Mysterious lights over Oldtown Valley Road reignited 1960s flying saucer stories.
The national obsession with “flying saucers” had quieted down somewhat by 1964. The frenzy of sightings and speculation that began in the late 1940s was replaced with Cold War concerns and cultural shifts. But in the quiet hills north of Port Washington, Ohio, the mystery took flight once more—right along Oldtown Valley Road. That winter, a longtime local resident and his family found themselves at the center of a series of strange, unexplained events that briefly reignited the flying saucer conversation in Tuscarawas County.
The resident reported his first sightings on the 1st and 2nd of February, 1964; one in broad daylight and another that same night. A month later in March, two more occurrences kept the mystery alive, but it was a dramatic evening later that month that stood out. On a Saturday night, for just over 45 minutes, the resident and others witnessed six or seven lights moving across the sky. The lights blinked on and off and resembled bright locomotive headlights, a description that likely resonated in this railroad-influenced part of Ohio.
Seeking confirmation, the resident drove his family three miles to a neighbor’s home. There, the neighbor also observed the lights, and verified what they had seen. Power even briefly flickered out at another nearby house during that time, adding an eerie twist. These sightings were obviously not isolated incidents; they were communal, shared among level-headed witnesses. The reporting resident, in particular, was no stranger to the skies. A former pilot, he was confident the lights were not common atmospheric phenomena like St. Elmo’s Fire, known aircraft, or reflections off of power lines as there were no such lines in the area at the time.
The sightings in Oldtown Valley never made national headlines, but they left a lasting impression locally. They came just a month before one of the most famous UFO reports of the era – the Lonnie Zamora incident in Socorro, New Mexico. That sighting, reported by a police officer, would become one of the most well-documented in American history. There would be more lights in the sky reported by multiple witnesses in Tuscarawas County in the coming years. Perhaps there was something in the air that spring of ’64, or maybe just in the imagination of Oldtown Valley Road residents. Either way, the events on that quiet country road are a curious footnote in Tuscarawas County’s past, a time when the mystery of UFOs briefly returned to the night sky.
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© Noel B. Poirier, 2024.
Tuscarawas County Stories 