This is actually a pretty famous UFO case.
“The 1988 U.S. Coast Guard Encounter with a UFO is one of the top 12 Government Documents That Take UFOs Seriously” – Richard Dolan
Coast Guard personnel responding to citizen reports of unusual aerial activity over Lake Erie on March 4, 1988, witnessed classic UFOs near Eastlake, OH. Sheila and Henry Baker were driving home with their three children about 8:35 P.M., after taking them out to dinner, and were almost home. As they neared the waterfront, Sheila noticed something hovering over the lake; they drove down to the beach to investigate and got out of the car. The moon was bright, and there was ice on the lake; Sheila could hear it cracking like claps of thunder.
Plainly visible was a huge, gunmetal gray, football-shaped, silent object rocking back and forth, blinding white light emanating from both ends. Then the object began moving, swinging one end toward the shore and descending. The Bakers became frightened, ran back to their car, and fled. When they got home, the object was still visible from a window facing the lake. Sheila hid the children in a closet, fearing that the thing might come and get them.
The object moved out over the ice and continued to descend, with red and blue lights now flashing in sequence along its lower edge. Sheila called the Eastlake police to report a UFO, and after several referrals, with no one expressing much interest, was told that unusual activity over the lake would be the responsibility of the Coast Guard. Suddenly five or six bright yellow triangular objects shot out of the center of the large object and began darting around independently (satellite objects). Once they stopped and hovered point up around the parent object, then sped away to the north, turned east, then inland toward the Perry nuclear power plant.
At this point Sheila called the Coast Guard, which sent a team to their house to investigate. Seaman James Power and Petty Officer John Knaub arrived towing a Boston Whaler (a seaworthy boat) just in case. They told the Bakers that they had seen some lights over the lake from Fairport Harbor and thought they were flares, maybe fishermen trapped out on the ice. However, when Sheila pointed to the main craft and some of the triangular objects still zipping around it, the men drove closer to the lake to investigate, accompanied by the Bakers. At the lakefront they could hear the ice rumbling and roaring.
In their incident report sent later by teletype to Coast Guard headquarters in Detroit, MI, the men were quoted as saying that “the ice was cracking and moving abnormal amounts as the object came closer to it.”
Power and Knaub gave a running report on what they were seeing to their base via the two-way radio in their Chevy Suburban. The window was down, and the Bakers overheard them saying words to the effect: “Be advised the object appears to be landing on the lake . . .
There are other objects moving around it. Be advised these smaller objects are going at high rates of speed. There are no engine noises and they are very, very low.”
Abruptly one of the triangles zoomed straight toward the Coast Guard vehicle, a blur of light, then veered east, straight up, and came down beside the parent object. Two witnesses in separate locations also reported seeing the triangles. Cindy Hale was walking her dog when she noticed a triangular object hovering overhead, and her dog began to whine and cower (animal reactions). She took the dog indoors and came back out to watch. The triangle flashed a series of multicolored lights, then accelerated and was gone without making a sound (hover-acceleration).
Tim Keck was using his astronomical telescope when one of the triangles caught his eye. He had a cheap throwaway camera with him and snapped a picture of the object before it flew away over the horizon. The photograph was analyzed by optical physicist Bruce Maccabee, who considered it to be a legitimate.
Here is the actual Coast Guard UFO Report…

I want to bring the reader to the attention of a testimony from a witness of the ’1988 Coast Guard Lake Erie Sighting’, Sheila Baker. She is mentioned in the article above, but there is a longer, quite rare interview with her as well that I think we need to take a look at, because it’s so typical for those ‘Lake Erie Sightings’. The interview was done by Richard P. Dell’Aquila and Dale B. Wedge. Unfortunately, this interview is not very known in the mainstream media and in the UFO community, although it’s such a famous case, so I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to include it here. These two witnesses, I believe stick holes in all the official denials and unrealistic explanations to the 1988 incident.[4]
“On March 26, 1988, two civilian witnesses to the Eastlake UFOs (W1 and her husband W2) who were on the beach with the Coast Guard March 4, 1988 were interviewed. The following is a partial transcript of that interview, conducted by Dale Wedge (DW) and Rick Dell’Aquila (RD). Several other witnesses have also been interviewed and photographic evidence has been obtained. To date, however , the Coast Guard has refused further information or interviews of its personnel concerning the UFO sighting that night near the CEI electric power plant. The investigation continues.
RD …Please tell us what happened in your own words.
