The Charleston area has a stellar history with UFO sightings. After digging through the newspaper’s archives, we’ve found some fascinating stories that are too good to keep to ourselves.
Every Thursday, we will do just that: Dig through the archives to bring you entertaining, meaningful and interesting stories from our past.
Some (like this one) should make you laugh.
Others (we hope) will make you think.
For this first installment of “To the Archives!” we’re thinking big — out of this world big.
Here are a few of the interactions the Lowcountry has had with the extraterrestrial.
1973: What’s that on the horizon?
Ten callers reported seeing a UFO to both police and The News and Courier on Sept. 30, 1973.
According to an Oct. 1, 1973 article in The News and Courier, the object appeared to be the size of a large star and could be seen with the naked eye, even though members of the City Fire Department had a telescope trained on the object.
James Howard, a firefighter, told the newspaper that the object started out higher in the sky before it moved steadily northward. He also said it looked bright with red and green lights blinking around.
The best details about the event would come later in a 1986 article published in the Feb. 2, 1986 edition of The News and Courier/The Evening Post.
One of the reporters who was tasked with covering the sighting in 1973 said they saw it, too.
“The reporter didn’t say whether he thought spacemen were inside,” the 1986 article said.
1977-1978: Beamed up
Wedged alongside letters published in the May 31, 1978 edition of the Charleston News and Courier was a letter unlike the rest.
A North Charleston mechanic by the name of William J. Hermann said he had beef with an article written about UFOs. The reason why, he wrote, was because he believed they were real.
He also sent in a picture.
A profile of Hermann the following year would go on to tell just how intense his experience had been.
Hermann told the newspaper that he was abducted by aliens not once, but twice. He claimed both incidents happened between October 1977 and March 1978.
“Their skin was the color of a marshmallow. Their eyes were long and dark with a brown iris. Their heads looked like overgrown human fetuses with no ears or hair. I heard a voice telling me to have no fear...” Hermann said.
Hermann said he did not remember the first incident until extraterrestrials sent him a strange-looking metal bar with the letters “MAN” on it. Only then, he said, did he remember the March 1978 abduction
“I’m the token UFO guy,” Hermann told The Post and Courier in 1981.
But he wouldn’t want that title for long.
Two years later, he washed his hands of all of it when he wrote a letter to the editor. He called the UFO phenomena “satanic in nature, demonic in origin.”
1989: ‘It was a monstrous looking thing’
On a later summer night in 1989, seven people saw something fly across the sky while they were standing in a parking lot near Rivers Avenue and Remount Road
At first, they thought it was a plane.
Then, they weren’t so sure.
A July 17, 1989 article published in The Post and Courier describes the flying object:
“It was a dark shapeless object 300-500 feet long, and fiery white and yellow sparks were shooting out of what seemed to be its tail end. Its front end appeared to be glowing.
It didn’t have any other lights or windows. It was about 1,500 feet in the air, moving slowly, and had just passed soundlessly above them from north to south.”
When Bessie Dixon asked what it was, no one could answer her question.
The object that went soaring across the sky was so large that it was seen streaking across the sky in Myrtle Beach.
Leo Martin told The Post and Courier by phone that he had never seen anything like it.
“I looked up and saw an enormous ball of fire with a tremendous tail. I’m former Air Force and have never seen anything like that.”
Martin also took a video of the incident, and sold the footage to ABC for an undisclosed price.
Is there something you want us to look up in our archives? Let us know. Send us message on Snapchat at @postandcourier, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. You can also send an email directly to Caitlin Byrd at cbyrd@postandcourier.com.
Reach Caitlin Byrd at 937-5590 or follow her on Twitter at @MaryCaitlinByrd.


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