In Washington, a hot spot for UFO sightings, people still want to believe

In Washington, Bigfoot rules the forest. But the skies? That’s for the little green men.

In 2007, Yakima resident Troy Hampton-Peterson was looking at the stars outside Moses Lake when he and a girlfriend noticed something strange.

“It looked kind of like a bat,” Hampton-Peterson said, “and it moved across the sky, and we said ‘That was weird. What was that?’”

“Two minutes later, we see five or six more of these things bouncing together kind of like balloons. … They weren’t frenetic like a bat.”

UFOs are not just for the tinfoil hat wearers anymore. In 2017, the Pentagon’s long-secret unit investigating unidentified flying objects, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, was acknowledged publicly for the first time. Unclassified Navy documents reported close encounters with unidentified aerial vehicles between 2013 and 2019. It’s a fact that officials have recorded unidentified objects with capabilities that do not appear to be possible through current technology.

Two years ago, Washington logged more reports of UFOs (newly dubbed unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, by the federal government) per capita than any other state in the U.S., according to the National UFO Reporting Center, a 30-year operation run by a Washingtonian. Many of those sightings can be explained away due to a lack of photographic evidence or grainy videos of streaks of light in the sky, and sometimes people mistake Starlink satellites or the planet Venus for UFOs. But some sightings still mystify.

And if you’ve ever watched the movie “Men in Black,” you can thank a Washington state resident (more on that later). Among Washingtonians who say they’ve had their own experiences with what they think may have been an extraterrestrial phenomenon, some still have a healthy dose of skepticism. For many, their outlook on alien life shares a similar disposition as “The X-Files” fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder: They want to believe.

At least, that’s how Katrean Hall phrased it. The 30-year-old from Bucoda, Thurston County (the “world’s tiniest town with the biggest Halloween spirit”), said she and her father believe they may have spotted a UFO during her youth.

“I’ve seen a lot of weird stuff I can’t explain. … But I will never say I know for a fact that this is a UFO. There’s something weird that happened that I don’t have an explanation for, that other people have also experienced, and they don’t have an explanation for it, and that in and of itself is magical.”

That’s why people like Hall and Hampton-Peterson ended up at the Chehalis Flying Saucer Party last month.

People descended on the small city’s downtown for two days in honor of a 1947 UFO sighting by a pilot en route to Yakima from Chehalis — a sighting from which the term “flying saucer” first entered the American lexicon.

For many, the event is a chance to bring the kids for a free trip to the Lewis County Historical Museum or don a big-eyed, bright green Area 51 blowup costume and parade downtown.

For others, though, the annual Chehalis festival offers a chance to dive into important questions regarding this year’s theme of disclosure, exploring what’s been declassified about UFOs and how to find credible testimonies.

For example: How does Hume’s argument in “Of Miracles” apply to UFOs? What kind of psychoactive effects does a UFO sighting have on someone? Was the unidentified object captured on video from the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz individually controlled or controlled remotely?

Washington’s most well-known UFO connection is the 1947 sighting by Kenneth Arnold, a pilot who reported seeing nine “circular-type” objects flying in formation at more than twice the speed of sound near Mount Rainier. His was the first widely reported UFO sighting in the U.S., and his description of the objects as “a saucer if you skip it across the water” was later penned as a “flying saucer” by reporters. Among ufologists, Arnold’s account is still considered highly credible.

But Steve Edmiston, an entertainment lawyer and speaker with Humanities Washington, contends that that shouldn’t be our claim to fame. Instead, he points to the Maury Island Incident, a man’s account of a UFO sighting that was investigated and documented by the FBI and U.S. Air Force, but has largely been regarded as a hoax. The reports were later declassified by the FBI.

As the infamous story that kicked off “The Summer of the Saucers” goes, Harold Dahl took a boat out near Maury Island in Puget Sound with his son, their dog and two deckhands. He was later contacted by none other than Arnold, the pilot and writer, to talk about his account in a magazine: On June 21, 1947, six round, circular flying objects appeared above the boat, Dahl said. They were about 100 feet across and in the center of each was a 25-foot hole, according to an FBI report of Dahl’s account. One of the objects poured hot metal from its center, hurting his son and killing their dog. Dahl claimed he retrieved fragments that fell from the flying disc and later showed them to Arnold (whose own Mount Rainier UFO sighting took place a few days later).

