The Centerville Flashes

"It blew up like a bomb." That is how one caller described the object over Centerville, Ohio, in the early hours of 6 March 2004. Between about 5.30 and 5.45 in the morning residents flooded the police with calls about huge electrical flashes, explosive bangs, a loud humming and failing power. In the archive's tellings a saucer-shaped object with spinning lights hovered at treetop height over a school and near the power lines. The outside record puts it at about the size of a house. It burst into a flameball and kept repeating the same path. Callers said the tree tops went on burning afterwards with a glitter-like sparkle, for hours in the outside account.

What is on the record

Unusually for a case like this, the logs exist. Centerville Police recorded about ten calls between 5.37 and 5.45 am and sent officers. Units from the Washington Township Fire Department responded. Dayton Power & Light logged a circuit lockout from 5.34 that morning until 10.45. The calls came from the area around Stingley Elementary School. One witness in the outside record is a 25-year-old local man who watched with his wife, and neither is named there.

The standard explanation is on file too. City officials attributed the flashes to wind-blown power lines arcing, and the National Weather Service recorded a wind of about 12 mph. The 911 recordings and the logs are real. Every outside account of the case, though, comes through one investigator, Bruce Forrester Jr., whose file adds a residue analysis. We found no independent press coverage. One of our rows dates the case only to around 2004. The record fixes it at 6 March.

Why it sits where it does

The archive holds two videos on one channel and resolves three claimants: Dennis Lewis, John McKeegan and John McKeep. The count is probably inflated, since the last two names look like one caller spelled two ways. The case still grades L3 for independent witnesses because many callers described one event within minutes. In the official reading arcing lines explain both the flashes and the outage. The callers described a craft. What hung over the power lines that morning is not resolved here.