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This article was published in the daily newspaper The Crescent-News, of Defiance, Ohio, on Tuesday, October 16, 1973.
PINE, la. (UPI) - Sheriff's deputies chased five orange-reddish flying objects 12 miles through the Louisiana piney woods late Monday night and early today.
Deputy Michael Moore said the ships almost attacked a police car.
"One of our deputies was scared pretty bad," Moore said from the Washington Parish Sheriff's Department. "He turned on his red lights, and they came down at his patrol car. He turned them off and they just vanished like in a cloud."
Moore said the ships, reported 150 miles northwest of similar sightings at Pascagoula, Miss., "come right down at you and then vanish above the treetops."
Moore said several deputies were out chasing the ships and one of the men tried to take pictures.
"Our deputies spotted five of them, and a bunch of witnesses saw them too," he said.
In another sighting reported near Slidell, across lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, Lloyd Mercier said he was driving home when he saw an object "approximately 15 or 20 feet in diameter and it had a streak about a foot wide straight through the middle.
"I was driving and I said, 'That can't be the moon, it's too large to be the moon.'
"I'd say it was approximately 125 to 200 feet in the air and gradually it disappeared. It took five to six minutes.
"All I could see was a red glow. It looked like it came straight out of the water" of Lake Pontchartrain," he said. "I've seen it tonight with my own natural eyes. I have to believe what I see. It was no moon and it was no balloon, and it was no ship."
