1977: Family sees UFO hovering over Camas, Washington

THINK ABOUTIT SIGHTING REPORT

Date: December 24, 1977

Sighting Time: 7:30 PM

Day/Night: Night

Location: Camas, Washington

Urban or Rural: Rural

Hynek Classification: NL (Nocturnal Light) Point or extended luminous source observed at night.

Duration:

No. of Object(s):  Single

Size of Object(s):

Distance to Object(s):

Shape of Object(s): saucer

Color of Object(s):

Number of Witnesses: Multiple

Source: Camas Post-Record (Camas, WA), Jan. 25, 1978

Summary: Barbara Siewell, of Springfield, OR, and her family witnessed a UFO hovering over Camas, WA on Christmas Eve, 1977. Two other adult witnesses reported seeing the same thing on the same date, also in Camas, WA.

Full Report

“She saw it, too! UFO hovering over Camas”

Remember the story in the Jan. 1st POST about the two adult witnesses who saw something they felt might have been an Unidentified Flying Object hovering over Camas about 7:30 on Christmas Eve?

Someone else saw the same thing at the same time.

Barbara Siewell, of Springfield, wrote in a letter to The Post, “I’m a little frightened to write this and I suppose I should have told someone sooner, but my family and I saw something ‘weird’ on Christmas Eve as we were en route to Washougal.

“We were just to the west of Camas before you get to the exit. I saw a few lights in the air to the northeast, but I thought it might be house lights on a hill, not being familiar with the Camas skyline.”

Then she added, “But as we continued on, the lights seemed to come directly in our direction, but moving along the road toward Washougal, too. Then it got real low, just over the highway, just directly between Washougal and the river.

“I told my girls and my husband to look at the UFO, and immediately my husband told us we were imaging things. But both girls and I saw it.”

She went on, “It was directly over the highway just ahead of us (and) just sort of hung there and then turned on end. Then it flattened out and went toward Camas at a slow pace, then changed directions and went (very fast) to the Portland area.”

Camas police, as noted in the previous story, said no one reported such a sighting to the department, and aviation officials speculated the “UFO” might have been a kind of advertising plane.

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An earlier story about two witnesses reporting the same thing:

“A Camas Encounter of the First King”

Camas Post-Record, Jan. 1, 1978

By Ken O’Toole
Post-Record Editor

Nowadays they call the sighting of a UFO a Close Encounter of the First Kind. At least two sober, reliable adult witnesses are certain that the elliptical saucer-like object they saw low in the sky over Camas on Christmas Eve had nothing to do with Santa and his reindeer.

Both said they would prefer to think it was something other than some kind of interplanetary spacecraft, but that, frankly, it didn’t look like anything they’d ever seen before.

One witness said she and her children were riding in their car just past the Minit Mart on SE Everett Road, about 7:30 p.m. when they first sighted the object “over the city of Camas.” The woman remarked jokingly to her children, “Aren’t you scared? You know, they could come and get you..”

The object appeared to be a “flat, round shape, saucer-shaped… moving like a helicopter… as low as one, as slow-moving. There was a light on top of it, as though on a tall pole. And.there were windows that went around and around (counterclockwise), in a sequence of six lighted windows, then six unlighted windows.”

The woman said one of her children felt there has been “some lines — like wires — from the pole (on top) to the tips of the (object’s) extremities.

“I’m assuming,” she added, “that it could have been a dirigible, but why did it go (rotate) around? There’s got to be a lot of other people who saw this, too.”

One other adult witness also conceded that she had seen the object that night about the same time. She had been riding in a car traveling the same route into Camas. However, she felt the object, described as “just a streak of light,” could have perhaps been a light plane flying around with lights rotating from the wings. I thought it could have been a Goodyear blimp, but I think it traveled too fast for a blimp.”

After traveling over Camas, the object reportedly headed off across the Columbia River toward Portland.

Others may have seen the object, but the Camas Police Department log shows no one calling the department that night to report a sighting. One officer speculated that the thus-far. UFO might have been a kind of plane used by an advertising company in Portland.