Alien Nation

The calls came in around 10:40 on the night of August 25, 1955. Thomas McGuinn, the dispatcher on shift in the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office, had been on the job for three years, but had never encountered anything like this. Sgt. Ralph Weber and patrolman Ernest Nehrer were watching a “big, bright, round” object above the Fernald atomic plant — where uranium ore was processed for nuclear weapons.

Both Navy veterans (Weber had been an airman), the officers were in separate cruisers, watching the object from different locations as it hovered at 5,000 feet. McGuinn also fielded frantic calls from farmers in the area about the “bright, round and tannish in color” object. Nobody could identify the object, but its arrival was less than surprising.

For the past few days, the Cincinnati area had been besieged by unusual sightings. Members of the Ground Observer Corps, a civil defense group with eyes peeled toward the sky, reported airborne lights of several colors. According to contemporary researcher Leonard Stringfield, the lights were variously described as “blinking with a bobbing motion” and “hovering in pendulum-like motions.” Once they were caught on radar, the military responded swiftly: jets were scrambled from the Lockbourne Air Force Base to intercept the objects.

Stringfield, who stood in nearby Madison Place with binoculars pointed toward the sky, struggled to see the drama through heavy clouds, but recalled that “the continuous din of low flying jets gave the writer a familiar choking chill, one that he had known during the Pacific campaigns while waiting for the inevitable attack.” America, it seemed, was under invasion.

Others were less convinced.

During the flap of sightings, Conquest of Space was showing at the local Woodlawn Drive-In. The film about an international mission to Mars was standard sci-fi fodder of its day, but includes some interesting elements. The commanding officer, Col. Samuel Merritt, comes to believe the crew is acting against God’s will. After an astronaut dies on board, Merritt recites Psalm 38:3 before sending the corpse into space.

While viewers watched the space drama at the outdoor theater, “flickering red, green, and white lights” flew overhead. Afterward the theater’s owner, Nat Kaplan, wrote to the Motion Picture Exhibitor trade magazine with a theory that dismissed not only the local event, but the growing sightings across the country. Kaplan “pointed out that outdoor movie screens are built to reflect light skyward and that