One of the reasons this particular episode maintained its integrity among all the myriad wide-eyed UFO reports of the 70s, is because it involved a military helicopter flown by sober men of impeccable character, who filed their experience into the public press before anyone in official channels could keep it quiet.
The captain of the helicopter told his tale to a Cleveland reporter almost immediately, and subsequently relayed it to a national television audience on the Dick Cavett Show.
He ultimately made a report of his time in the sky over Charles Mill Lake to the United Nations. He told the Special Political Committee of the U.N., “As a result of my experience, I am convinced this object was real and that these types of incidents should require a thorough investigation.”
There were four earnest and sober young men in uniform who all signed their names to witness the October 18, 1974 close encounter in the sky over Richland County. (A Helicopter-UFO Encounter Over Ohio by Jennie Zeidman, 1979)
The Helicopter
The captain of the helicopter that night was Larry Coyne, and his name is often used as a reference to the event, which is known as the ‘Coyne Incident’ or the ‘Mansfield Encounter.’
It was around 11 p.m. when the U.S. Army Reserve ‘huey’ passed over Richland County, flying from Columbus to Cleveland. There were four enlisted men aboard, and one of them casually mentioned to the captain that he could see a red light in the distance that was oddly out of place.
Within moments it became obvious that the odd light was in motion, and that it was moving very quickly toward the helicopter on a collision course. The captain took immediate evasive action, diving his aircraft out of the path of the unidentified object that was closing at a terrific speed.
Suddenly the object stopped still in mid-air, right in front and above them.
It cast a spotlight on them that was brilliant green in color, and paused for a moment to scan the military boys, who were staring back wide-eyed and amazed.
And then it buzzed off over Mansfield.
When the men in uniform stopped freaking out they realized their helicopter was 2,000 feet higher in the sky than it should be, and that somehow during their encounter the craft had lifted far above its normal flight path, in spite of the evasive dive it had undertaken.
They needed fuel but rather than drop in at the Mansfield air base for a fill-up as originally intended, they pealed out for Cleveland and arrived there with the gas gauge on empty. The pilot stated he ‘was so frightened that he wanted to leave the area immediately.’
(A Helicopter-UFO Encounter Over Ohio by Jennie Zeidman, 1979)
Two of the men in the helicopter independently sketched the UFO they saw, and both drawings are remarkably similar. (A Helicopter-UFO Encounter Over Ohio by Jennie Zeidman, 1979)
The Mansfield Encounter has been referenced in dozens of UFO books during the last four decades, but the first published accounts other than newspaper coverage, came in these two volumes from 1978 and 1979.
Witnesses
One of the reasons why the Mansfield Encounter remains so intriguing is because the sighting was corroborated by witnesses on the ground.
Driving along Ohio 430 that night, a mother and her children were so astonished by the lights in the sky that they pulled over to watch.
Commenting on the brilliant green illumination shining down around them, the mother said, “I don’t know if I can describe the color of the light. It was real, real bright and absolutely beautiful. It was wonderful to see, but yet it was also very frightening. I wanted the kids back in the car, to get home as fast as possible. It scared me.”
Illustration from Fate Magazine, August 1978.
The witnesses who watched the helicopter/UFO encounter were pulled off the road on Rt. 430 where the road bridges Charles Mill Lake, about 2 miles from the I-71/Rt 30 interchange.
The [helicopter] crew won the National Enquirer Blue Ribbon Scientific Panel’s $5000 award for “the most scientific and valuable report of 1973.”
And not long afterwards Aviation Week & Space Technology editor Philip Klass (who declares flatly that he never found a UFO case he couldn’t solve) announced that his “rigorous investigation” of the case had determined that the object was merely “a fireball of the Orionid meteor shower.”
The Friendly Skies
If you were paying attention in 1973, the headlines in the papers and the evening news on television were full of UFO sightings all over the country the entire year. Even the Governor of Ohio went on record as having spotted one; and Walter Cronkite relayed the news of the Governor’s revelation on Oct. 17—the evening before Mansfield skies hosted its own news-making moment.
Everyone started watching the night sky, and it was during these evenings of ripe opportunity that the firemen of Mansfield Fire Department No. 1 got the inspiration to launch their own unidentified flying object.
There was a tank of helium in their garage on South Walnut Street that they had been using to fill Smokey-the-Bear balloons for kids, so they created and inflated their own makeshift weather-balloon-like apparatus with latex gloves.
The young men took parts from a fire department flashlight and mounted them on metallic pie pans, and when the lit apparatus was suspended from their lighter-than-air unidentifiable object it created ‘an eerie glow.’
It was a clear night and very still, and when the illuminated craft launched from the Municipal Building it lifted slowly over the north end of the city and wafted leisurely out to the airport.
After sightings of their UFO made headlines in the News Journal the next day with 911 calls, City cops, County Sheriffs and State Patrol involvement, the MFD guys knew that if they wanted to keep their jobs they needed to maintain absolute silence about their prank.
They are all retired now though, and in retrospect wish they had taken pictures…especially at the airport where they retrieved pieces of the UFO at the crash site. Holding the tin pie pans ‘it looked like the Army at Roswell…more or less.’
The Truth is Out There
Since the 1970s Richland County has never lacked for sightings of weird things in the night sky. I make note of them all.
My favorite is the old guy in the 1980s who used to go up on Mt. Jeez every week because it was easier for the UFOs to contact him there: to pass along to him insights and specifications for his inventions.
I have collected tales from Shiloh and Shelby to Palmyra and Pinhook, of unexplained things hovering in the air, dashing across the sky, flashing in the woods, or lounging in the parking lot.
I am a believer, and I am a skeptic. Mostly I’m just fascinated, and I love a good story. The UFO story I tell most often is the one from the night of Oct. 18, 1973 because you don’t have to believe me or take my word for it—you can look it up yourself.
Watch for yourself this interview with Coyne and his crew excerpted from the 1979 documentary UFOs: It Has Begun.
The author has obtained the only known photograph of the October 18, 1973 Mansfield Encounter, clearly taken from the UFO. Copies are available at a modest price.
