Late on the night of 18 October 1973, a United States Army Reserve helicopter was flying home across Ohio when its crew met something they could not explain. The four men on board were not thrill-seekers or strangers to the sky. They were trained aircrew on a routine flight, and when the night turned strange, they did what aircrew are trained to do: they reported it, in writing, to their commanders. The report they filed, and the investigation that followed, made the Coyne incident one of the most carefully documented UFO encounters in American history — and one of the most stubbornly unresolved.
The flight had begun unremarkably. The helicopter, a Bell UH-1H “Huey” numbered 68-15444, belonged to the 316th Medical Detachment, an Army Reserve helicopter ambulance unit based in Cleveland. Earlier that day the crew had flown from Cleveland to Columbus for scheduled medical examinations. At about 10:30 p.m. they left Port Columbus to fly home to Cleveland Hopkins Airport, roughly ninety-six nautical miles to the north-northeast. In command, in the right-hand front seat, was Captain Lawrence J. Coyne, thirty-six years old, with nineteen years of flying experience. At the controls in the left-hand front seat sat First Lieutenant Arrigo Jezzi, twenty-six, a chemical engineer in civilian life. Behind them were Sergeant John Healey, thirty-five, a Cleveland policeman serving as flight medic, and Sergeant Robert Yanacsek, twenty-three, a computer technician, the crew chief.
A Red Light on a Collision Course
At about 11:00 p.m., near Mansfield, Ohio, Sergeant Healey noticed a red light off to the left, to the west, moving south. At first the crew assumed it was another aircraft. Coyne thought it might be an Air National Guard F-100 jet out of Mansfield, and the crew watched it as it seemed to slow and hover. Then, according to the crew’s account, the light turned toward them and began to approach at a speed they estimated at more than 600 knots — far faster than any helicopter, and on what looked like a collision course.
Coyne took the controls from Jezzi and put the Huey into a powered descent of about 500 feet per minute, while trying to raise the Mansfield tower on the radio to ask whether any aircraft was operating in the area. The radio, the crew said, would not work. As the helicopter descended, the light kept coming, growing larger until the crew could make out a shape: a cigar-shaped, grey, metallic-looking object, slightly domed, that seemed to fill the entire front windshield. It blotted out the stars behind it. The crew described a red light at its front, a white light at its tail, and a green beam shining from the underside of its otherwise featureless body.
The green light, in the crew’s account, swung up over the nose of the helicopter, through the windshield, and into the upper window panels, bathing the cockpit in intense green light. The encounter, as later reconstructed by the investigator Jennie Zeidman, lasted about five minutes — roughly 300 seconds of continuous observation. The object then moved off to the west, turned, and flew away over Lake Erie at an estimated 250 to 600 knots. Radio contact was restored with Canton/Akron, and the flight continued uneventfully to Cleveland.
The Climb That Should Not Have Happened
The strangest detail of the night came after the object had gone. Coyne later reported that, during the encounter, the helicopter had climbed from about 1,700 feet to about 3,500 feet, with the altimeter showing a climb rate of 1,000 feet per minute — while the collective control, which governs lift, was fully down, the position for descending. In other words, the helicopter appeared to rise against the pilots’ control inputs. No flight recorder was on board to measure the climb independently, and no synchronized record of the control positions exists. The crew’s account is the only evidence for what happened, and it is worth stating that plainly: the reported climb is a claim by four witnesses, not a measurement by an instrument.
The Investigation
The case was investigated for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) by Jennie Zeidman, a former Project Blue Book investigator. Her full study, “Helicopter-UFO Encounter Over Ohio,” was published by CUFOS in 1979. Zeidman reconstructed the encounter second by second and concluded that the five-minute duration and the descriptions from the helicopter ruled out a meteor — the explanation favoured by the sceptic Philip Klass, who argued the crew had seen a bright fireball. A meteor, Zeidman pointed out, crosses the sky in seconds; the crew watched their object for minutes, and it changed direction, hovered, and paced them.
The crew received the National Enquirer’s Blue Ribbon Panel award of $5,000 for what was described as the most scientifically valuable UFO report of 1973. That prize, offered by a tabloid newspaper, is a fact of the case’s history, not evidence for what the object was. Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force’s UFO investigation programme, had closed in 1969, four years before the incident, so there was no official Air Force investigation of the Coyne encounter.
The case remains unresolved. No photograph was taken, no radar plot has been made public, and no physical evidence was recovered. What the record firmly supports is narrower but still remarkable: four trained aircrew, flying a military helicopter on a routine night flight, filed a signed official report describing a close encounter with an object they could not identify, and their account has survived more than fifty years of scrutiny without being explained away.
What Is Documented — and What Is Not
Documented: On 18 October 1973, a U.S. Army Reserve UH-1H helicopter (68-15444) of the 316th Medical Detachment, with Captain Lawrence J. Coyne, First Lieutenant Arrigo Jezzi, Sergeant John Healey and Sergeant Robert Yanacsek aboard, was flying from Port Columbus to Cleveland Hopkins Airport when the crew reported an encounter with an unidentified lighted object near Mansfield, Ohio, at about 11:05 p.m. The four men signed an Army disposition form on 23 November 1973 titled “Near Midair Collision with UFO Report.” The crew received a $5,000 National Enquirer Blue Ribbon Panel award for the report. Jennie Zeidman investigated the case for CUFOS and published her study in 1979. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969, so no Air Force investigation took place.
Not documented / unverified: The exact shape, size and speed of the object rest entirely on the crew’s estimates; no photograph, radar record or flight recorder data exists. The reported climb from about 1,700 to 3,500 feet with the collective fully down is a witness claim, not an instrument measurement. The green beam and compass effects come from later testimony rather than the signed Army form, and were not described uniformly by all four men. The ground witnesses found in 1976 gave their accounts nearly three years after the event, anonymously, with no contemporary corroboration. Philip Klass’s meteor explanation and Zeidman’s rejection of it are both arguments, not settled findings. The case is unresolved; it does not prove an extraterrestrial craft.