St. Helens, Oregon, police sighting over the Columbia River

Early on 17 March 1981 Sgt. Russell Yokum of the St. Helens, Oregon, police, on patrol on Highway 30, saw an extremely bright light moving upriver toward Portland Airport. Oregon State Police officers Ricky Cade and Tom McCartney and a few citizens joined him at the county courthouse. On the police radio they were in contact with a CB operator across the river in Ridgefield, Washington, Donald Askins ("Lucky 13"), who had picked up their traffic and said he could see the light too, and hear an eerie, very loud sound from it.

The officers set a portable tape recorder beside their radio to catch the sound if it came back. The roughly 30 minutes it recorded include, at about 4:29 a.m., the sound itself, which the officers describe as "revving up its engines" and as a power-plant diesel motor with a screech. The speakers are not identified on the tape. The excerpt filed here ends at the time check.

Details from Greg Long's column. The fullest account is Greg Long's 1996 column "Tales from the Secret Study" (Pacific Harbor Publishing), written with the help of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), the research group Hynek founded. Long reports that CUFOS interviewed the officers (Askins could not be found): Yokum and Cade described a spherical light with no visible structure, Cade saying orange-red and Yokum light orange, about 30 feet across and hovering 80 to 100 feet above the river. He says investigators ruled out the moon (wrong direction), a boat, a balloon and hallucination ("too many observers"). He reports that CUFOS's analysis of the tape found two strong frequency peaks, near 1000 and 3000 hertz, with no even harmonics, unchanged when the tape was played backwards, and that Askins and Yokum both heard the pitch fall like a turbine winding down before the light went out at 4:43 a.m. The rest of the tape, which we do not have, has an officer hearing the light "quietly humming" after it "powered down", a "funny whistling sound before it went out", and the line "The Coast Guard confirmed they did have it on radar and it did go down." We have not seen CUFOS's own report, and nothing here is backed by a radar record.

What is and is not explained. Long writes that the light the officers first saw bobbing from the courthouse was a man-made light on Sauvie Island, seen through variable fog ("it was proved", he says, with no source). The light Askins and the officers then watched to the south was not identified, and no official explanation was ever given. The 1981 National Enquirer article quotes Hynek relaying the acoustic analysts: they had "not heard any sound like that in nature". Radar claims differ: the tape says the Coast Guard confirmed one, while Yokum told the Enquirer that Portland International Airport confirmed and then denied one.

The case is on file because several on-duty police officers from two agencies witnessed it and recorded it as it happened, and a research group led by a scientist of Hynek's standing examined the recording. The accounts are the witnesses' own, reported second-hand, and the original 1981 local newspaper coverage has not been located. A 2017 local retrospective repeats the story from the Enquirer.

Sources: National Enquirer (Joe Mullins), 1981 · Julie Thompson, "The strange case of the St. Helens UFO" (The Chronicle / Tillamook Headlight Herald, 2017) · Greg Long, "Tales from the Secret Study" (Pacific Harbor Publishing, 1996) · the tape, on YouTube