W1 We were coming home (on March 4, 1988) and I saw something over the lake…and it wasn’t moving and I had my husband go down the street and I said, “Go down to the beach because I’m telling you there is something out there.” He kept laughing at me. I said I was serious and we went down there. We got out of the car and walked to the beach. I had left the kids in the car and you could see it. It looked almost like the shape of a blimp and had lights on both sides. One end was brighter and the other end was a little bit dimmer, but one end flashed. It wasn’t a constant light that was on. It seemed to rock a little bit–you could just see it rocking back and forth. It hovered and didn’t make any noise. The ice was cracking really bad and the ice down here doesn’t crack like that. It was making like–it was rumbling and cracking it was real, real loud. There were no animals barking or nothing. Around here we have a lot of dogs and that was surprising because you always hear the dogs out. There were no animals–just the real loud noise out of the lake. We were standing on the beach and my husband and I were looking at this thing. It started to turn and I thought–you know how you get really eerie feelings? I said to myself there i s something up there. You could see it was a ship or something because you could see there was a gray line like a football kind of thing in the middle, but you couldn’t really see it. You could just see it was there. Do you understand what I’m saying?
RD We are going to ask you to draw a sketch in a while.
W1 You could see the whole thing, but not real well. You could see there was a middle to it. We stayed and we watched it for a while…(interview interrupted by phone call).
DW Okay, we are back on. We had a phone call interruption.
W1 …Okay, we sat down at the beach and while we were watching this I had the kids in the car and I was getting kind of “weirded-out” you know, because you hear about these things, but you never really believe it until you see them. It started to turn toward us. It was coming in closer to land and beacuse my kids were in the car, I didn’t want to stay down at the beach, because you never know what’s going to happen or if it was going to come down to get us or whatever.
RD In other words, you were concerned for your safety?
W1 Yeah, because it was coming closer to us. You could see…it seemed like it knew we were there. We were the only ones down there at the time and I was getting really nervous. I told my husband, “You know, we’ve got two kids in the car. Let’s get them home and safe so we don’t have to worry about anything.” He said okay, so we got the kids back to the house and I put them in their room and I locked the door because I had a real eerie feeling, you know after we left there. We were down there a while looking at it and we came home to watch it from our living room.
RD When you say “we”–who else was there with you?
W1 My husband and my kids. So I was looking at it from here and I said to my husband, “Well, maybe I’m nuts, I don’t know, but let’s call Sue,” who lives across the street, “and see if she sees the same thing that we do.” So I did, I called he r and her and her son went outside and they saw the same thing and we kept hearing this noise at the lake and that really scared us because, like I said, the lake doesn’t make noises like that. We watched it most of the evening and when it started to come down, we all got real curious and we all went back down. Sue drove down to the beach and she saw it with her son and her husband thinks she’s totally “cracked-up.” (Laughter.) But they all did. Everybody thinks, you know, we didn’t see what we did. So now we get down there and the thing’s starting to land. You co uld see like red and blue lights and they said they were planets and gasses and nonsense like that, but they were actual lights starting to flutter. But before this, while it was still in the sky, there were like little triangle “planes”, about, there were, we counted about five–we weren’t sure if there were five or six, but we counted five of them that were running back and forth. They were going up and down, like hovering. They didn’t make any noise, but they were going REALLY fast across the sky and by this time the Coast Guard was down there. I had called the Coast Guard, I would say at least twelve times and they kept telling me, “Well, your crazy and nothing’s wrong…(Phone call interruption).
DW Pause for phone call.
DW Okay, we’re back on.
W1 So now what had happened was these planes were like, looked like they had come out of it, because they came out of nowhere. We saw them come out…I don’t know if it was on the side or on the front of it, but you could tell they ca me out of it because they were real little. They looked like little yellow triangles. They were real bright and went super, super fast.
They went up and down like this, instead of, you know how a plane goes this way? Well, they were going up and down and like diagonally at it and they were hovering around it and then they started shooting out toward the lake and this time the Coast Guard saw all this because that’s when they sent their people out when these little planes started appearing. And w hen they g ot down here, they saw these things and they were coming real close to the coastline. That’s when these kids were getting scared.
RD When you say “kids,” do you mean Coast Guard personnel?
W1 Yeah, they were young boys. They were real scared and we got REALLY scared because we were right down on the beach there and we figured the coastline that would be it. We were afraid they would attack their truck, because their truck had lights on it. So w e told them, “Turn off your lights.” Because the more they kept coming closer and closer to the lights of the truck, because the truck was parked on the hill. There’s like a little hill over there. They could see the lights, because they seemed to be coming at the lights. And so we had them shut their lights off because we were scared. You never know what was going to go on. We didn’t know what was in these ships or planes or whatever they were because we couldn’t tell, but I’ve never seen a yellow triangle fly around the sky.
