On 18 October 1973 four US Army reservists flying near Mansfield, Ohio reported a cigar-shaped object closing on a collision course, a green beam that filled the cabin, and a climb they could not account for. A family in a car below reported seeing it too. This is the record of what the crew and the ground witnesses described, not a verdict on what was over Ohio.
The crew were flying at night near Mansfield when a red light appeared and closed rapidly on the aircraft. Lawrence Coyne put the helicopter into a dive to avoid the collision. The accounts describe a cigar-shaped domed metallic object that came to a stop above them and paced the aircraft, then put a green cone-shaped beam down into the cabin. The helicopter rose from 1,700 feet to nearly 3,800 with the controls still set for descent. Radio transmissions failed during the encounter and the compass malfunctioned. The instruments tested normal afterwards. A family of five in a car on the road below reported watching the same object.
What is on the record
The archive resolves ten claimants from four videos on a single reporting channel. That count needs a caveat. Several entries in the claimant list are variant renderings of the same four crewmen: Lawrence Coyne appears as Major Coyne, John Healy as Sergeant Healy, Arrigo Jezzi as both Lieutenant Jezzi and Lieutenant Errico Jetse, and Robert Yanacsek as Robert Janacek. The number of people who were in that cockpit is four. The one separate group of observers is the DeLong family on the ground, who are named collectively rather than individually.
No documents sit in this file. There is no incident report, no radar trace and no maintenance record for the instrument failures, which is a serious absence for a military aircraft encounter. The climb against the controls is the load-bearing detail and it survives only as testimony.
Why it sits where it does
The case grades L3, the archive's independent-witness tier, on testimony from a crew and a ground party describing one connected event. It does not climb to L4 because no government paperwork is attached to it here. All four tellings come from one channel, and that concentration reflects how thinly the archive has indexed this case rather than how widely it was reported. What paced the helicopter is not resolved here.
◆ CORROBORATION
✓4 independent video sources across 1 channel
✓8 resolved claimants
◆ SOURCES
Everything this file draws on, in the open — reports, not reality. Check us.
Watch — the tellings
Each opens the source video at the exact moment this case is covered.
