaining why. A majority of the witnesses only gave details by phone, and couldn't be traced afterwards. Donald Menzel and Blue Book argued it was ball lightning, so a lot of effort was expended by ufologists in proving whether or not there were storms in the area at the time.

Despite all that I actually think Levelland could be one of the keys to the whole mystery. Maybe it was rare evidence of some very unusual type of atmospheric phenomenon, but the chance to possibly get more solid detail was messed up by investigators who had decided in advance that it was a spacecraft. Interestingly, the person usually identified as the 'best' witness, Newell Wright, apparently always said he thought it was some sort of strange natural phenomenon.
 
BS3 said:
I was quite surprised we didn't have a thread about this one already. This is the case where a series of motorists and truck drivers encountered a bright, egg or torpedo shaped object on the roads around Levelland, Texas, culminating with the local sheriff seeing...well, something.

View attachment 60751

So, yes, this one still makes a lot of ufologists' "top ten" lists. Hynek and McDonald liked it. Kevin Randle still does, and published a book on it last year. The case was always big with ETH proponents - no obvious "high strangeness", arguable 'intelligent control' of the object/s, loads of witnesses, and car stopping. How long is it since there was a decent 'car stop' case?

In reality there are quite a few problems with most of the evidence - there was a decent article in Magonia some years back explaining why. A majority of the witnesses only gave details by phone, and couldn't be traced afterwards. Donald Menzel and Blue Book argued it was ball lightning, so a lot of effort was expended by ufologists in proving whether or not there were storms in the area at the time.

Despite all that I actually think Levelland could be one of the keys to the whole mystery. Maybe it was rare evidence of some very unusual type of atmospheric phenomenon, but the chance to possibly get more solid detail was messed up by investigators who had decided in advance that it was a spacecraft. Interestingly, the person usually identified as the 'best' witness, Newell Wright, apparently always said he thought it was some sort of strange natural phenomenon.
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Good analysis. Have always argued on here 20th Century Ufologists were - mostly - guilty of only cherry-picking those facets of a case that might prove an alien spacecraft had visited and ignoring a whole host of accompanying phenomena. Likewise absolutely anything unidentified in the sky was a nuts-and-bolts alien craft.
 
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Paul_Exeter said:
Good analysis. Have always argued on here 20th Century Ufologists were - mostly - guilty of only cherry-picking those facets of a case that might prove an alien spacecraft had visited and ignoring a whole host of accompanying phenomena. Likewise absolutely anything unidentified in the sky was a nuts-and-bolts alien craft.
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In some ways they had a point - 'ball lightning' so far as we know doesn't have the size or duration of the Levelland objects, nor can it stop cars. Indeed back in the 50s there was no real proof ball lightning existed at all. So in that respect ufologists were right to criticise the rather hurried Air Force conclusion.

As always I suppose it comes back to the issue of whether witnesses accurately describe what they see. This isn't always the case, but there is a certain consistency in the descriptions given by Saucedo / Wheeler / Alvarez / Wright / Williams / Martin / Long which might hint at something real beneath it, even the 'car stopping' (I think Martin's was the only account where there was some possibility of 'contamination' by earlier reports). Unfortunately as no one was able to track down the witnesses later, other than Wright and Sheriff Clem, there was a real missed opportunity.

How often do we have this many close-quarters witnesses?

FgsLVtTVsAAUfoi.png
 
Incidentally the 'engine stopping' reported by most of the Levelland witnesses didn't feature in the 1952 wave. There were plenty of cases afterwards but it's not really possible to say that the Levelland witnesses would have had any expectation of UFOs stopping engines.

I know the usual argument here is that the witness may simply have stalled the car through fright, but some of the detail at Levelland - assuming the witness was truthful - does suggest something electrical; eg Wright reporting the car's ammeter jumping to 'discharge'. The fundamental problem is that we still don't know to what degree the witness narratives were 'edited' by Fowler, the duty police officer on the phone, or the NICAP investigator James Lee, who was clearly determined to prove the object was a craft.
 
FWIW ... The historical weather data for the night of 2 - 3 November 1957 can be viewed at Weather Underground:

https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/KLBB/date/1957-11-2
https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/KLBB/date/1957-11-3

The nearest reporting station was Lubbock airport - circa 30 miles east of Levelland. From 9:00 PM onward on the 2nd the temperatures were in the upper 40s (F.) and falling. Humidity was 80%+ (relatively dank). No precipitation was recorded until circa 9:00 AM on the 3rd.
 
