What started as a normal evening for Kathleen Covalt about five years ago turned out to be out of this world — perhaps literally.
While dinner cooked in the kitchen, Covalt and her husband, Wesley, sat on their porch to catch a glimpse of the sun setting across Upstate New York’s Hudson River Valley.
The couple, now Athens residents, frequently enjoyed this “beautiful” view, Kathleen maintained, but that night more than any other remains clear in her memory.
“I looked up in the sky and there was a dark object hovering and we continued to watch it for a little more than a half-hour,” she said. “I said out loud to whatever that was hanging there, ‘If you are trying to make contact…please move.’”
“And then it went up and up and up and then it vanished.”
There’s no doubt in Covalt’s mind that the strange object in the sky was a UFO navigated by an extraterrestrial being.
“If you communicate with the universe…it will respond,” she said.
Every year, thousands of UFO sightings in the U.S. and Canada are reported to the National UFO Reporting Center. Since 1999, there have been four reported sightings in Athens, according to a database the center maintains and makes public online.
That number isn’t scientific, though, said Pete Hartinger, director of the Roundtown UFO Society in Circleville, who estimated there could have been at least 40 Athens-based unreported sightings during that time period.
Hartinger said he’s been a “no-doubter” about UFO existence since his first sighting in February 1958.
“The government doesn’t want the people to panic, but I feel like I’m helping condition the public about UFOs and all that,” Hartinger said. “Don’t be embarrassed or ashamed by it.”
Not everyone buys into Hartinger’s way of thinking, though, including Douglas Clowe, Ohio University associate professor of physics and astronomy.
“There are things up in the sky that people see that they don’t know what they are,” Clowe said. “That happens all the time.”
Weather balloons, trash bags and even Venus are all often confused for UFOs, Clowe said.
Still, the immensity of the universe almost makes it certain extraterrestrial intelligent life exists, Clowe said, but he added that he’s “not seen any evidence anywhere that says UFOs actually are space aliens.”
But Guido Stempel, OU professor emeritus of journalism, said the prevalence of UFO sightings makes it hard to completely deny the possibility of extraterrestrial activity in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Stempel conducted three nationwide surveys, which asked questions about UFO existence, for the Scripps Howard News Service between 1993 and 2008.
In 2008, Stempel said 8 percent of respondents claimed to have seen a UFO.
Covalt said she expects that number is actually higher. She hopes more people start coming forward when they see extraterrestrial activity — in Athens or elsewhere.
“The universe wants to talk to us in every way,” Covalt said. “I’m hopeful I meet the guys in the UFO.”
sh335311@ohiou.edu
@SamuelHHoward
