U.S. GOVERNMENT RECORDS REVEAL THAT SANFORD HAS BEEN HOME TO MULTIPLE
‘UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS’ AND PLAYED A ROLE IN THE COUNTRY’S EARLY RESPONSE TO SIGHTINGS

By Richard Sullins

It’s a story that could easily have been used as the opening scene for an episode of the X-Files, back when Mulder and Scully ruled broadcast television. Set in the backwoods of Sanford, North Carolina, a father and son are returning home after an athletic competition on the western fringes of the Triangle. It’s been a long and full day for each of them, capped off by the dad playing well in his game tonight. Now, they’re heading home, and the end of this day might have been as it has been for them so many times before — the uninterrupted minutes dad and his son got to spend together away from anything else competing for their attention.

It was a decade before cell phones took away almost all of our privacies, including the ones that allowed others to reach us most anywhere — and often for the most trivial of reasons. Even today, people who report experiences like these two men were about to have are frequently ridiculed for reporting what they saw, and have their lives turned upside down because of it. For that reason, we will call the dad “Steve” and his son “Julian.”

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The days were getting shorter, and the sun had set hours before. Because of the lateness of the hour, Steve decided that instead of taking the more conventional Interstate 40 East to U.S. 1 to Sanford route, they would follow an alternate track that will skirt the western edges of Jordan Lake because the miles were fewer and if luck was on their side, they’d make it home faster, too.

It’s a road Steve knows well, having traveled it many times for both work and pleasure. But nature was making it extra-special on this night, with an incredible display of beauty as the leaves were beginning to put on a show of colors that comes but once each as they headed south ultimately to an intersection with U.S. 1 at Pea Ridge Road, much closer to Sanford than the I-40 to I-440 route that would have taken them almost into Raleigh before turning southwest, adding extra time and miles.

As they came to a bridge that crossed one of the many fingers of Jordan Lake, the two noticed a large triangular object ahead of them, hovering out over the water. Steve slowed the truck to a near stop over the bridge, both of them frozen by what they were seeing. There was hardly a sound being emitted by the black triangle with white lights at each of the three corners. They didn’t perceive a threat, so they crossed the bridge and got out of the truck to observe it more closely.

A few minutes later, the approach of a large truck from the opposite direction resulted in the object moving closer to land and dropping slowly into a grove of trees. What made this action even more significant was that the object didn’t look for a clearing to just land. Instead, its matter seemed to merge with that of the trees, so that the two masses became one.

After the object disappeared into the darkness of the night, Steve and Julian returned to their pickup and continued their trip south toward Sanford. The hour was getting late and what they had just seen had their minds going full throttle, so Julian leaned against the seat and tried to get a few minutes of shuteye. But after seeing something that neither of them could explain, how could he begin to relax?

Steve was also trying to turn their strange experience of a few miles back over and over in his mind, hoping to make some sense of what it all meant. But that was the problem – nothing about it made any sense at all. Tomorrow was going to be as much of a long day for Steve as this one had been, and sleep was going to be as difficult for him as it would be for his son.

These thoughts continued to fly through his mind as the pickup approached yet another jetty of land that, like the first, connected two larger portions that had been saved from being flooded when the lake finished filling in 1982.

That’s when Julian looked out the back window of the truck and saw the same shape he’d seen earlier, appearing to follow them along the treeline. This time, there were two of the objects instead of just one.

Side by side, they maintained their positions as if they were holding formation for several minutes. Julian still believes they were being studied by the occupants of these objects, but he also believes that he and his dad were not perceived as a threat. Then, one of the objects began to turn slowly as it rose into the sky and moved off into the opposite direction.

And like the grand finale at a fireworks show on the Fourth of July, the most mind-blowing part came at the very end. Julian told me that the second of the two objects also rose slightly into the air of the nighttime sky and “blinked,” explaining that it was similar to what you might see on “Star Trek” when a ship goes into warp drive. The Enterprise is there, there’s a blink of bright light, and then it’s gone.

“That’s what happened,” he said.

It’s been more than 30 years since Steve and Julian’s experience on the shores of Jordan Lake, but the details remain fresh for them. And regardless of what you might believe about unexplained objects in the sky, what this father and son saw is still one hell of a story, particularly as you put it into context with reports that have been made by others who have seen some of the same things in this area over the last 75 years.

Huh? Sanford? A UFO Mecca?

