8 November 1973
(The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, Virginia)
Quote from the article:
“ ‘… If this country has got it or if the Air Force
makes it somebody was clowning around because they moved toward me.’
Seward Trice was talking this morning of three
unidentified flying objects he saw while plowing a field here (Thornburg,
Virginia) last night (7 November 1973), noiseless objects which he said
followed him as he drove his tractor toward his house to get his wife and son
so they could come out and see the strange lights.
‘They were back over the woods so I stopped the
tractor and watched them as they came over the farm. I was a right good ways
out in the field, so I lifted up the plows and started toward the house and
when I did they started coming toward me …They didn’t get real close …Before I
got to the house they veered back to the east.’
However, said Trice, the ‘reddish-orange’ lights were
still hovering over the treetops when his wife, Lelia, and 15-year-old son,
Gary, got outside. Mrs. Trice supported the description given by her husband.
Trice, whose farm and store–Trice General Merchandise–sit
alongside U.S. 1 just south of the Spotsylvania County Line, said the lights
came out of the north and were visible for about 10 minutes before moving
south.
The cloud-covered moon made it impossible to
distinguish the objects’ shape, said Trice, but it appeared that there were
three objects. ‘There was one in front, one directly behind and one over to the
side and when they moved to the east it looked like they got in line.’
Distance was hard to calculate, he said, but the
lights appeared to be ‘about the size of basketballs’ and appeared to hover
like helicopters although they emitted no sound. At one point, said Trice, the
lights appeared to move up and down.
The Trice’s daughter, Sharon, was not at home at the
time, but returned later to tell them about a strange sighting made by a friend
of hers, 16-year-old Susan Kidd of Ruther Glen. Miss Kidd had also told friends
she had seen a red and orange light earlier in the evening.
Contacted this morning, Miss Kidd told a reporter she
was driving along Va. 601 in
Ruther Glen around 6:30 p.m. when she saw the lights moving south at a high
speed.
‘It was a blinking red light and behind it was a
blinking orange light …It was moving too fast to be a plane,’ said Miss Kidd,
who added that the object quickly disappeared behind the trees, but not before ‘it
shook me up.’
Neither Miss Kidd nor Trice had ever seen Unidentified
Flying Objects before, they said, but both now have had their previous beliefs
in them reinforced.”
Satellite photo of Ruther Glen, Virginia (tageo.com)
(tageo.com photo)
