Date
of sighting: August 9, 1966
Location of sighting: Richmond, Virginia, USA
"I
happened to look up and there was that UFO right above
the cornfield, it was just hovering right up above the
power lines" about 200 feet in the air, Mathews said.
The craft, which Mathews described as white and about
30 feet in diameter, made hardly a sound and emitted no
light. "It was just like the ones you see on TV,"
Mathews said.
Source:
Richmond Times-Dispatch (Virginia), October, 1999
Sheriff
Reveals 1966 UFO Encounter And Death Of Dog
By
Mark Bowes - Staff Writer
Richmond
Times-Dispatch (Virginia)
If
he hadn't seen it with his own eyes, Henrico County Sheriff
A.D. "Toby" Mathews said, he might not have
believed it.
On
a bright moonlit night, 33 years ago this summer, Mathews
said, he saw a large unidentified flying object hovering
silently near his Varina farm. He suspects whatever was
inside the mysterious craft was responsible for snatching
and snuffing the life out of his dog.
"I
really saw the thing, I really did," Mathews,
65, said this week when asked to respond to talk of his
close encounter. "And I've never seen anything
like that since then."
Mathews
said he never publicly disclosed what he saw until now
because he felt no one would believe him. He talked about
his UFO experience this week after The Times-Dispatch
learned that he had told the story three years ago to
his former chief deputy during a Christmas dinner in Williamsburg.
Mathews,
who's fond of sharing personal stories about his life,
was candid about his UFO experience, which he noted occurred
during a time when such sightings were reported with some
regularity by Richmond-area residents.
During
the spring and summer of 1966 - when Mathews said he saw
a saucer-like object hover over a cornfield near his farm
and then disappear in a flash - more than a half-dozen
people, including three other Richmond-area police officers,
reported spotting similar objects hovering over the city,
Henrico and Goochland
County, according to news accounts in The Times-Dispatch
and The Richmond News Leader.
One
Richmond patrolman told The News Leader that he chased
the UFO in his patrol car.
"If
I live to be 100, I'll never forget it," said
former Officer William L. Stevens Jr. in a July 21, 1966,
news story.
Mathews'
UFO encounter had been the subject of gossip for years
and recently surfaced again as the local election season
draws to a close.
Mathews, a two-term sheriff, is running for the Varina
District seat on the Henrico Board of Supervisors.
With
just four days left until the general election, Mathews
this week recounted his UFO experience with little hesitation.
He said it occurred Aug. 9, 1966, after he returnedhome
from a psychology class at the former Richmond Professional
Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). He was
a road sergeant with Henrico police and was living alone
at the time at his farm on Charles City Road in the county's
Glendale area.
At
about 10:30 that evening, Mathews said, his German shepherd,
tied to a chain out back, began barking loudly, so he
went outside to investigate. After turning him loose,
Mathews said the dog, which he had acquired only three
weeks earlier, ran to the edge of an adjacent cornfield.
He was astonished at what he saw next.
"I
happened to look up and there was that UFO right above
the cornfield, it was just hovering right up above the
power lines" about 200 feet in the air, Mathews
said.
The
craft, which Mathews described as white and about 30 feet
in diameter, made hardly a sound and emitted no light.
The object was about 4 or 5 feet wide at its widest point,
which was in the middle, he said.
"It
was just like the ones you see on TV," Mathews
said. "It was a bright moon that night,"
so he got a good look at it.
Mathews
said he ran back inside his house to get a flashlight,
and when he returned and shined it on the craft, the UFO
turned slightly, emitted a burst of light and "took
off like a bullet, just tremendously fast."
Mathews
said he rechained the dog and went to bed after the craft
disappeared, and he got up about 5 the next morning and
went out to check on his dog. He let it run loose for
a few minutes, as was his routine, but the dog didn't
come back.
Mathews
said he canvassed the area, but the dog was nowhere to
be found. When he returned home, he was startled to find
his dog lying motionless in the middle of the road just
beyond his circular driveway. He was dead.
"He
didn't have a mark on him - no blood, no singe [marks],
no nothing," Mathews recalled. "It looked
like he almost was sleeping. And whatever killed him,
they had taken his chain collar off" and dropped
it on the shoulder of the road. "I couldn't believe
how it got off him like it did."
Mathews
said his neighborhood in those days was remote and largely
devoid of traffic at that hour. "I didn't see
any cars come through at the time." Mathews said
he assumed that his dog was killed by whoever, or whatever,
was in the UFO. "The dog let me know that they
were there," he said.
The
dog's death remained a mystery, Mathews said. He buried
the shepherd that morning in a meadow on his property.
Mathews
said the city officer who saw a saucer-like object near
the State Fairgrounds a month earlier had urged him to
notify the news media about his encounter, but Mathews
resisted. Mathews was living alone at the time, and there
were no other witnesses, he said.
"I
wasn't frightened by it; it was kind of awesome,"
Mathews said of the object. "Of course, back in
those days I was still in the military reserve, and it
didn't appear to be any type of military craft at all.
Because No. 1, it wouldn't have done what it did, had
it been a known military aircraft."
In
December 1996, Mathews told his story to then-Chief Deputy
Patrick Haley and his wife, Brenda, during a Christmas
dinner party at the Seafarers Restaurant in Williamsburg.
"The
way he told it was so specific and he was dead serious,
he wasn't joking," said Haley, who now is deputy
coordinator of law enforcement accreditation for the Virginia
Department of Criminal Justice Services. "We talked
about this for months."
Haley,
who resigned abruptly after about a year as the department's
No. 2 officer because he believed incompetent leadership
and dishonorable management practices by Mathews created
a host of problems with the sheriff's office, recalled
Mathews telling him a slightly different story about the
encounter.
Haley
said he remembered Mathews saying the craft had landed
and emitted some kind of strong "pull"
that drew him toward it, although he managed to resist
it. Haley also recalled Mathews saying that his dog, after
it was found dead, appeared to have been burnt or singed.
Mathews,
however, said those things didn't happen. And he shrugged
off how his strange encounter may be viewed by the public.
"Well,
I did see it," he said. "I really don't
know what it was."
Source:
http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case1073.htm