Case · C-034
Captain Coyne's helicopter and the red light over Mansfield
Charles Mill Lake, near Mansfield, Ohio · United States · Oct 18, 1973
In flight Mixed witness types
Disputed explanation
- What happened
- At 23:05 an Army Reserve UH-1H helicopter flying from Columbus to Cleveland, at 2,500 feet southeast of Mansfield airport, saw a red light approaching on a collision course; Captain Lawrence Coyne descended, but the object stopped above the helicopter, lit it with a green beam and moved off to the west. The crew reported that they subsequently found themselves higher than expected, and witnesses on the ground along the road that crosses the lake described the light. The official near-collision report (DA Form 2496) can be consulted in transcript form.
- Proposed explanation
- Philip Klass, an editor at Aviation Week & Space Technology, concluded after an investigation of his own that the crew had seen a fireball from the Orionid meteor shower; other reconstructions consider the case unresolved and place it among the most credible because of the reliability of the crew.
- Official investigation
- U.S. Army (Reserve: 316th Medical Detachment and 83rd Army Reserve Command, Cleveland)
Official documents
- Near Midair Collision with UFO Report (DA Form 2496, 23 Nov 1973) · U.S. Army – 83d USARCOM USAR Flight Facility, Cleveland (transcript on Patrick Gross's site) · Nov 23, 1973
Sources
- Richland Source, Taylor Perry – the 1973 Coyne case (2022) (press)
- Richland County History, Timothy Brian McKee – “UFOs Over Richland County: 1973” (2019) (analysis)
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