TECHNOIR (25 page)

            At 11 pm, as the Super Huey cut through the clear Fall night, wrote Zeidman, “Yanacsek noted a single red light on the south-eastern horizon.” Cue the creepy music. He kept a bead on the light for a “minute to 90 seconds.” The red light then started to make a line straight for the Super Huey.

            Yanacsek called out. Coyne saw it now. Sensing impact was seconds away, he took the controls from Jezzi and promptly sent the helicopter into an evasive descent. Coyne radioed a nearby air control tower from the city of Mansfield. He sternly asked, “Do you have any high performance aircraft in this area at 2,500 feet?”

            No reply. He tried again. Nothing. Then it hit them with a jolt. Both UHF and VHF frequencies were dead and the red light was getting awfully close.

            “Coyne increased his rate of descent to 2,000 feet per minute and his airspeed to 100 knots,” wrote Zeidman. Sometime during this maneuver, air controllers from the Mansfield Tower got through and acknowledged Coyne: “This is Mansfield Tower, go ahead Army 1-5-triple 4.” He couldn't respond – because the helicopter and his crew were headed for obliteration either by this UFO or the ground.

            Zeidman wrote, “The last altitude Coyne noted was 1,700 feet. Just as collision appeared imminent, the unknown light halted, and assumed a hovering relationship above and in front of the helicopter.” At 1,700 feet, the helicopter was paralyzed.

            The crew would later agree what “the unknown light” was. A cigar-shaped craft with no windows. “A featureless, gray, metallic-looking structure was precisely delineated against the background stars,” wrote Zeidman. The red light was positioned on the front cone nose of the ship. A sickly green light appeared emanating from the back of the UFO; a green light that quickly formed a cone-ish, searchlight appearance. A cone that began to swivel towards the front of the helicopter. Suddenly someone or something was   deliberately flooding the cockpit with it! Literally, the frozen-faced crew turned green.

            Yet within seconds the cigar-shaped ship disengaged from the Super Huey. Jezzi reported it headed northwest and “snapped out” over Lake Erie without a sound. But like a lot of good horror flicks, and a lot of bad flicks, for that matter, Coyne and crew were not out of the woods just yet.

            That’s when “Coyne noticed that the magnetic compass disk was rotating approximately four times per minute and that the altimeter read approximately 3,500 feet; a 1,000 foot-per-minute climb was in progress,” wrote Zeidman. Yet Coyne told investigators he still had the collective (or throttle stick), pressed forward in descent mode. He had no choice but to pull the collective back even if it meant disaster. Miraculously he gained control of the Super Huey – at 3,800 feet.

            Zeidman wrote, “Coyne had been subliminally aware of the climb; the others not at all, yet they had all been acutely aware of the g-forces of the dive. The helicopter was brought back to the flight plan altitude of 2,500 feet, radio contact was achieved with Canton/Akron airport, the night proceeded uneventfully to Cleveland.” As they flew, they realized the magnetic compass wasn't working properly; it would soon be replaced. In fact, Coyne’s Super Huey would never be the same. Twenty years later during a televised interview, Healy said, “She was never any good after that. She was the hangar queen after that. The radios never worked after that. The navigation instruments. Nothing.”

            Just days after the incident, Coyne spoke openly and confidently about what exactly happened. “It looked like a fighter plane coming straight for us. The light was traveling in excess of 600 knots. It came from the horizon to our aircraft in about 10 seconds. We were on a collision course. I took immediate evasive action. I cut the power and dropped into a shallow dive. We dropped to 2,000 feet and it was headed straight for  us. We braced for impact.” But there was none. “We looked up and saw it stopped right over us. It had a big, gray, metallic-looking hull about 60 feet long. It was shaped like an airfoil or a streamlined fat cigar. (And) There was a red light on the front. The leading edge glowed red a short distance back from the nose. There was a center dome. A green light at the rear reflected on the hull.”

            Coyne was asked about the freakish ascent.

