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This article was published in the daily newspaper The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on October 11, 1966.
By JOHN DE GROOT
Beacon Journal Staff Writer
AKRON, Ohio (AP). —- In his ruined world of loneliness and twisted nightmares, Dale Spaur wonders whether the chase will ever end.
It began six months ago with seven steps to hell and a flying saucer.
In the pre-dawn hours of a gentle April 17 morning, Sheriff's Deputy Spaur of Portage County chased a flying saucer 86 miles.
Now the strange craft is chasing him.
And he is hiding from it – a bearded stranger peering past the limp curtains of a tiny motel room in Solon, Ohio.
He no longer is a deputy sheriff. His marriage is shattered.
He walks three miles to an $80-a-week painter's job. His motel room costs $60 a week. The court has ordered him to pay his wife $20 a week for the support of his two children.
That leaves Dale Spaur exactly nothing.
The flying saucer did it.
"If I could change all that I have done in my life," he said, "I would change just one thing. And that would be the night we chased that damn thing. That saucer."
Four other officers took part in the April drama:
Police Chief Gerald Buchert of Mantua, Ohio, saw the craft and photographed it. The pictures turned out badly.
Special Deputy W. L. Neff rode with Spaur during the chase.
Patrolman Frank Panzanella saw the chase end in Conway, Pa., where he works. He saw the saucer.
H. Wayne Huston was a police officer in East Palestine, Ohio. Several months after the saucer passed above him in the night, he resigned, going to Seattle, Wash., to drive a bus.
None of them will talk about the incident today.
Now Spaur relives the chase each night in a nightmare. He awakens... shivering and wet. Alone in his motel room.
As for filmmaker Steven Spielberg, he would benefit much better from the events to which these police officers were the witnesses, by usint their story in his blockbuster movue "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" which delighted huge crowds who never actually heard of Dale Spaur and the Portage county sighting.