RD It was yellow?
W1 Yeah. Bright, REAL BRIGHT. It looked like a light. That’s what it looked like. It looked like a bright light. You know how a car light you’d have? It looked just like that, but it glowed. It was yellow.
RD Was there any portion of it that was brighter than any other portion of it?
W1 No. It was all real bright.
RD Just one solid, bright light?
W1 Yeah, little bright triangles. You know like the little glider models you get for your kids? There in triangles. You make paper airplanes…Like that shape? That’s exactly what they were, and they were solid. They weren’t…it didn’t have wings or anything else.
RD Was it even-sided? All three sides of equal length?
W1 No, no, it was more pointed like that (gesturing).
RD Okay.
W1 It was exactly like that (forming triangle with her fingers). The front was more pointy. How’s that? I flunked geometry by the way.
RD Okay.
W1 But it was more pointy, almost like the tip of an arrow.
RD Okay, so i n other words, the two sides were longer…
W1 Were longer than the base…I was wondering why you were laughing at me.
RD We’re not laughing at you.
DW No. We’re not.
(Wedge and Dell’Aquila had reacted to the fact that the triangular objects described by W1 were identical to those described by other independent witnesses that night and identical to the bright yellow triangular object one witness photographed.)
W1 Okay. They were all solid bright light. There was no part of it that was darker than others. We saw it real close down at the shoreline. But when they started coming at this thing and they went back into it, too, we thought maybe it disappeared over the lake. Well, here they had gone, shooting out over the lake and coming, then all of a sudden we saw them about an hour later, coming back REALLY fast, and they came right into that ship.
RD Did you see anything open up on the ship, a door or anything like that?
W1 No, but they went right into it because they went rig ht between the lights, so it had to be an opening on the side of it, because they went right into it. They came up and then they went right into it.
RD Were you able to observe which direction they left.
W1 They went out that way, toward Canada…they went east too, this way. But none of them went that way, toward Cleveland. They all went this way.
RD Did any of them go south or southeast?
W1 No. They stayed over the lake…they went east and north toward Canada, and that’s where basically they stayed. When you saw them shooting out, it was just almost right over land and we had seen them come out and said to my husband,” What in the world is that?” He was just laughing. He said, “You’re just…” and he got, you know, he goes, “Yeah, sure, I’m going to tell my mother we were sitting home watching UFOs tonight.” But, that’s what happened. They were there and then we saw them like I said, about an hour later, come back in the same direction they came in, and they all went right back into the thing, one at a time, too. It wasn’t like they all swooped down on it and went back into it. They went back in it one at a time, and then the ship seemed to land in the lake. It was about maybe an hour difference, an hour lapse. The ship started setting down on Lake Erie. That’s when all these colored lights started coming on when it sat down. You could see the lights as it sat down on the lake, because it was all ice. As soon as it landed, about five minutes later after it landed, you coul d still see it, the red and the yellow lights and the blue lights, running around the bottom on the lake, because it was a clear night, it was beautiful. Then as soon as all the lights went out on it, the lake stopped cracking. Everything got dead silent. There wasn’t animals–nothing. Everything got totally quiet. That was it.
DW Can you give us a time, approximate time?
RD When did you first see it?
W1 About six. I think it was about six. My husband said it was later but I don’t think so, because it was just getting dark.
DW It doesn’t get dark until about 6:30
W1 Okay, then maybe it was a little later, about 6:30 or 7:00 P.M. It wasn’t exactly dark, but it wasn’t light out. It was like dusk, almost, where it’s just starting to get dark.
RD When did you last observe it?
W1 I’d say about 11:30 P.M.
RD You were down there for 4-1/2 to 5 hours?
W1 No. We came back up to the house and watched it. When it started to set, we went back down.
RD I see. At the same time, were you able to observe any of the objects in the sky that you would recognize?
W1 Oh, yeah, absolutely because we were there, we kept looking at them and looking at them to see, you know, we were curious. Even from the house, when it started moving in-land, you could see, you know, what it was if you looked real close.
RD Where was the moon for example?
W1 The moon?
RD Yeah. Was it out?
W1 Yeah, the re were moon, the stars were beautiful. All the stars were out.
RD Was it a clear night?
W1 Yeah. it was real clear.
RD Did you notice where the planets were?
W1 The planets that they told me this was?
RD Well, the planets.
W1 I didn’t really…we weren’t looking for the planets, but they would have been behind it, and farther off.
RD Is there any question in your mind that what you were looking at was something that you should have recognized, like the planets or…?