There’s a certain stigma often applied to people who tell others they have seen something, often in the skies, that they can’t explain. Maybe it was a UFO. Maybe it was Sasquatch. How about the Brown Mountain Lights? Two things tie many of these stories together. First, they defy most attempts to explain them with science, and secondly, those of us who didn’t actually see the event are asked to accept them on blind faith, even if they contain elements our minds have been trained to believe simply cannot be true. They ask us to believe stories of objects that bend the laws of physics in ways that our minds can’t comprehend.

They push the boundaries of how we know things work in the universe, and so those who tell such stories without the obvious difficulties that the rest of us have in accepting them as being within the realm of believability — these storytellers often push us beyond our comfort zones, and because the universe tells us that such things cannot be that way, we must dismiss them and the stories they tell.

But maybe we shouldn’t do that so quickly. 

As Sanford continues to celebrate its sesquicentennial in 2024, almost any of us who live here could spend a couple of hours at the library and come away with a book report piece laying out some of the more familiar stories about Sanford’s history that many of us have heard before.

But maybe looking elsewhere can lead to a gem that few are familiar with.

One of Sanford’s unspoken legacies is that it’s a city with a surprising number of claims about unidentified flying objects, UFOs, UAPs — or whatever you might wish to call them. They’re tales fitting for an October edition of a monthly news publication, at a time of year when “spooky” is appropriate.

It’s important to know how The Rant chose to approach this story. We could have posted something to social media reading “if you’ve ever seen a UFO, call us up and tell us about it.” No doubt, our inbox would have been filled with messages, some credible, but many from drunk uncles full of fantastical and outlandish claims. 

As interesting as that might have been, that wasn’t what we were looking for.

First and foremost, this has been a data-driven search. As hard as it might be to believe, scientific studies on unexplained visual sightings have existed since the early 1950s. 

They have been cataloged and are digitally searchable, and that’s how we found the very first recorded sighting of a UFO in Sanford. 

In that same year, the U.S. Air Force began its investigation of the phenomena called Project Blue Book that ran through 1969. There is some crazy stuff in there. Believe it or not.

People who saw objects in the sky they couldn’t explain often contacted the FBI and CIA. Their public “reading rooms”, also digitally searchable, provided much information. By the late 1950s, a feeling of mistrust was building against the federal government, and citizen-organized groups like NUFORC (the National UFO Reporting Center) and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) emerged as alternative sources of information as people searched for answers to what they had seen. 

Because these groups are staffed by volunteers, their work of cataloging sightings is slow, but it also can be a source for rich details that include photographs and videos.

There are also interviews, admittedly few because the number of people who have seen something unexplainable and are willing to talk about it are contained in a small universe. But we located some people who believe the public has a need to know what they personally experienced, and so we tell their stories, verifying the details as far as we were able to do.

As with anything we publish, we trust our readers to make the ultimate judgment on the stories we share, as well as their value to the collective good.

Sanford’s role in gathering UFO data

It’s hard for most of us to think of Sanford as being a “hot spot” for UFO activity. We’d prefer instead to think that anything unexplained in the skies above us is more likely to be the latest technology arriving from Hollywood, bound for a television series or a movie theater.

But that’s not what history tells us. Those government files, some of them just now having been opened for research by the National Archives earlier in 2024, tell us that Sanford was among the first American cities to report a UFO encounter, and what’s more, it also played a critical role in the U.S. government’s decision in the early 1950’s to investigate what people were seeing in the skies and assess whether they were a threat to our national security.

Unexplained objects in the sky go back almost to the very beginnings of recorded time itself. The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, for example, tells of seeing a great wheel in the sky about 3,700 years ago. In almost every age and in every location where civilization flourished, there are reported accounts of things in the heavens that defy an easy explanation.

By World War II, as Allied planes were beginning to turn the tide against Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe over Europe, American and British pilots began to report encounters with unknown objects they labeled “foo fighters.” In 1947, two years after the war ended, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold said he observed nine objects in the sky near Mount Ranier in Washington State, all flying in close formation. It was the Arnold sighting that led to the birth of the term “flying saucer.”

Three years later, on July 19, 1952, in Washington, D.C., the evening radar operator at National Airport reported a dozen or more of these unidentified objects above the city. The Air Force’s brand-new F-86 Sabre jets were scrambled from nearby Air Force bases, but they find that they are no match for the maneuverability and speed of what they face over the nation’s capital. A nearly identical event happens again over the capital on the following Saturday evening, and with the same result.

