The Georgia Police Wave

The reports come from October 1967 and from around a dozen towns across Georgia. The archive's telling calls it an eastern Georgia wave and names Noonan; the documented centres are Newnan, in Coweta County to the west of Atlanta, and Milledgeville in the middle of the state. According to the account the archive holds, patrolmen saw and chased glowing blue spheres, one of which emitted a bluish beam. Warner Robins Air Force Base denied any radar contact.

What is on the record

Four claimants are resolved: Dale Spradlin, Gerald Maskin, Jerry Golden and Mac Long. The documented reports put officers in pairs. In Newnan in the small hours of 22 October two officers reported a white ball of light at treetop height that reversed and followed them, casting a bluish beam. In Milledgeville two nights earlier two officers reported a red ellipse that lit up their patrol car, and on the night of the 22nd two police groups half a mile apart and in radio contact reported an orange-yellow object shaped like a water tower tank rising out of a pecan grove. That last one is the strongest in the set: two units at separate positions talking to each other while they watched the same thing.

Police witnesses are weighted for the ordinary reason that they are on duty and required to report accurately, and here they were in more than one town. Against that, the archive holds no police report, no radar record and no photograph, though photographs from Milledgeville on the 22nd are described in the published record. The Air Force denial is reported second-hand and is not a document.

The archive's record covers a period and groups several incidents. That is how the record treats them.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L3, the archive's tier for multiple independent claimants describing one connected event. Officers in separate towns carry it there. What the patrol cars were chasing is not resolved here.