The Portage County UFO Chase was an unidentified flying object encounter that began in Portage County, Ohio on the morning of April 17, 1966, when police officers Dale Spaur and Wilbur Neff observed a metallic, disc shaped object flying in the skies. They pursued the object for about half an hour, ending up in Pennsylvania before losing sight of the UFO. Several other police officers became involved in the chase, and several civilians reported witnessing the same object, or a similar object in about the same area, during this time. The UFO encounter earned significant mainstream publicity, and probably inspired a scene in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where three Indiana police cruisers are depicted chasing several UFOs into Ohio, eastbound across state lines. After interviewing one of the police witnesses, Project Blue Book determined that the witnesses had chased a communications satellite, then the planet Venus. This conclusion was rejected by the officers involved as ridiculously inadequate, and was furthermore subject to some wider criticism, contributing to the opinions of some observers that Blue Book was a failure as an investigative project. The UFO chase was one of the cases that contributed to the creation of the Condon Committee, ostensibly an independent scientific investigation of UFOs. Wikipedia [ - ]

The Portage County UFO Chase was an unidentified flying object encounter that began in Portage... [ + ]