One thing that I've seen confusion over is whether the description of the object as "egg" shaped means an egg on its side or an egg on end (there is a point to all of this as I'll explain in a minute).

Not all people have depicted the former, eg the cover artist for Randle's recent book.

However the two images included in this Swedish webpage, which appear to be Blue Book documents, show a horizontally elongated, torpedo like object.

https://www.ufo.se/index.php/om-ufo-sverige/88-fakta/artiklar/verklighet/1761-levelland

I've not seen these before but they do seem to conform to the descriptions of Saucedo and Wright respectively (the two people the Air Force actually interviewed).

However if we allow for a vertically elongated shape then there seems some remote possibility of a luminous tornadic or vortex phenomenon - luminous tornadoes are very much on the 'Fortean' end of weather but some people have claimed they exist (Kurt Vonnegut's meteorologist brother did some work on this if I remember correctly).

I've just downloaded a sample of Randle's book looking for a bit of clarity and note that the first sighting of the 'series' filed by the Air Force is one by a witness with a redacted name, taking place about 3am on the 2nd November near the confusingly-named Canadian, Texas. This witness also reported his car lights dimming in the presence of an object described as "submarine" like, with a "conning tower" amidships...a humanoid standing near it...and a 'white flag' on the tower (?!) No wonder this one didn't make it into NICAP's reports!
 
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BS3 said:
... I've just downloaded a sample of Randle's book looking for a bit of clarity and note that the first sighting of the 'series' filed by the Air Force is one by a witness with a redacted name, taking place about 3am on the 2nd November near the confusingly-named Canadian, Texas. ...
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FWIW ... According to the Weather Underground data (from Lubbock) the temperature was dropping and the humidity was substantially increasing as of 0300 on the 2nd. A similar combination of dropping temperature and significantly increasing humidity was recorded for 2100 onward the night of the 2nd - 3rd.

No precipitation was recorded (at Lubbock) during these periods.
 
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EnolaGaia said:
FWIW ... According to the Weather Underground data (from Lubbock) the temperature was dropping and the humidity was substantially increasing as of 0300 on the 2nd. A similar combination of dropping temperature and significantly increasing humidity was recorded for 2100 onward the night of the 2nd - 3rd.

No precipitation was recorded (at Lubbock) during these periods.
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That's perhaps quite significant. As the sighting itself involved a flash of light and electrical effects on the car followed by seeing the 'object', you can't help but wonder if this was a similar phenomenon to that seen at Levelland, combined with misperception of a vehicle seen straight afterwards. Perhaps a military vehicle on an exercise parked off the road given the 'flag' on top? Seems plausible on the face of it, but however...

...just to complicate things even more, this incident was noted by Blue Book as a "military and civilian" sighting - it was, in other words, multiple witness. The military witness was a T/Sgt Alfred Calvin; the civilian witness, whose name was redacted, was a Civil Service employee at Vance AFB.

Blue Book seem to have not taken this very seriously due to the 'entity' aspect, but the multiple witness aspect makes it, bizarrely, quite credible.
 
BS3 said:
I've just downloaded a sample of Randle's book looking for a bit of clarity and note that the first sighting of the 'series' filed by the Air Force is one by a witness with a redacted name, taking place about 3am on the 2nd November near the confusingly-named Canadian, Texas.
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Canadian TX is over a hundred miles NNE of Lubbock and Levelland. Canadian is much closer to Amarillo than it is to Lubbock. Here's the Weather Underground data for Amarillo on 2 November 1957.

https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/tx/amarillo/KAMA/date/1957-11-2

At 0300 the temp was dropping and the humidity significantly rising, just as I reported for Lubbock earlier.
 
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One thing I did think about - given that solar storms and aurorae can sometimes be associated with odd electrical phenomena - was if there was anything of that kind going on at the time.

Well, no aurorae, but there was an "unprecedented solar radio event" on November 4th.

https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1959IAUS....9..263B

Food for thought or complete red herring?

The idea of 'engine stopping' as an EM effect is usually thought to be completely implausible - you'd have to have something greater than the Earth's magnetic field, and anything that stopped an engine would also take out lots of other electrical stuff in a wide radius. But this case really does have some compelling aspects - I can't think of another one with multiple CE2s in succession over a short period.
 