By the time of the second D.C. encounter, other reports were coming in from a few other locations up and down the East Coast. One of those accounts was filed by a farmer on the outskirts of Sanford, who claimed to have seen a bright light or object holding position over his field. The farmer described the object as a metallic, disc-shaped craft that hovered silently over his field for almost a full minute before moving away at a high speed.

This sighting was reported by the farmer to one of the state’s two North Carolina Senators in Washington, Willis D. Smith. Smith’s papers were donated to Duke University after his death, and among the records of his telephone calls received on July 23, 1952, is a note of a call from a person who did not give his name, just that he was a farmer from Sanford who gave the details reported here.

The note contained a handwritten notation at the bottom, apparently from Senator Smith to his secretary, to “set up mtg (meeting) with Finletr.” Thomas K. Finletter was Secretary of the Air Force at the time, and the Senator’s calendar indicates that the two met on the afternoon of July 29. These reports were taken seriously due to the Cold War context, where any unidentified aerial phenomena were of significant interest to national security. The 1952 UFO incident in D.C. included numerous sightings of similar objects across the country like the one in Sanford, leading to widespread media coverage and public fascination.

Months later, the Air Force announced it was opening an official investigation into the nature of the sightings being reported across the country, largely as part of an effort to determine whether they constituted a threat to national security. That investigation, known as Project Blue Book, looked at more than 12,500 sightings through December of 1969. Of that number, 701 sightings — including the one reported by the farmer over his field in Sanford — remained unexplained.

Sightings from the 1960s through 2024

As the number of sightings increased during the period from the 1960s through the 1980s, several residents in the Sanford area claimed to have seen peculiar objects in the sky that did not look like conventional aircraft or follow flight patterns typical of the ways airplanes of that time period behaved. In 1963, a class of school children and their teacher outside on the playground reported seeing a saucer-shaped craft hovering over a neighboring field just before flew away at an astounding speed. A group of early UFO researchers came to the city from Raleigh to investigate this report.

Another group also came from Raleigh to talk to motorists who had traveled along U.S. 1 in the spring of 1975. They each had seen a large, glowing object that seemed to follow their cars for several miles toward Sanford before suddenly disappearing. This report was unique in the period. None of the motorists had been acquainted with the others before the day of the incident. 

They were also unanimous in their report of the object having a dome-shaped top and a light that seemed to pulse on and off. A loud humming noise could be heard near the object as it got closer, and the witnesses also reported feeling disoriented from their encounter. Several of them filed reports with the Lee County Sheriff’s Office, but there is no documentation on any conclusion that may have been reached.

In 1996, a group of people who were camping just outside the city limits north of Sanford saw a series of bright orbs in the night sky that formed triangular shapes, not unlike what Steve and Julian had seen less than ten miles north of their position four years earlier. The objects moved in unison before disappearing one by one. 

Investigators from MUFON were brought in to interview the witnesses and while no definitive conclusions were reached, the triangular objects seen by those campers in 1996 remain unexplained.

As digital cameras and camcorders came into vogue in the early 2000s, the number of UFO sightings that could be documented by photographs and videos increased dramatically. The MUFON files contain one of the more important sightings from anywhere across America, when a Sanford resident captured both digital images and video of a series of red and blue lights that moved in erratic patterns above his property in 2004 that could not be attributed to known aircraft. The footage was submitted to MUFON for investigation, and investigators there declared it to be “unexplainable by conventional means.” 

This case was among those that moved Sanford’s status to a UFO hotspot in North Carolina.

One of the more interesting things about these sorts of reports is that they show no signs of slowing down. Just as the COVID-19 pandemic got underway in 2020, a family living on the outskirts of Sanford reported encounters with an unknown object over several nights. They described a cigar-shaped craft that seemed to be the source of a low-frequency hum, and this family came to believe over the course of these evenings that the object was observing their property. Again, MUFON was called to investigate but no definitive explanation could be reached.

And Sanfordians were not restricted to being at home in Lee County to encountering something in the sky they could not explain. Noah Gunter, who now works with the airplanes that come and go at the Raleigh Executive Jetport just outside Sanford, was 15 when he was vacationing with family at Surf City. He was up early one morning and looking out the kitchen window as he was cooking breakfast.

Suddenly, he saw an object that had just appeared outside his window and over the window.

