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Some will tell you it all started in 1948, when a B-29 bomber the US Air Force was using to test a heat-seeking device crashed in Waycross, near Zachary Farm. The government could never determine what had caused the engine fire that had taken the Boeing Superfortress down and killed nine of the thirteen men aboard. When widows of some of the men demanded answers, the government claimed it could not explain without jeopardizing national security. Thus, through the unprecedented case, United States v. Reynolds, the "State Secret Privilege" was born.
And while the reports of that incident were declassified in 1998, as with many aviation disasters, there was still no real answer of what caused the engine fire. What had become very real, however, was the evidentiary rule of the "State Secret", which would later be used to shield the government's most infamous UFO landmark, "Area 51."
In 1969, Project Blue Book, the US Air Force's official investigation into UFOs which had been started in the early 50s, was closed. The government had concluded there was no evidence of alien-piloted crafts behind the thousands of UFO sightings across the nation. Ironically, this is when the eyewitness accounts began to be reported in the Waycross area, and have since continued to this day.
Steve Knight, co-owner of Okefenokee Pastimes, says that he encountered a UFO in the late 60s, in Waycross, near the swamp. "I had driven to Atlanta for the weekend with my friend John Casbon from Cocoa Beach. It was getting late on this last part of the Sunday night return trip, a little after 10 pm. We were not too distant from the Okefenokee Swamp where the road gets terribly lonely and dark with long stretches of nothing but pine trees containing few breaks or clearings for farms or pasture. I was startled awake by my friend punching me and saying, 'Hey wake up, there's something out there!' Groggily I responded, 'What, what's up? What are you talking about?' 'There's a light out there and it's following us.'"
The two continued down the highway, with the UFO trailing at the exact speed as their car. When they slowed, so did the UFO. The two got out of the car to take a closer look: "The object itself was an eerie looking triangular glowing shape, having the base of the triangle toward the ground. The glowing triangle seemed to pulsate almost like a beating heart with pulsating white and purplish light instead of blood."
Another UFO sighting around the same time involved a ten year-old boy and his brother playing in the woods behind their house in Waycross. "The craft resembled a submersible vehicle" and had "no visible or recognizable propulsion. It flew towards our home slowly at treetop level and stopped over the front of our home." The UFO "remained motionless for about one minute, then flew away rapidly."
Skeptics would claim these stories were from hippie college students on drugs and middle school kids with overly-active imaginations, and the reports brought little to no attention from authorities or the public.
That would change in 1973, when Georgia's own governor, Jimmy Carter, would say that he had seen a UFO in 1969 with ten others in Leary, Georgia. Carter, who would later become president, described an object as "bright as the moon, bluish at first, then reddish, then luminous but not solid." Carter added, "I don't laugh at people any more when they say they've seen UFOs. I've seen one myself!"
Later that year, reports of UFOs in the Waycross area wouldn't come from children or even Georgia's "nutty" governor, but from the authorities themselves-- the Georgia State Patrol.
On August 31st at 12:20 AM, police stations across southeast Georgia, including Waycross, began reporting sightings of a round object "with orange, red, green, and blue lights." One police dispatcher described it as a "white light with blinking green and red lights. It moved in a zigzag pattern and then moved slowly to the west." Multiple civilian witnesses in the area also came forward with similar descriptions of the object "sometimes hovering, sometimes moving rapidly, sometimes moving slowly." By the next day, the local paper had managed to downplay the entire event with the headline: NO UFOS SEEN HERE.
A decade later, that same newspaper had another headline for the locals-- this one perhaps not so comforting: WARE TEENS TERRORIZED BY LOW FLYING UFO. The lengthy and detailed article from 1984 reported on two local teenagers, Danny Thrift and Janet Curry, who, just the night before, had been driving on Swamp Road when they witnessed a UFO with "L-Shaped lights, two red lights and one green" that lit up the car's interior with an intense "burning red hot" light. Thrift claimed "I was trying to speed away and it kept up with me. It got right over the car and glided over us. I felt I was in danger. I felt like it was after me." When he reported the incident to the police, he was told six others had witnessed the object along Swamp Road that same night.
More frightening than that close encounter, was what some believe to be a full-blown alien abduction. In 1996, a former Everglades National Park Ranger on vacation from New York visited the Okefenokee Swamp Park, canoeing to Billy's Island. When he did not return to the Park and his canoe was found that evening, federal, state and local officials immediately started a search, which escalated over the next few days and weeks to no avail. Forty days after his disappearance, the dazed man was spotted on the island by some passing canoeists. Taken to a local hospital, the disoriented man insisted he had been on the island the whole time, "living off the land." However, federal, state and local officials involved in the searches did not buy his story.
"Speculation around the swamp is that he was taken without his knowledge from the island and then returned sometime after the search had been scaled down, with his memory seemingly erased," says Steve Knight. "A classic UFO abduction."
The turn of century brought even more UFO sightings in Waycross, with the internet being used to discuss and share encounters by people in the area. "A bright reddish orange light moving north west slowly," claimed one from 2006. "Two disk-like objects above treeline, extremely bright, turned and shot straight up and out of sight," reported another in 2008. Sites like mufonga.org, ufostalker.com, ufospottings.com, and sightingsreport.com continue to fill their databases with sightings from Waycross, Georgia, and the world over.
So it seems that the secret is out, and that people are talking, even after that legal precedent was set so long ago. Recently, on a Waycross message board, some one pecked out a small, but open-ended question, almost haiku-like in its simplicity. It reads:
shooting star? ufo? drone?
flying faster than an airplane
yellow light bright
appearing, fleeing southern descent
instantaneous
silent
did you see it too?