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Another possible factor - it may be debatable whether there were thunderstorms in the area of Levelland on the night in question, but early November 1957 seems to have been unusually stormy in the US, with "severe thunderstorms and tornado activity in the South from Texas eastward" (Woffinden, 'Weather and Circulation of November 1957')

Screenshot_20221116-105510_Drive.jpg


A lot of the debate around the weather conditions originates with James McDonald, who stated that records from ten weather stations in the region showed no sign of storms. Unfortunately we don't know exactly which stations he was referring to!
 
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EnolaGaia said:
... No precipitation was recorded (at Lubbock) during these periods.
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I went back to Weather Underground and checked the entire 2-week stretch from 27 October through 9 November 1957 for the Lubbock reporting station. There was no recorded precipitation during this entire 2-week period bracketing the Levelland sightings.

This lack of precipitation is the only anomalous weather item I see during that period. According to WU data the average precipitation for that location was a bit more than 4 inches per month.
 
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EnolaGaia said:
I went back to Weather Underground and checked the entire 2-week stretch from 27 October through 9 November 1957 for the Lubbock reporting station. There was no recorded precipitation during this entire 2-week period bracketing the Levelland sightings.

This lack of precipitation is the only anomalous weather item I see during that period. According to WU data the average precipitation for that location was a bit more than 4 inches per month.
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How do you find past weather in WU? Is it the calendar function?
 
Lb8535 said:
How do you find past weather in WU? Is it the calendar function?
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From the WU webpages' topmost / title bar: Select the "More" drop-down menu, then select "Historical Weather".

From a specific weather station webpage: Select the "History" tab (for that same station).
 
Red and green are both colours associated with auroral activity., It would be rare and unusual for an aurora to be seen as far south as Texas, but not impossible.

I'm intrigued by the fact that the Air Force only interviewed two witnesses - not even Sheriff Weir Clem for some reason. Clem's account is somewhat less impressive than the others, but is presumably (relatively) reliable.

Since most of the other accounts are hearsay they may include some re-interpretation by NICAP investigator James Lee, as suggested in the Magonia article. This is a curiously dubious case in many ways, and might have its origin in an entirely natural phenomenon.
 
There used to be a detailed study by Antonio Rullan online: it's still viewable via archive.org.

Rullan's general conclusion is that the case is "not very well documented and investigated" - seems to be as far as anyone has got really.
 
eburacum said:
Red and green are both colours associated with auroral activity., It would be rare and unusual for an aurora to be seen as far south as Texas, but not impossible.

I'm intrigued by the fact that the Air Force only interviewed two witnesses - not even Sheriff Weir Clem for some reason. Clem's account is somewhat less impressive than the others, but is presumably (relatively) reliable.

Since most of the other accounts are hearsay they may include some re-interpretation by NICAP investigator James Lee, as suggested in the Magonia article. This is a curiously dubious case in many ways, and might have its origin in an entirely natural phenomenon.
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I think the Air Force simply couldn't find anyone else in the short time available to the investigator. Several of the witnesses were from out of town and left no substantive address details - for example Williams was supposedly from Kermit, TX, but the local sheriff couldn't find him.

Given that Sputnik 2 had been launched the same night I think a lot of official people had bigger fish to fry (including Hynek, who later regretted he'd not been able to follow the case more closely due to his Sputnik related duties). It's generally thought the Levelland Blue Book investigation is a particularly half-arsed effort, but in fairness NICAP didn't do much better.

Incidentally I think they did manage to speak to Clem - they rated him as quite reliable but less so than Newell Wright, who impressed them. Clem's daughter and widow later claimed he'd actually experienced a far more close-up, car-stopping sighting but this smacks of those Roswell stories that become more elaborate years later.
 
On the subject of the witness accounts, Rullan's paper has a very useful section on the core witnesses at Levelland, ie those who reported a 'ball of light' and their car stopping (Saucedo, Wheeler, Alvarez, Wright, Williams, Martin and Long) rather than those who saw only a distant streak or flash of light (eg Clem).

In particular it sorts out those accounts with multiple first person interviews (Saucedo and Wright) from those with a single first person interview (Martin) and those with second or even third hand accounts, in all cases mediated through Fowler's telephone (everyone else). Fowler was still alive at the time and recalled everyone who called him being genuinely scared - he still, decades later, believed it was a test of something by the Air Force - but ultimately we have to rely on his accurate recording of what the callers actually said, the notes for which have obviously long gone.

Rullan also interviewed Wright, who suggested that while quotes from him at the time gave a sighting duration of a few minutes, it might have been as short as a few seconds, so we can't even be too certain about the 'best' account. Intriguing, but very frustrating!
 
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