Unidentified flying objects, UFOs.

For decades people in the Pacific Northwest have seen things in the sky that they can’t explain.

We saw this immense object in the field over there with lights that were spending and it was something we had never seen before.

It took up most of this valley and it was just humbling.

It was just hovering and we were mesmerised.

Gloria Bonacci and her friend Mary saw something too.

We were walking along and all of a sudden we looked up and there was an object.

It seemed to come out of nowhere and of course we were scared and we ducked down in some tall grass behind a fence line.

It was football shaped and had red lights.

All of a sudden that went up and horizontally.

It went toward the high bluff and it just kind of went below the bluff and then seemed to just go really fast and be gone.

Susan and Gloria both live on Whidbey Island, not far from the Navy base.

They don’t know each other but on separate occasions in the 1960s when they were kids, they say they saw something in the skies above the island that neither could identify.

Whatever they saw.

Whidbey Island resident and former Nasa scientist Dick Haines ask that you please not call them UFOs.

It begs the question: unidentified flying object.

We don’t know their objects yet, right, do they fly well, some do and some don’t.

Right, they’re certainly unidentified.

So we like the?

U part.

So we say the Ua P is a better way of presenting this idea.

It’s aerial

And it’s a phenomenon, and that’s all we know.

Haines grew up near Seattle.

He worked as a Nasa scientist and though he was skeptical about unidentified aerial phenomena, he eventually founded a group that collects anonymous reports from pilots.

I heard these stories up from pilots.

That just blew me away and they forced me to leave that hypothesis that it was all controlled variables and so forth.

It was something totally different and that’s what got me started.

The Northwest has a long history of unidentified phenomena and people around Seattle saw things before that more famous Roswell incident in New Mexico.

A pilot named Ken Arnold famously coined the term flying saucer when he saw a group of silvery discs in the skies near Mount Rainier way back on June 24 1947- and it was three days before that- when something called the Maury Island incident took place on Puget Sound near Des Moines.

Steve Edmiston, along with Scott Shafer, made a film about it On June 21, a man named Harold Dahl who has a 50-foot boat.

He goes to a dock in to comb and he picks up two dockworkers.

He also brings his son, Charles also brings the family dog, Sparky, and they’re all on the boat.

And there go three miles and they’re just off Maury island when they see allegedly six flying discs.

They described them as round, hollow, like a donut.

But then there’s this explosion and according to the accounts the explosion is almost like a molten lava- they refer to it as Slag-

And it’s pelting down

And it’s right above the boat.

Harold’s son is burned badly on his arm, the boats being badly damaged.

So they are so frightened they take that 50-foot boat and they actually race it up on the beach on Maury island to get off the boat and hide and cliffs that were there.

The objects flew away and the men returned to Tacoma.

They agreed not to tell anyone what they had seen.

The next day, Edmisten says, a mysterious man dressed all in black showed up at dolls house.

That man took doll to a diner where he encouraged Dahl to remain silent.

You shouldn’t tell anyone else you saw.

Dahl eventually claimed the whole incident was a hoax, but Steve Edmiston thinks Dahl was just tired of not being believed.

What does Steve Edmiston believe this is not something to dismiss as a hoax, it at least belongs over here.

If nothing else, it belongs over here with the Roswell as in the other great stories.

Now to Berrian, where the community has embraced the Mori Island incident and Steven Scott’s film and created an annual celebration inspired by what happened.

This is a Bufo- Burien Ufo festival, so anything could happen tonight in Burien.

It’s like aliens, everything.

It’s pretty much a day for the community to come out and celebrate their weirdness.

Well, I’m dressed up because I came to this show here before couple of years ago

And I love Burien.

It’s just one of my favorite little towns, though she’s dressed in a funny costume.

Does Lorraine believe in you a Ps this way?

I don’t not believe.

Okay, I would never not believe.

Back on Whidbey Island, what does Gloria Bonacci believe?

I suppose really, before I saw this with my own eyes, I really didn’t believe, but after I saw that, you know, I kind of think there probably is things that we don’t know about.

Dick Hanes was one of the first people to take Laurie a Bonacci and Susan Gonzalez seriously.

When I interviewed each of them separately, the two groups had never met, didn’t know about each other’s sightings and asked them to draw a picture of what they saw, he drawing pretty much the same object.

What does Susan Gonzalez believe?

We’re not crazy.

And this really did happen.

And it really did happen on this little wonderful island.

It’s not craziness, they’re here.

They’ve been here a long time.

And what do you believe?

Have you ever seen a Uap?

Until there’s scientific proof, it comes down to each of us to imagine the possibilities.

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Rg.