YAKIMA: The Second Curtain

It is a real pleasure to have such a nice simple anomaly on our hands, is it not? Just some pretty lights which suddenly appear and sit motionless in the air, or dance around a bit, and then just go out. Maybe Mother Earth is having some gastric distress, but because she's such a perfect lady, she turns little burps into Xmas Tree like ornaments to decorate the Sky. Yep, a nice well-behaved little mystery ......

September 29, 1978. Satus Peak Lookout Station, Toppenish Reservation, WA.

Veteran fire lookout Louise Kutz turned her television off to get ready for bed. Looking to the west she saw a bright orange light, seeming like a headlight, in the direction of Goat Rocks, where many such manifestations are seen. Habitually, she got out her binoculars, braced her elbows, and inspected the thing. It was an oblong {elliptical?} shape, and it wasn't moving. In the middle of the shape there were clustered an abundance of smaller lights of every shade of the rainbow. These bits of light "swelled and surged" pulsating like a colored "fountain spilling out".  45 seconds later the "fireworks show" faded away.

Her curiosity, however, refused to die with the lights. Wondering if they would come back on, she continued to survey the general area. The only slightly odd things were a few thin elongated clouds resting over the Goat Rocks. Then those clouds became illuminated by some light source beneath them. Maybe the show wasn't over afterall. Beneath the clouds was a black space. Focussing on it, she saw a row of windows in the air. These windows were not themselves emitting light, but were illuminated by small lights near their casing structures, allowing their square forms to be visible. These lights were dim, much like those of a phosphorescent watch dial at night.

Shortly the windows faded out, but the original "oblong" orange object appeared in their place. This thing still had its internal surging rainbow lights active. This second show lasted 5 minutes. Then the rainbow quit. In its place a small red light came on ... then another ... several in a horizontal row, right to left. Then the whole lighted array just switched off.

The final aspect of this is that something like a small plane [it at least had the proper lighting for that] came flying straight out of that line of sight and eventually passed north of her, making a small engine sound. She wondered if this last bit was also part of the rest, as the lights of the "plane" did not blink.

The whole of the event though had a punch to it regardless. "I came in [she had walked out to follow the "plane"], and I couldn't go to sleep. I went over it step by step in my mind, and since then I've sat there and said Louise, you didn't see what you saw, you just think you saw what you saw."

Well, "young lady", I believe that you DID "see what you saw." But it begins turning Yakima into something not so simple.

David Akers {Standing applause and Thanks to my buddy Bill Chalker for coming up with a picture of this fine gentleman, and standing applause for Mr. Akers for doing such good field research --- which I am delighted to state he is still actively involved with} did a yeoman's job at the Toppenish Reservation in the 1970s, logging quite a list of incident reports, as well as his main interest which was photographing the lights and taking magnetometry readings for correlations.

Akers along with Bill Vogel and Greg Long have lain a great foundation of data for any attempt to further probe this mystery. Much of his past and current work is on a website attributed to Willard J. Vogel and if I wasn't several geological ages fixed in the technological past, I'd make it easy to get to for you. I'll say more about the good Mr. Akers' work later, but first the simple listing of the reports he obtained back then:

These are the cases. Of the 55 reports that he had encoded at the time of the review report, 78% of them were "nocturnal lights." Just as the well-behaved Yakima mystery is supposed to be. But that leaves 22% or 12 other kinds of things. Looking closely at the table you find "D" disks and "CEs". Some of these are "CE3s" --- uh oh. Once in a while there is an "UNCL" unclassified --- and that could be even worse. I wonder what Louise Kutz' observation would be?

Above are some of my strange cartoons for four cases in Greg Long's articles { the orange-red BOLs are just winged from the description, but that was pretty basic, while the other three are colored up versions of drawings right in the texts --- so probably not horribly misleading except for the vivid colors.} The top two are daytime cases and the bottom two at night. In order to not write a book on this entry, a thumbnail rendition of these cases:

{Bottom right} September 9, 1982   Medicine Valley, Yakima Reservation, WA

A fire lookout sees an odd light and radios a family who seem nearer the object. They go to look. The father, mother, and son watch the thing through binoculars and a telescope. It's a yellow-orange motionless light. Through the telescope it's two pale-orange/amber lights horizontally side by side. They begin traveling in a jerky stop/go stop/go series of motions. A plane flew over. The lights dimmed down till it passed. Through binoculars though the lights were still there, now accompanied by a string of smaller lights which were however quite bright. Both the mother and son had the impression that the smaller lights were "windows." The array then flew off.

{Top right} Mid-July, 1971   Timberwolf Mountain Lookout Station (northeast of Mt. Adams), WA

The lookout was taking his lunch outside to relax. Sitting on his steps listening to the news on radio, he saw what first appeared to be a big helicopter. No noise, however, was forthcoming. It seemed to be silently parked about 7,500-8,000 feet in the air. The observer had seen helicopters rarely in the area, but much lower and always easy to hear even at much greater distance. He ran in the cabin and got his binoculars. The thing was a bright silvery disk/cigar with black rounded "domes" on each upper end. It just sat there for a minute and a half's observation, swinging very slightly so as to catch the Sun's rays a glint brightly. He dropped his binoculars for a second, raised them back up, and it had disappeared. One additional unusual detail: the thing seemed made of riveted together plates.

