LaGrange Daily News from July 15, 1997
On a cool spring evening, some college students were wandering around campus when the wind picked up a little. The breeze sent a shiver down their spines and then they saw it… what, exactly, no one knows.
The first documented report of an unidentified flying object in this area is 1938. Even before World War II, a young man witnessed in broad daylight a “domed saucer with portholes” in Southwest LaGrange. He stated the saucer was flying at only 4,000 to 5,000 feet and was moving north at a speed of over 1,000 mph.
In September 1952, a roofer in Mountville saw a giant saucer. The witness claimed that the object’s underside was glowing green, yellow, and red and made a hissing noise. The UFO hovered below the tops of the trees in a hilly area off Old Dallas Mill Road. It stirred the grass some ten to twenty feet beneath. After twenty minutes, the UFO lifted straight up into the air and within two minutes it looked no larger than a tiny speck in the dark night sky. The next day, a military exercise of Army helicopters took place where the roofer had seen the UFO. After the exercises ended, the roofer and some friends went to investigate. They found a “blackened circle a quarter-mile around.”
LaGrange Daily News article from Friday May 8, 1970.
A young housewife who lived near a railroad crossing on South Greenwood Street had a dramatic close-encounter in the fall of 1963. From her front porch, she looked south and less than one hundred yards away she saw a huge football-field sized UFO with “flashing lights hovering only twenty feet above the railroad tracks.” After reading her report in the LaGrange Daily News, a railroad worker was able to corroborate her story; he had seen the same thing while working on the rails.
In October of 1987, according to the local paper, multiple reports were received by the LaGrange Police Department. Four or five residents in the Springdale and Azalea Drive area called police when they saw something described as a “bright star with flashing green, yellow, and red lights.”
The newspapers almost always had a “logical explanation,” but among those who search for unidentified flying objects, LaGrange and Troup County are situated in what is called the “Troup-Heard Corridor” and have a long history of UFO sightings and paranormal activity. Sandwiched between the Fall Line to the south and the Brevard Fault line in the north, the THC presents an isolated rural setting. Stretching from east-to-west for approximately 120 miles and south-to-north for 70 miles, the Corridor encompasses an area slightly larger than Massachusetts. Covering these igneous and metamorphic rocks such as granite, quartz, and mica, is a soil base of chiefly bright red clay. The red clay, when not exposed, is often hidden beneath a thick canopy of mature pines and hardwoods. All of these factors combined with the plentiful surface water and hills and valleys of the Troup-Heard Corridor make it an ideal setting for aliens to visit. Extraterrestrial craft are spotted often and alien entities, including inter-terrestrial beings, have been occasionally encountered.
The nearest Federal Aviation Administration radar facilities are in Atlanta, 50 miles to the north, and Columbus, 40 miles to the south. While radar coverage overlaps, it only meets at more than 2000 feet altitude.
This permits UFOs, sometimes as large as a half-a-mile, to make a several thousand miles-per-hour entry into the atmosphere and then loiter well under the 2000 feet high “basement” of radar coverage. Normally under the cover of darkness, these UFOs use the many hills and forests of the area to mask their low-level operations.
The scene seen tonight did occur in April of 1966 and was reported by local papers the following month. The United States Air Force investigated the report made by two male students.
