The East LA Police Chase

One officer took a picture in the middle of the chase and the department kept it. According to the account the archive holds, Officer C. C. Smith broadcast the pursuit over the radio and took a single photograph. It was booked as police property. Smith and his partner Joe Wynkoop had been dispatched at around 9.45 on a Monday evening after several East Los Angeles residents called in an unidentified flying object. The officers saw an oblong object travelling south-west and went after it.

The catalogue version adds movement. It has two officers and about a dozen residents watching a bright blue oval that dived at an angle of 45 degrees and stopped. Then it climbed and raced away to the south-south-west.

What is on the record

Two claimants are resolved, Smith and Wynkoop, and both come from one telling on one channel. That telling carries no date. A single catalogue entry supplies it as 12 November 1973. The entry was compiled by Hatch from Flying Saucer Review and it matches the two-officer chase. The officers' names come only from our video, since the catalogue entry does not carry them.

Outside documentation is limited to that one source. The archive holds neither the photograph nor any police report of the pursuit. No official finding and no explanation are on the record. The two versions differ in detail. They agree on the sequence: residents called, two officers were sent and a chase followed.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3, the archive's tier for multiple independent claimants describing one connected event. Both claimants are named in a single retelling and the independent record is one catalogue line. The booked photograph is the piece of evidence that could change that. If it survives in a police property store it has never surfaced in any source the archive holds. What the officers chased across East Los Angeles is not resolved here.