The next day, a man — reportedly dressed in black — contacted him and said “I know what you saw at Maury Island and I’m telling you in a nice way to forget about it and keep your mouth shut,” according to the FBI report. This purported confrontation is possibly the first interaction with the “men in black,” strange characters who would appear through the decades in conspiracy theories and popular media about aliens, usually as people trying to muffle the news that extraterrestrials exist, including the “Men in Black” movies starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.

When Dahl met with Arnold for an interview, he claimed he wanted to forget about the proclaimed sighting, saying his son later went missing and his wife became ill. He wanted to avoid further troubles, but he contended his story wasn’t false. Two Army Air Corps Intelligence officers, Lt. Frank Brown and Capt. William Davidson, met with Dahl to confirm his account and collected the disc fragments. The next day, Brown and Davidson were killed in a plane crash outside Kelso. Some reports state the plane was shot down. And Dahl later claimed his story was a hoax.

Edmiston, a founder of The Men in Black Birthday Bash, won’t say whether he believes Dahl’s story, but he said he does believe in what the federal agent documented, including the statement that “(Dahl) was sick and tired of the entire business and that if he was ever contacted by the Army or the authorities he was going to deny ever having seen anything and claim to be ‘the biggest liar that ever lived.’”

“Why don’t we know that story? Because the FBI, despite what was written in the final report to (Director J. Edgar) Hoover, was happy to seal the files for 50 years as top secret,” Edmiston said, a decision that he says sacrificed the Pacific Northwest’s historical significance — and Dahl’s true experience — to be surpassed by the notable Roswell, N.M., UFO incident.

Washington’s UFO connections run deep. That’s in large part why Jason Mattson, executive director at the Lewis County Historical Museum, and his team wanted to highlight the state’s history with the Flying Saucer Party, held in honor of Arnold. It’s the festival’s fourth year running. Mount Rainier is a popular spot for UFO sightings, he said, and some party attendees drive hours to meet experts who could illuminate their experiences.

Heather Houston drove from Auburn to meet Kevin Day, a retired U.S. naval officer who was at the festival speaking about his experience witnessing the “Tic Tac” UFO in 2004, a video of which was officially released by the Pentagon in 2020.

Day was the senior radar operator aboard the USS Princeton, another ship with the Nimitz group. Retired Navy Cmdr. David Fravor, who led the F/A-18F Super Hornet squadron on the USS Nimitz, later testified before the House Oversight Committee about the experience.

“I think what we experienced was, like I said, well beyond the material science and the capabilities that we had at the time, that we have currently or that we’re going to have in the next 10 to 20 years,” Fravor testified last year.

Houston, 37, said she’s had “a lifetime of experiences, and I don’t really know what to make of them.”

“I’m not the only one seeing and experiencing these things,” Houston said. “It’s been happening for thousands of years to people all over the Earth. Something’s going on.”

Houston said she was returning from Mount Rainier with a group in her 20s when she had a sudden urge to go to her childhood home in Thurston County. The second she saw the house, Houston said she had a “vivid memory” of standing in her front yard and seeing a UFO.

Houston said she tries to keep up with events about UFOs. She had heard Day’s experience when he appeared on a podcast, and then learned about the Chehalis Flying Saucer Party through researching him.

Day described seeing about a hundred of the Tic Tac-shaped UFOs while aboard the Princeton. He spent over 18 years in the Navy, and said “oddly enough, this was my very last time at sea.”

It was years later, after retiring from the Navy, that he saw the video from what had popped up on his radar on CNN.

“I had never seen anything like this,” Day said to guests at the Flying Saucer Party. “You should have seen these things.”

Day speculates extraterrestrials are here to get humans “over the hurdle of artificial intelligence.”

But some don’t want to speculate about what they’ve witnessed or watched on video.

“I don’t think it matters what they are,” Hampton-Peterson said. “One thing I remember during all my experiences was the way I felt, like for a brief instance I’d come into contact with the Unknown, capital U.

“There’s this possibility of existence that you’re not quite aware of, and that, if you’re lucky, sometimes you get to experience that, and it redefines for at least a brief moment who you are.”