Paranormal Witness: Trumbull County UFO

Enjoy the Paranormal Day Party!

May 3, 2016 

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I saw an intriguing account on “Paranormal Witness” called Trumbull County UFO—the story of a mass UFO sighting involving both private citizens and police personnel from multiple jurisdictions. I’m always especially interested in UFO sightings reported by police; police officers are trained observers, after all. And in my mind, the police are less likely to perpetrate a hoax. When multiple law enforcement personnel are involved, that really gets my attention.

         This particular story is fascinating, too, because it includes many of the actual communications from that night, retrieved from the Police Archive. It was amazing to hear the reactions of these seasoned, no-nonsense officers as they began to realize they were dealing with something they couldn’t explain.

         The Trumbull County incident took place in Ohio on December 14, 1994. It all began when a call came in to Dispatcher Roy Anne Rudolph of the Liberty Township Police Department. A man reported seeing some type of aircraft angling downward in the sky, with flames trailing from behind. Roy Anne’s first thought was that this could be a plane in distress. But other calls soon followed, with citizens reporting lights in the sky that didn’t appear to be any kind of plane—they hovered without noise, were strangely colored, and one of the callers again saw fire coming out the back. A call even came in from the media, who had received a report of their own.

         In the actual conversation between Roy Anne and the media, she could be heard making jokes, trying to laugh off the sightings with wry good nature. But because of the number of calls, she finally decided to ask an officer to investigate. She expected that he would probably go there and find nothing, laying the matter to rest. Still, she didn’t want to send a message about a possible UFO over the radio, so she used her own phone to call Sergeant Toby Meloro. He went to the site to investigate.

         As Meloro approached the area, a man, obviously frightened, flagged him down, insisting he had seen “a huge light in the sky” over his house. Meloro drove on a little further, and to his amazement, he did see a bright light, a red pulsating light, and a large, indeterminate object. “Maybe it’s a UFO,” he said over the radio to dispatcher Roy Anne, who listened in disbelief—and then sheepishly called the nearby airbase to check on the sightings. She was told they were seeing nothing on radar within a “60-mile diameter of Youngstown—nothing out there.” Meloro, still onsite, drove on a little further toward the bright light. And then his car just stopped; he couldn’t restart it. His portable radio went dead as well. Now he was alone and cut off from communication with Liberty.

         While Roy Anne tried unsuccessfully to reach Meloro, his disabled police car—with him still inside—was hit by “a huge light”. He climbed out with his hand on his pistol. He could see, hovering above the tree line on a double, wooded lot, a huge object enveloped in blinding light. “The light was so intense that I had to shield my eyes,” he said. “It was almost like looking at the sun.” The object was about the size of a football field, and there seemed to be a “structure there”, but he couldn’t distinguish what. The object made no sound as it hovered. And then it began to move off. Now Meloro’s car restarted, and he heard the radio come back on. Finally in contact with Roy Anne again, he said he needed a few minutes to gather his thoughts. And he sat, trying to make sense of what he had just seen.

         He didn’t want to make a report about seeing a UFO; “they’ll think I’m crazy." So he told Roy Anne over the phone, not the radio. And then the other reports flooded in. Hubbard and Hartford Townships called in. “Every agency in the county’s got a visual on it, that I can hear,” someone reported. “Multiple departments have sightings,” another voice said. Officers in various locations could be heard pursuing the object, trying to catch up to it. Even “sergeants and seasoned veterans” were excited, Roy Anne said. Toby Meloro, still onsite in his car, was hearing all this. So, with police lights blazing and sirens screaming, he took off after the object.

         One officer in Brookfield climbed up an old radio tower to observe the strange sight in the sky. There were “four discernible colors,” he said: red, yellow, green, and blue. “Please be a plane, please. I ain’t ready for this,” he said.

         At Toby Meloro’s request, Roy Anne called the airbase a second time, reporting multiple sightings; again she was told they were seeing nothing on radar. By this time, she wanted to see the strange object for herself. One of the officers at Liberty, going against policy, did take her out to the site. Gaping at the strange object through a set of binoculars, Roy Anne saw “something hanging from the bottom, with a red light on it.” The object was “just still”, and she wondered, “Why am I not hearing it?” Then it just shot away, still without sound.

         Sergeant Meloro, meanwhile, had continued to chase the object in his police car. But he never did catch up to it. He felt angry, he said, because he really wanted to catch it and see what it was. The strange events of this night would leave a lasting impression on him—and on Roy Anne Rudolph as well.

         “I get teased endlessly,” she said in the Paranormal Witness account. “Other officers in this get teased endlessly.” She wanted to believe that what she saw was related to the airbase. “But it was like nothing I’d ever seen or experienced.”

         “Everybody denied knowing or seeing anything,” Toby Meloro said. “But I felt there was nothing wrong with what happened. This was something unexplained that happened in the town I live in.” He had never believed in UFO’s, but he felt unquestionably certain that what he saw that night wasn’t any kind of familiar object in the sky. He did contact NASA and the military after the incident, but they claimed to have no knowledge of it. The Trumbull County sightings still remain unexplained.

         An intriguing story. I’ve never sighted a UFO myself, and I’m not convinced about extraterrestrials. But: I’ve heard a couple of personal accounts that really caught my attention. Two people who didn’t even know each other told me eerily similar stories about a strange, silent object hovering above the trees near their homes—in two different states. And I’ve heard other stories, like the one from Trumbull County, that seem to have a strong validity to them. My feeling is that something outside the ordinary really is happening in some of these cases; I think these people really are seeing something that is beyond our familiar reality. The Universe is such a vast place—filled, some say, with a multitude of realities. Who’s to say that these strange sights in the sky aren’t sometimes a glimpse of a different reality that has somehow intersected with ours?

       What do you think?