“It was a metallic disc, maybe a hundred feet wide, and it seemed like it was miles off the coast,” he said. “It was moving slightly back and forth, from one side to the other. It was reflecting the light of the sun, so I felt certain that it was metallic. It just hung there for 15 or 20 minutes, then it shot straight up into the sky and out of sight.”

Sightings by pilots over and near Sanford

Whether it’s MUFON, NUFORC, NICAP or some other group that looks into these events, investigators are always most anxious to talk to pilots who have seen things in the sky that they can’t explain. Pilots are trained to be observers of all that is around them. Many commercial and private pilots got their initial cockpit training from the military, and these folks have seen almost anything and everything there is to see that is moving in the air above, below, or around them.

In doing research over the summer in preparation for this story, I spent many, many hours reading through reports of the strange and weird over the skies above Sanford that were submitted by pilots when they returned to the ground. It’s really important to remember here the risks that pilots were taking by reporting what they saw. Until recently, a pilot could be laughed out of the cockpit or declared unhinged for telling what they saw. In the 1940s and 1950s, doing so could equal the end of a pilot’s career.

Making such a report in that era would almost have been an act of desperation by a professional pilot who was so concerned for his colleagues and his country’s security that he would risk his own career to report what he saw. Here are just a few excerpts of some of these reports made by both commercial and military in the skies above or near Sanford during that era:

October 23, 1949 – 4:38 p.m. Flying over Sanford in his P-47 high altitude fighter aircraft, U.S. Naval Reserve Lt. Cdr. Frederick Carr spots a round, white shining object at 25,000 feet and traveling southwest at a speed the P-47 cannot begin to match. Though he immediately gave chase, Carr can only dream of catching up and his visibility of the object was less than 15 seconds.

December 29, 1949 – approximately 5:00 p.m. Four military pilots on a training mission take the long loop from Columbia, South Carolina to Greensboro in their light training planes see a blimp-shaped object in the skies over the western fringes of Sanford. The training aircraft attempt to keep up with the object, but the object will only allow the trainees to keep up for so long. About a minute after rendezvousing with the object, it immediately accelerates and out distances the new pilots at high speed.

October 15, 1950 – Over Sanford and crossing into Pope AFB – 4:20 p.m. Miami Airlines Pilot Captain George Woodward and Co-Pilot Williams Bradsley, en route from Raleigh to Miami in a DC-3, observe four “shiny-domed discs” about 100 feet in size each and about 25 feet apart approximately five miles ahead of them traveling in a straight line. 

Captain Woodward gives pursuit, and the objects slow and decrease their altitude before leaving “in a burst of speed.” On the ground, retired Army Captain Harvey Daniel sees an object identical to the one observed by the Miami Airlines pilots. Daniels sees the object for about 10 seconds before it, too, speeds off toward the northwest. If one were to draw straight lines between the objects at the times they were observed, those lines would intersect near the point where the Deep River empties into the Cape Fear River.

October 23, 1950 – 12:42 p.m. One year to the day since Carr’s encounter, ex-USAF pilot Frank Risher is driving on U.S. 421 South. He has passed Bonlee and is less than 7 minutes northwest of Sanford. He sees what appears to be an aluminum object about 2 miles ahead of him, hanging below overcast clouds at about 700 feet above the ground. The object is cigar-shaped and about 100 feet in length, with three to four portholes on each side. 

It hovers above him for about 35 seconds and drifts upward, back into the thick cloud cover and disappears.

Some 75 years after some of these events, the names of some of the pilots involved in these incidents remain classified. The Air Force considers their release too great a risk for national security.

This story could have been much longer. There are reports of four objects seen in and around Broadway over the past 20 years that I didn’t get to here, and it’s simply because this article was about what has happened in Sanford.

I didn’t stop to count the number of reports of objects seen near Fort Liberty (Bragg). There were easily a hundred or more, and those are just the ones reported by civilians living on or near the base. The Fort has never been known as a site for the testing of experimental aircraft, but there are a small handful of reports involving aircraft being seen there that can give you what my wife calls the “weebee jeebees.” If those things are not ours, then they belong to the Russians, the Chinese, or from a point of origin somewhere outside this solar system. Or they aren’t what they appeared to be at all.

When Sanford’s Sesquicentennial Year winds down, those of us who call Brick City home can hold our heads high for yet another reason. If the reports represent ET first began making his visits to the Third Rock from the Sun (a big if, of course), Sanford was one of the first places he wanted to visit.