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-=ð P R O U D L Y í P R E S E N T S ð=-
West Seattle, Washington UFO Report
Saturday, March 5, 1988
PART I: Narrative of principal witness, male, age 43
Transcribed from notes by Dr. Donald Johnson, March 13, 1988
At approximately 9:30 p.m. I left the ARCO convenience
store at the southwest corner of Fauntleroy and SW Alaska St.
and noticed the object while facing east. It was "sitting"
[hovering] over towards the golf course and club house. I live
on Fauntleroy and Dawson, about 4 blocks south of Fauntleroy and
Alaska. I looked at it, then looked away then back for about 3
or 4 seconds. It wasn't sitting on the ground, but if it had it
would have crushed the clubhouse, because it would have been
right over it. [Later at the clubhouse he revised this comment
to say that it was probably not over the clubhouse but in a
clearing between the highway and the golf course to the right of
the clubhouse--an area some 500 yards long and 100 yards wide.
It is important to note that if the UFO had been near the ground
in this area it would have been hidden from view to the south by
trees, to the north by the West Seattle high school stadium, and
from 35th S.W. by a hill.] It was huge--I don't know what a
"mothership" is (we get our terminology from TV), but it was
like a mothership, it was big.
[Later at the intersection he described the size of the
object as stretching from a rotating motel sign on the left to a
tall evergreen tree on the right, a distance that would be
covered by 3 inches of a ruler held at arm's length. His
estimate on the report form that the apparent size of the object
was as large as a 12" ruler held at arm's length was therefore
an exaggeration.]
I shouted back and called [his girlfriend's] attention to it.
It moved to the left, then to the right, then it moved away and up
until it was out of sight.
While we were watching it we stood in the middle of the
intersection and nearly got run over by two or three cars. One
guy who almost hit me honked and said, "are you nuts?", and I
said, "no man, look at that". He stopped and said "is someone
hurt" and then he saw the object. He saw it while it was in
motion. We watched it until the damn thing disappeared. The
other witness--a guy 25 to 30 years old, heavy build with a
blond mustache, 5'9 to 5'11, well dressed in sweater and
slacks--said, "somebody's playing a joke, right?", and I said,
"No, I've been watching it for about 30 seconds."
I didn't hear anything like a hum or a buzz like you would
get from an airplane. There was nothing. [When questioned
about his note on the sketch made earlier that said "humming
sound":] I heard a humming sound like the electric [cooling]
fan on a car after the engine is turned off, but it was probably
the car of the guy who stopped. I'm almost sure the sound
didn't come from the object.
The other guy said he was on his way to Jake O'Shaunnessy's
Restaurant to meet someone and had to get going. I said I was
going to go down to the golf course and check that out. I went
down to the clubhouse parking lot, there were only two cars
there, parked in front of the clubhouse. I didn't see anything
more unusual there. The stadium lights were on at the West
Seattle High stadium there at the park.
The first thing I thought when I saw it was that it was a
carbon arc [searchlight], and I was looking around first for a
carbon-arc searchlight to see if there was some source of the
light. I used to be a projectionist and used to work on the
carbon arc. You could project the pictures on the clouds with
one of those things if you wanted to. But it was definitely a
physical object.
[Asked about the weather conditions that night:] There was a
full moon that night. The moon looked huge that night. It was
clear, there were sparse clouds but not "en masse" so you
couldn't see the sky.
I hadn't been drinking and I don't do any drugs.
[Asked about his line of work:] I run a shoe repair concession
with two other men in the Nordstrom's Men Shoe department, and
I'm a part-time musician (percussion and piano).
[Asked about his familiarity with UFO literature:] We saw the
Betty and Barney Hill movie, I used to watch a TV series in the
'60s called Project Blue Book, one of my favorite movies is "The
Day the Earth Stood Still", and I read Shirley MacLaine's book
"Out on a Limb".
[Asked about a description of the object:] The object was
metallic blue color. It was shaped like this [makes an ellipse
in the air with his two hands], but it wasn't flat like you
would think a flying saucer should be. It had greenish yellow
lights in a row--six of them the same size. There were three
rings of rotating white light: the one on the left was rotating
counter-clockwise and the one on the right was rotating
clockwise and the one on the bottom was probably rotating
clockwise. It had a blue thing on top like the radar detector
on an AWAC aircraft. It may not have been attached.