Dayton

On April 30th, 1981, seven-year-old Colby Landrum heard an approaching helicopter and became frightened.

The CH-47 Chinook was to land at a spot near the town square in Dayton for a festival.

Troops aboard came to march in a parade.

Colby's grandma, Vicki, decided that seeing the helicopter on the ground might help the boy overcome his fears.

Vicki's sister Bertha was also present.

Schuessler recorded the interview, and after, Saren telephoned Betty in Alabama.

That same afternoon, the group visited Dayton police officer Lamar L. Walker and his wife, Marie.

Schuessler recorded their account of the helicopters they had seen the very night of the encounter.

On a cool and clear December night in 1980, Lamar and Marie Walker were driving through the Piney Woods on their way back from Plum Grove, Texas, where they had been visiting her parents.

Lamar was a veteran patrol officer for the Dayton Police, a small town about 37 miles northeast of the heart of Houston.

As they made their way home, traveling east on Farm to Market Road 1960, just inside the Liberty County limits, Lamar heard something.

A deep, fast, rhythmic thump, repeating continuously.

Other ordinary folks would also report seeing swarms of Chinook helicopters that night, including two women named Betty and Vicki and a boy named Colby.

But those three also saw something else entirely, something that would change each of their lives for the rest of their lives.

Music On the evening of Monday, December 29, 1980, Betty Cash was driving home toward Dayton, Texas, with her friend Vicki Landrum and Vicki's grandson, Colby.

They'd gone out looking for a bingo game, first to Cleveland, where they usually went to play at the local VFW club.

Now let's explore what may have happened and what the available evidence can actually tell us.

In the late evening of December 29, 1980, a quiet stretch of Farm to Market Road 1485 north of Dayton, Texas turned into an unexpected theater when three Texan women, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and seven-year-old Colby Landrum, found themselves staring at an object that would soon dominate UFO lore.

They described it as a massive diamond-shaped craft hovering over the roadway, emitting a searing light that seemed to melt the air itself.

Observers recounted that the object was roughly a hundred feet along its diagonal and fifty feet wide, with no discernible seams or windows on its front surface.

In December 1980, three residents of rural Texas reported an encounter that would echo through ufology circles for decades.

Those witnesses, a restaurant manager, an older woman with military experience, and a seven-year-old grandson, said they saw a massive diamond-shaped object hovering low above the road near Dayton.

According to their own statements, the craft was not only large but also emitted intense heat that burned their skin and ignited nearby vegetation.

The claim was that this heating was immediate and so severe that it caused visible burns and blistering within moments.

The two-lane blacktop of Farm to Market Road 1485 stretches ahead of you like a tunnel cut through living walls of pine, the trees pressing so close on both sides that their lower branches sometimes scrape the roof of a passing truck.

The road runs between New Caney and Dayton, threading through some of the densest forest in the Gulf Coastal Plain, and on a night like this one, cold, clear, the air dry enough to make the pine needles crackle underfoot if you stepped out of the car.

There is nothing to see but the road, the trees, and whatever your headlights happen to find in the next hundred yards of pavement.

the piney woods of east texas are not the kind of forests that most americans picture when they hear the word these are not the deciduous hardwoods of new england not the towering douglas firs of the pacific northwest Not the scrubby chaparral of the California hills.

Not because the evidence is insufficient, but because the evidence points in several directions at once, and no single direction can accommodate all of it.

The road is still there.

FM 1485 still runs through the piney woods between New Caney and Dayton, cutting through the same forest that stood on either side of it in December 1980.

The pines are different individual trees now.