12 February 1986
(The Desert Sun, Palm
Springs , California
Source: cdnc.ucr.edu
The whole article:
“The droning sound was so unusual in the quiet Avra Valley
‘What the hell is going on?’ Grill wondered as she
stumbled to the door of her mobile home in the rural area northwest of Tucson
Airplanes or something in the sky were making the
droning noise.
But as she looked eastward and saw the lights began
zipping by in all directions at varying speeds without colliding, she wondered
if they were airplanes.
‘You never saw such a sight in your life,’ she said.
‘It was incredible.’
They resembled blue, green and white lights on
airplanes. Some were in clusters and some were solo. They came from and went to
the north, the Tucson
Mountains 15 miles across the valley
to the southwest, and Ryan Field to the south. Others skimmed the Tucson Mountains
Somebody must be guiding them, she thought.
Last week, Grill became the latest person to admit
publicly that she saw Unidentified Flying Objects the night of Oct. 7, 1985.
They also were seen by the most professional of the
watchers of the night sky.
Grill is an artist — a trained observer. For years,
she was a cook on merchant ships. She has sailed the South Pacific in a 42-foot
ketch. She has witnessed some of the phenomena of the sea, including Saint
Elmo’s fire, an electrical flame sometimes seen on a ship’s mast during a
storm.
But that night last October, Grill was mystified as
she began counting the UFOs. She lost count at 36.
‘What the hell is going on?’ she asked herself again.
Then one big UFO slowly flew about 500 feet over her head,
she said. It was cigar-shaped, had a light on each side and had a fuselage like
a military transport plane, she said.
Federal Aviation Administration radar operators at
Tucson International Airport reported tracking about 15 groups of aircraft that
night — at least 60 total — as they flew from the Avra Valley area in the
southwest, across the city, and out through Redington Pass northeast of Tucson.
Officer Timothy Clark, the pilot of Air 1, the Tucson
Police helicopter, saw the lights of the objects cross over the city and leave
over Redington. They were going too fast for Air 1.
Officials at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and at other
military installations in Arizona
‘Nope, we don’t deal with UFOs,’ Lt. Julie
Fortenberry, a public information officer at Davis-Monthan, said a few days
after the sighting. ‘We’re not pursuing it.’
Nevertheless, for more than an hour that night, things
with lights were seen and tracked on radar screens as they flew over the city.
Likewise, the North American Air Defense Command — NORAD
— in Colorado Springs , Colo.
In fact, no one has ever been able to explain what the
objects were or where they came from. At least, no one has been willing to say
so publicly.
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization Inc. (APRO), an
international UFO study group based in Tucson
Robert G. Marsland, a former Air Force officer and
deputy director of APRO, interviewed Grill and others who saw the UFOs. While
even he has no idea what they were, he is ‘very sure’ the UFOs were not
military aircraft.
‘There were too many airplanes in one place at the same
time,’ he said. ‘It was too close to the mountains. The military doesn’t take
those risks.’
One major difference between the UFOs that Grill saw
over Avra Valley
and those seen by others over Tucson
Grill remains undaunted: ‘There was something about that
thing flying over that I can’t get out of my mind,’ she said. ‘It’s almost like
it was a dream . . . It was just a strange-looking thing because of the khaki,
dirty color . . . It still reminds me of a great big moth.
‘It was strange that it flew over me,’ she said
shaking her head. ‘I didn’t like that thing. Something was in the air, but no
one on this earth will ever make me say those were flying saucers because I
don’t have enough information about what I saw.’ ”
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