{Top left} Fall of 1961   Satus Peak Fire Lookout Station, Toppenish, WA 

A husband and wife lookout team were startled by a light like a camera flash going off. He grabbed the binoculars and saw several "dull stainless steel" objects doing formation flying at treetop level. These things seemed to effortlessly hug the contours of the Earth [probably like a cruise missile today.] The things looked like teardrops with a black spot on them. They never wavered in their tight formation. He guessed their speed at about 300mph. Once again, these things made no sound. He later saw on a much different occasion a jet racing across the area "on the deck" but there was no mistaking it nor its sound.

{Bottom left} July 31, 1974   Wishram Heights, Klickitat County, WA

A mom and her daughter and her foster daughter were sitting in their backyard coming up on midnight. They were habitually star-gazing when they noticed "a number of lights directly north of them which seemed to be alternately arranged in alphabet letter shaped patterns." {OK. Cue the Close Encounters of the Third Kind movie music.} They brought out their sets of binoculars and observed these lights for two hours. The things moved in jerky "stair-step" motions, seemingly at random. Of course there was no sound. The things appeared like "vanilla wafers" with a shallow bump on top, when seen on edge, and two lights [blue and red] were on their sides. But when they turned their "bottoms" up towards the witnesses, they displayed a dark round object with a whirling rainbow all-mushed-together pinwheel of light flowing out from the edges. The six objects seemed to arrange themselves into a triangular array and moved off. The ladies called the sheriff at Goldendale [just south of the Yakima Reservation] and two officers saw them.

Well, not exactly simple lightballs. The idea of anything flying in formation meant only one thing to Major Dewey Fournet when he made his USAF Pentagon study of UFO motions in 1952 --- these things are CONTROLLED. Animals and loose balloons and naturally-produced physical energy balls do not fly in rigid formation nor maneuver geometrically. He couldn't convince the Robertson Panel about this, but then no one could.

Early February, 1982   Highway 222, Yakima Reservation, WA

A police officer was on routine patrol. He saw a light ahead and worried that it might be a house fire or even brush fire, so off he went. He was driving along Toppenish Creek when over the trees rose something he was not expecting: two bright-white light cylinders each the size of a house. The bottom of the cylinders seemed to resemble half moons. The ominous objects rose silently to 100-150 feet and began moving towards Toppenish Ridge. they smoothly, never breaking their side-by-side arrangement, slid up and over the 1,500 foot ridge and sailed away making a lazy "S" travel route as they left. All this happened in seconds once the officer saw the things rise up.

November 1974, in the middle of the local flap.   East of Goldendale,WA

A husband and wife were having a small get-together on their ranch. There were six adults, two women and four men. At 8pm one of the women stepped outside and saw an odd light. She mentioned it but was pooh-poohed that it was nothing. At 10pm she stepped out again and the light was there, now much closer and seemingly parked on the ground. This time she didn't mention it. At 11pm the party broke up, but as the guests began to leave something awaited them. Suspended only 15 feet off the ground and just 10 feet away was a cylinder. The thing was seemingly made of silvery ice crystals which you could almost but not quite see through. Two thirds of the way up the cylinder projected a bright beam of {solid} light. This beam was two inches in diameter and three feet long. The cylinder itself was 36" tall and 14" wide. The lady observed the thing closely while the men [most of them] cowered back into the house --- she later noticed that those men who were the most "controlling" types were the ones who couldn't face the experience. They watched the unmoving thing for 10 minutes, then retreated to conversation inside. They peeked out thirty minutes later and their unwanted guest was gone.

Well, THAT one was surely just a normal evening at the reservation --- yep, no trouble explaining THAT experience!

Two guys who probably would like to give a try at explaining it are Greg Long on the left, and Ron Westrum on the right. Both of them visited and worked with Bill Vogel during these years.


Both Greg and Ron found many new cases that Bill had not heard of, which made him happy. And David Akers was piling up data too. Yakima was starting to look like it could become UFO Central.

These are David Akers charts for those early to mid-seventies years. I'm not going to pay much attention to the monthly pattern, because I don't know when he was there surveying nor the social dynamics of that, but the time-of-day should not suffer from that. And there we see something very interesting to me .... because that graph looks suspiciously similar to the famous UFO Close Encounters graph/pattern found by Claude Poher called "The Law of the Times." This pattern, with a peak at 10-11pm and a surprising secondary bump at about 3am, has been seen in other data sets by Vallee, Ballester-Olmos, Ted Phillips, and Australian data. I've seen it in one or two other places myself. {Look this up or search it here on this blog, if you're interested].

Well, how about all this! We've looked behind the second curtain and found aliens!!

.... or have we? 

Yow. What's behind curtain number three? 

Till next time folks [might be a weekend though],

Peace and no fears --- the Light Crystal cylinder WILL NOT GET YOU!

Trust me on this.