Thea, of Erie County, said that since her husband worked nights in a local factory, she had plenty of time on warm summer nights to sit on their house’s balcony and study the starry night sky.
“I lived in Tonawanda, NY, which is north of Buffalo and I lived across the road from a very large grassy park area which was near the Niagara River,” she said.
On one such summer night in 1970, she had just taken a sip of lemonade as she glanced up to view a odd sight. Hovering out over the river was a perfect circle of lights. They levitated at the height of a low-flying airplane; the circle of lights was seemingly just parked there, stationary in the local sky.
“There had to have been about eight or nine bright lighted objects forming this circle,” Thea said. “They all looked to be of equal distance apart from each other.”
At first Thea thought it was some constellation she had never seen before, but after realizing constellations was in the shape of a near perfect circle.
She said that the circle of lights remained stationary for quite a long time. Then, suddenly, one of the objects left the circle of lights. Thea was quick to explain that as the one light left and flew off and out of sight, the other lights in the circle quickly closed the gap, and seemingly appeared to make the distance between them equal. While she studied the new arrangement of the lights, something even more unexpected happened.
“Unexpectedly, another object, a huge one, appeared to my left, just above the tree tops and house tops,” she said. “It moved very slow and silently, about two houses away from me.”
She described the object as craft of some sort with huge windows all along the side of it. To her, it appeared to be dark grey, but being late at night, it was difficult to be sure.
“The windows were well-lit with a red glow and I could clearly see inside,” she said. “There appeared to be several instrument panels, but I never saw any humanoid forms or anything else for that matter.”
She admited that she was so awed by what she saw that she didn’t think to yell down to her neighbors to come see the craft before it flew completely out of sight. By the time she did yell to them, the craft was gone. Of course her neighbors all got a big laugh and thought she had been mixing a bit of gin in her lemonade.
Thea said the clincher was the next evening, when her neighbor dropped by with a copy of the daily local newspaper.
“Did you see what was in the paper?” asked her neighbor. Thea said she hadn’t.
Her neighbor then showed her the front page where a picture of two uniformed policemen from Niagara Falls were pictured. The two policemen were quoted as saying that they watched a UFO for nearly ten minutes; that it looked like a circle of lights.
A 1970 Circle of Lights UFO in Erie County
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Columnist Cheryl Costa shares the account of an Erie County woman about her close encounter.
