7310

7310

Sierra Sun

Serving the communities of ... Incline Village - Crystal Bay - Brockway - Kings Beach - Tahoe City - Tahoe Park - Tahoe Pines - Homewood - Tahoma - Meeks Bay - Squaw Valley

VOL. 105-NO. 50 Established 1869 TRUCKEE, CALIFORNIA, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 1973

# UFO sightings reported in Tahoe-Truckee area

If indeed "flying saucers" are hovering over the skies of Northern California, they may have paid a visit to Lake Tahoe, according to several local residents. At 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, Pete Werbel of Truckee may have seen the most astounding unidentified flying object ever witnessed over Tahoe skies.

Werbel admits to having scanned the skies unsuccessfully many times in hopes of sighting an UFO. But Tuesday night, standing on Bridge St., he glanced up to see an orange ball of fire tagged with a bluish orange tail.

"It lay very slow on the horizon and probably was a couple hundred miles away, but "I could see it more distinctly than any other stars because of its size."

In the moments it took to call a friend, it disintegrated in what appeared to be an explosion. The tail evaporated, the orange ball splintered into little clusters. Then it disappeared.

The object appeared to be about the size of an Apollo rocket, said Werbel, and it gave the impression of being some such object. Werbel saw the object in the western sky. It was moving south to north he said, and could have been a meteor, or more likely, a rocket reentering the atmosphere.

"I was coming home from North Shore with my husband Sunday night," said a South Tahoe resident who preferred to remain anonymous, "and suddenly this bright green thing flashed across the sky.

"It looked like a big football," she continued, "and it just flew straight and suddenly landed somewhere south of us. I wasn't going to say anything about it, but when I read in the Tribune that people had seen something similar in San Francisco, I thought I had better call you."

And in Zephyr Cove, a sheriff's spokesman said the sub-station received a call last night "from a man who claimed he saw a flying object on Spooner Summit which had fire coming out of it."

The caller was advised to contact the South Tahoe Airport but apparently decided against it as the airport received no calls.

A nation-wide survey by United Press International Thursday morning reported a wave of UFO sightings from coast-to-coast Wednesday. But a scientist, Arthur Pursell, president of the Tulare Astronomical Association, said an exploding meteor was responsible for the sightings on Northern California.

Meantime, law enforcement offices in the Truckee-North Tahoe area had several calls from citizens between about 10 and 10:30 p.m. Thursday. Callers reported something that appeared to be a burning plane down in the Squaw Peak or Alpine Meadows areas. An officer of the Placer County sheriff's substation went into the Alpine Meadows area with a citizen informant without finding anything, a spokesman at the substation reported. A private plane from Truckee-Tahoe Airport flew Tuesday night over the Alpine Meadows Granite Chief, Desolation Valley and Donner Lake areas without seeing a reported object.

And while one psychiatrist has called most of the sightings "fantasy," Dr. J. Allen Hynek, chairman of Northwestern's astronomy department, has called for a government agency to investigate UFO reports which "could set the stage for a panic situation" if they continue to multiply.

"At least somebody should keep track of what is going on here--make a record of the reports and plot them on a map," Hynek said. "I wouldn't mind being sort of a Ralph Nader for UFOs for a while."