            “I had made no attempt to pull up,” he said. “All controls were set for a 20-degree dive. Yet we had climbed from 1,700 to 3,500 feet with no power in a couple of seconds with no g-forces or other noticeable strains.”

            In 2003, for the 30th anniversary, a 56-year-old Jezzi would re-tell his story. He still wasn't sure what it was. But his memory remained vivid. He said it was like no other aircraft he had ever witnessed. “The first thing I thought was those Commie bastards,” he told one local paper near Cincinnati. “What are they up to?” The next morning he and the others were asked to draw what they had witnessed. They all drew a cigar-shaped looking craft with a dome on top.

            In that same article, Rene Bouchard, who was on the ground on that night, said she saw something in the same skies the Super Huey would fly through some 60 minutes later. The flying saucers had her and her brother searching the starry night in a nearby field. She remembers lying down in a grassy field for just a few seconds. Then suddenly awakening – to a tremendous bright light. “That’s when we saw this brilliant white light. It was as bright as the sun.” They ran for their lives. Thirty years later, she told the newspaper she would be in that same field the night of the anniversary.

            In the immediate aftermath of the Coyne incident, UFO skeptic Philip Klass tried to discredit the case saying the Coyne UFO was a “fireball of the Orionid meteor shower”. He and other critics said Coyne must have accidentally caused the helicopter to rise in altitude. “They said the pilot unknowingly moved the helicopter,” says Jones of MUFON. “Coyne said it felt like the object had control.” Hartinger of RUFOS likes to note that Coyne would later be promoted to Major. “They (US military) didn't hold it against him,” he said. “A lot of military people would say to Coyne, ‘You’ve got to be nuts,’ but they didn't. Promoting him says a lot.”

            Corroborating Coyne and crew’s story would be several ground witnesses. In the months that followed, a younger Jones found a family of five who also saw a cigar-shaped craft and a helicopter floating together some 500-feet over the tree tops. Earlier, the family was driving on a typical country road when two lights – one red, one green – made a B-line for their car. The mother, Erma DeLong, pulled over to the shoulder. The light, this thing, seemed as if it was headed straight for them, she told Jones. That’s when her set of twins, 13-year-old brothers, jumped from the car. Above the dark webs of thinning tree branches the twins saw what looked “like a blimp...as big as a school bus.” The craft appeared to be hovering over the helicopter, attested members of the family. That’s when their world turned green. “It was like rays coming down...The helicopter, the trees, the road, the car – everything turned green,” said Ms. DeLong to Jones.

            The invasion of 1973 offers a lot for those who want to believe Carl Sagan’s little blue dot is being visited by a super-advanced species. The Coyne incident alone is worthy of mainstream attention and respect from both science and media.

            And it has an entire host of smaller, lesser incidents propping it up. Arguably the Coyne incident is
the
UFO case that could help win US government disclosure.

            But the 1973 UFO frenzy that swept the green and gold flatlands of the Midwest can be countered with some disproving evidence. It shows that the entire “invasion” may have been of a human kind. Conducted from, oddly enough, a US Air Force base with an infamous UFO history:
Wright-Patterson AFB
of Dayton, Ohio. And to best understand what goes on there, a check of the base’s web site is revealing: “Today, as in the early 1900s, Wright-Patterson is where weapon systems of the future are conceived, tested, modified, and tested again until worthy of acceptance as part of the most responsive deterrent force in the history of military aviation. Yesterday-Today-Tomorrow. That is what Wright-Patterson is all about. A heritage of a legendary past spurs aerospace logisticians, engineers, and scientists in a quest to ‘keep’em flying,’ faster, higher, further, and safer than man has ever flown before.”

            Wright-Patt, as the locals call it, is believed to secretly house the flying saucer that wrecked at Roswell in 1947. Shipped there with bodies by a B-29 bomber and stored in
Hangar 18
. UFO folklore also says a second UFO – one that crashed in Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948 – was shipped there, along with the craft’s 16 dead shipmates. What’s more, Wright-Patt was home to the Air Force’s office for Project Blue Book. Which coincidently, was initiated in 1947.

