UFOs in the daily Press:

Family saw silver discs zipping through Utah's skies

By Deseret News, Zack Van Eyck, Staff Writer

Roswell, N.M., is the UFO capital of the world this week, all because of an event the U.S. government says never happened.

Imagine what Utah would be like if a small plane piloted by Earl "Skip" Page had collided with a UFO in the skies above Utah Lake.According to Page's two passengers, it almost happened.

On the clear, sunlit afternoon of July 12, 1947, Page, his wife, Beulah, and their 9-year-old son, Ronald, were flying a two-seater from Las Vegas to Salt Lake City. UFO sightings and the alleged crash near Roswell were big news in America that summer, but the Pages had no idea what was about to take place.

At roughly 3:30 p.m., a group of silver-colored, disc-shaped objects zipped past the Pages' plane, coming within about 50 feet of the aircraft at the same altitude. It was a near-miss Beulah, now 81, and Ronald, 59, will never forget.

"At first we thought it was birds. We just saw the movement," Beulah, a Salt Lake native, said in a telephone interview from her home in Olympia, Wash. "My husband turned (the plane) to where they were going and they zoomed away like crazy.

"It got kind of scary when we turned toward their direction. They just disappeared."

The entire sighting lasted only a few seconds. The Pages didn't notice markings, windows or even how many objects were in the cluster. Beulah thinks there might have been three.

"There was definitely something there," said Ronald, who was squeezed in between his parents but had a good view of the sky. "Those were the days before we had jet airplanes or anything like that. I'd seen fighter aircraft in those days, but they weren't anything like what I saw."

Once they arrived in Salt Lake City, the Pages told their story to family members and friends they had come to visit. The reaction was one of skepticism and ridicule. Within days the trio stopped talking about the event, although the story is well-known in the family.

"I remember it made them nauseous because they didn't know what it was," said Marilyn Pope, Beulah's niece, who lives in Wyoming. "It was just something completely new they'd never seen. It was kind of a shock."

By keeping the story to themselves, the Pages avoided the public scrutiny and grief experienced by Kenneth Arnold, the Boise pilot who had a similar sighting on June 24, 1947.

Earl Page did tell the story to Frank Salisbury, who married into the family in 1949. Salisbury, who will retire this summer as a professor of plant physiology at Utah State University, had a keen interest in UFOs and would later write "The Utah UFO Display." His 1974 book contains the only previously published account of the Pages' near-miss.

"It was apparently a tremendously moving experience for them," Salisbury said. "Apparently those objects zipped under his wing not very far away, so it was really very impressive."

Dozens of UFO sightings were reported by the media during the now-famous "wave of '47," but hundreds of others were later uncovered by UFO researcher and author Ted Bloecher. In a 1967 book, Bloecher reported no less than 853 UFO sightings in the United States that summer, including 363 reports of multiple objects flying together. Most were spotted during the day and between July 4-8. According to Bloecher, 160 sightings were made on July 7 and very few occurred after July 13.

Earl Page was born in Bountiful in 1912. He moved his family fromm Salt Lake City to Hanford, Wash., in 1943 to work as an electrical engineer at the government's then-secret nuclear weapons facility. The plutonium production outpost was so isolated the family often took weekend plane trips. The July 1947 trek was a vacation journey to California, Nevada and finally to Utah.

Earl Page later served as a maintenance supervisor at Hanford. He died of a heart attack at the age of 49. To that day, he remained convinced he saw something extraordinary in Utah's skies. Whether or not it was extraterrestrial, Page's widow and son can't say for sure.

"Do I think they were real? Yeah, I think they were real," said Ronald, who lives near Richland, Wash., and works at Hanford. "What they were I can't say, but in today's world I probably would have thought less of it than at that time."

Earl Page's wife remarried and is now Beulah Ditto. She grew up in a Salt Lake home at 600 South and 700 East near the old streetcar barns. That house is now a parking lot, but she still has family in Utah - and the memory of an event that nearly changed history.