The Portage County UFO Chase: Or How Defense Intelligence Created a Monster - Hardcover

by Michael Kishbucher (Author)

An enduring feedback loop where belief masquerades as evidence and credibility becomes collateral damage.

In April 1966, police officers in rural Ohio and western Pennsylvania chased a glowing object across eighty miles of back roads. The encounter--silent, blinding, and seemingly intelligent--became one of the most famous UFO cases in American history and helped inspire the opening scenes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But the mystery didn't end when the lights vanished. Drawing on primary sources, official records, and personal experience, this book traces how a single night's events were transformed into lasting folklore--shaped not just by witnesses and the media, but by the U.S. military's own investigative machinery. Rather than merely asking what the police chased, a more unsettling question is asked here: how did government involvement, belief, and mistrust combine to create a self-perpetuating legend that still echoes today?

Author Michael Kishbucher, a career Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency officer, revisits this strange Appalachian legend from an uncommon perspective: from within the intelligence community itself.

Author Biography

Michael Kishbucher grew up in Ohio and Pennsylvania and resides in Virginia with his family. He first learned the trade of intelligence analysis while serving in the US Air Force, and he is now a civilian in federal service at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He earned a Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence degree from the Department of Defense's Joint Military Intelligence College (now the National Intelligence University) and a Master of Strategy degree from Air War College. Michael uses a non-de-plume and often writes about himself in the third person, suggesting that he is probably a disinformation agent. I wouldn't believe anything he wrote.