13 September 1976
(Colusa Sun-Herald,
California)
Sources: U.F.O. Newsclipping Service, Seattle, Washington
and AFU.se
The whole article (Pages 1 and 2):
“ ‘It was a nightmarish experience I’ll never forget.
I didn’t believe in UFOs before, but I do now. You’d have to see it to believe
it, but so help me what I saw — and felt — about 1 A.M. Friday
(10 September
1976) outside our house is the truth.’
That’s what Bill Pecha, Jr., who does machine and
bankout wagon work in his shop at 1650 Wilson Avenue, Colusa, told the
Sun-Herald in describing what happened after the power went off (the power
outage lasted for about nine minutes) while he was watching a Channel 12
television program. His wife and two children were asleep at the time. Said
Pecha:
‘When the power went off I started outside and saw
this huge glowing thing hovering over our house. It looked to me like it was 150 feet across and from 10
to 18 feet
in height shooting out beams of bluish light. It looked like a huge inverted
cup and saucer with the outer brim spinning clockwise and an inner disc
spinning counter clockwise. When I got outside I felt funny. Seemed like all
the hair on my body was being pulled up.
‘There were three of these things, the big one and two
smaller ones on the high power line in back of the ‘Slim’ Davis house. There was no noise, no sounds of
any kind —
just a huge blue halo of light with the big UFO maneuvering about at amazing
speed. I awakened my wife and she and my son and daughter saw the whole thing,
too. So did Les and Gayle Arant (they reside at 846 Thirteenth Street) because I awakened
them as I drove into town to report the UFO sighting to the sheriff’s office.
At that time this ‘thing’ was heading toward the fairgrounds and disappeared in
a southeasterly direction, like toward Sacramento.
Pecha said the Arants drove into town, too, as a
report was made to the sheriff's office which apparently had received other reports
from Colusa area residents who had seen the strange glowing object.
Pecha said he was so frightened that he drove into town as fast as he could in his
pickup with the lights out. But, he said, the bluish light from this thing,
about 50 feet
off the ground, seemingly followed him, then disappeared. He further described
the events which transpired thusly:
‘Slim Davis and his wife were asleep. There was a
bluish light all over their place, and coming down these shafts of light turned
to an all-white color. This thing darted about, clear out to the foothills and
back. On each side it had two things about eight feet long which hung down and
curled around underneath it. They looked like wire bristles. The power line
poles were glowing and the two smaller UFOs each had lights.
‘All of this happened, I guess, in a matter of 15 or
20 minutes. A call was placed to Phenomena Research, the UFO reporting center
in Seattle, Washington, and the man in charge asked if
this thing I saw had three lights, or windows, and I said it did. My report was
that it seemed to have long flexible cables by which it looked like it was being
maneuvered.’
Pecha, who said he and his family didn’t get much
sleep after the early Friday morning incident, told his story to a number of Colusans
and has received numerous telephone calls. ‘I
guess some believe me and some don’t,’ he said. ‘But I know what I and
others saw. It made a UFO believer out of me, that’s for sure.’
Pechas said two officers from the sheriff’s department
came out to talk with him further about what he saw. It is also understood that
a man from the UFO reporting center in Seattle
is coming here to talk with Pecha about the incident and also to have him make
a drawing of the object.
Pacific Gas & Electric Company officials who were
contacted about the incident said there may have been some relation between it
and the fact that about the time the power outage occurred shortly before 1 A.M. Friday, the PG&E
substation at Victorville went out, causing a high voltage power line overload.
The nine-minute power outage affected thousands of Northern California homes.
It was suggested that the power overload caused static
electricity being conducted into the ground and this might have accounted for
the weird, glowing UFO witnessed and experienced by Pecha and others.
But Pecha doesn’t buy this theory. ‘It was big, it was
real, it was terrifying — shafts of light seemingly come at you, hovering over barns and houses,
darting away, coming back, moving upward, then shooting back down close to the
ground. I wasn’t a believer in UFOs before, but I certainly am now. I don’t
ever want to go through anything like this again.’ ”
The article contains Bill Pecha’s drawing of the UFO.
I also reported about this UFO case on 3 November 2013.
Related posts:
realtvufos.blogspot.com/search?q=1976
(tageo.com photo)