            “Ground Zero” of UFO flap 1973 is easily just thirty to forty miles east of Wright-Patt, which is located in southwest Ohio. Eighty to a hundred calls a night about strange lights were being logged from there. The Coyne incident happened 150 miles to the northeast. Thus most of the “flap” occurred relatively in the same direction that an armada of US Air Force aircraft was heading, day-after-day, beginning October 14th, 1973. Could it be that all those witnesses were looking at ships and crafts from this world?

            On October 6, 1973, the Yom Kippur war erupted. The Arabs – mainly Egypt and Syria, but with help from ten other Arab nations such as Iraq – wanted to annihilate Israel for good. The fourth Arab-Israel war started with the Arab’s surprise two- pronged invasion on the holiest of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur. Along a broad front, the Egyptians crossed over the Suez Canal with Soviet made T-55 and T-62 tanks. In the air, they flew Russian Mig-21s. To the west, the Syrians invaded the Golan Heights, which is close to Tel Aviv, sending 1,400 Soviet tanks into battle. After gains made by the Arabs, however, the Israelis held strong; their American weapons winning a stalemate.

            Nevertheless, seeing the Apocalypse on the horizon, the US government capitulated to the desperate Jewish state, which was threatening to unleash a dozen 20-kiloton nuclear missiles onto to Egyptian and Syrian targets. On October 13, 1973, President Nixon ordered the Air Force to begin Operation Nickle Grass; an air lift of weapons, ammunition, tanks, and other supplies, so to save the Israelis. Hopefully the arms and supplies would help Israel from lighting-up a number of huge Arab cities, which no doubt would bring about a global holocaust. Within hours of orders, air bases across the US, including Wright-Patt, were buzzing on a mission that would last from October 14th to mid-November.

            Soon US Air Force planes stuffed with equipment were flying over the Atlantic, stopping only in Portugal for more fuel, and then racing down the middle of the Mediterranean Sea to Israel. All told, Operation Nickel Grass resulted in 567 missions carrying close to 22,000 tons of cargo. Much of it flown out of Wright-Patt, one of the largest air bases in the world.

            And missions that had the aircraft heading east out of Wright-Patt, directly over areas where UFO sightings had reached a boil. Some of the planes involved were
C-141 StarLifters
, which simply look like oversized passenger jets. Another heavily used plane was the
C-5 Galaxy
;
again, nothing more than an extra large cargo jet. The Egyptians caught on their radar a craft at high altitude moving at a tremendous speed over their troops, but it wasn't flying from Ohio or from a distant corner of the universe. Later, the US Air Force would admit it was their sleek SR-71 spy plane, conducting surveillance for the Israelis.

            But what about saucer-shaped or cigar-shaped craft? The kind that can take over the flight of a Super Huey with an apparent green tracking beam? Was the Air Force using Operation Nickle Grass also as a cover to conduct secret flight tests of classified aircraft?

            In an interesting side note, Coyne decided to check on the radio transmissions he had made with the Mansfield air-control tower during the night of the encounter. What Coyne found is a bit eye-opening. The Mansfield Tower had no recorded tape of the response they made to Coyne. There was no explanation as to how this happened. It was a mystery, raising questions like spirits in a crypt – to this day very day. Was the transmission deliberately erased? And if so, by whom?

            “I can’t believe that,” quips Hartinger with deep sarcasm. He says the obvious sabotaging on the part of human hands “gives credit to the case.”

            Like so many past UFO “flaps” or waves, the evidence left behind as to “What the Hell?” is going on is simply mind-bending. In the case of the Halloween UFO invasion of 1973, did the Greys give believers one of the greatest UFO encounters of all time – the Coyne incident? If so, why this invasion then? So to make peace – amongst Earthlings – as Hartinger suggested? Or could it be, as Jones suggested, that the Greys used the Super Huey as a “trick” in order to convince the US Army and US government to give up the “treats”?

            And, if so, what on Earth would those “treats” be? Some type of animal or sea creature? Or some human beings, perhaps those that are comatose, in exchange for the not snatching-up kids in costumes?

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