Editor’s Note: “Strange sightings in Lewis County” is an ongoing series by Chronicle reporter Owen Sexton. To read the previous installment, visit https://tinyurl.com/4rweby4x.
Throughout the 88 years Jim Stafford has lived, he’s done quite a bit of work as a bronze sculptor. But, with his age now, he’s swapped out most of his foundry work for oil painting, as it’s easier on the joints.
Aside from producing many bronze wildlife sculptures over the decades, some of his notable works include the statue of George and Mary Jane Washington at Centralia’s George Washington Park and “The Guardian” statue honoring fallen law enforcement personnel outside of the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office. Additionally, he also served in the U.S. Army.
However, Stafford didn’t meet with The Chronicle to talk about his artwork or time in the service.
What was on his mind was something he saw in the skies above Adna late one evening back more than 70 years ago with some old friends.
“This is not real dramatic, but I’ll sure tell you what I saw,” Stafford said. “It was a round circle, it wasn’t ragged. A full circle, and it was a fiery-red-orange. I was with two friends of mine. They’re both deceased now. I wish they were still alive to verify it.”
His friends were a pair of brothers he went to Adna High School with, Bobby and Edwin “Tiny” Smith. They all grew up in the area, working odd jobs for many of the local farmers surrounding Adna.
Stafford was driving home with the Smith brothers late one night around 9 p.m., heading toward Adna on Bunker Creek Road. While he can’t recall the exact date, Stafford believes it was in 1953.
“I don’t think we were juniors in high school yet, maybe we were. And then halfway back, we noticed this thing in the sky. We had lived there for quite a few years, but never saw anything like that,” he said.
The fiery-colored orb wasn’t moving, but appeared to be hovering, glowing brightly just over the treeline of a ridge north of Bunker Creek Road, about a half-mile east of Ceres Hill Road.
“It was just above the timber I think, on the ridge,” Stafford said. “It could’ve been closer, but if you hold your hand out (and make a circle), it was between the size of a quarter and a 50-cent piece … How physically big it was that far away, it was hard to tell, but it seemed to be a pretty good size.”
Given the boys had never seen anything like this light before, they stopped to observe it.
“It lasted for what seemed like a long time, but it probably wasn’t. It was maybe a full 30 seconds,” said Stafford.
During the few moments they were observing it, while the object remained stationary, it did start to do something odd before vanishing.
“It didn’t change width, but it started slowly squeezing down to just a sliver, then, gone,” Stafford said.
On top of that, throughout the entire sighting, the mysterious light made no sound. Once it disappeared, the boys finished their drive home and didn’t really think much of what they saw or talk about it with anyone.
“We were full of ourselves in high school,” he added.
After high school, though, Stafford began to hear more about other sightings and recalling his own, started researching, as the light he saw back in the early 50s never left his memory.
“I won’t forget it, I remember it clearly,” Stafford said. “And I’ll even take a lie detector (test) for this story.”
Although he’s come to terms with the fact he will likely never see it again or learn what it was, Stafford subscribes to the conspiracy theories that the U.S. government knows a lot more about UFOs than officials admit.
“The reason the government doesn’t let out what it has, I believe, is because it would cause civil unrest,” he said.
As for what the federal government has revealed so far concerning UFOs, or what it now refers to as UAPs — unidentified anomalous phenomena — government officials have given more information than they traditionally did in the past, but not much more.
Founded in 2022, the the U.S. Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is now the lead government agency in charge of investigating UAP sightings reported by Department of Defense personnel, or in and around U.S. military bases and other sensitive government installations.
Previous government UAP disclosure projects going back to the 1950s, like the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, originally sought to provide transparency to the public about the strange things they were seeing in the sky.
However, they eventually became focused on debunking sightings while quietly dismissing the ones which couldn’t be debunked.
While debunking is important, as even Stafford himself admits there are a lot of fake reported sightings and doctored images out there, there are ones which have been confirmed to be authentic.
“We have thousands of images now,” Stafford added. “They’re physical objects.”
These include the now world-wide famous forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera videos taken by U.S. Navy pilots flying McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornets, now known as the “FLIR,” “GIMBAL” and “GOFAST” videos.
They’re commonly also known as the Tic Tac videos, as they depict Tic Tac-shaped objects exhibiting aerial maneuvering and acceleration capabilities that left the F/A-18 pilots observing them stunned.
The pilots weren’t the only observers, as many sailors on the ships in the carrier strike groups, including radar operators, were also observing and tracking the UAPs.
The FLIR video was captured off the Southern California coast in 2004 by pilots who were part of the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, while GIMBAL and GOFAST were captured over the Atlantic Ocean while the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group in 2014 and 2015.
In 2020, the Department of Defense officially released these videos to the public, but made no comment as to what the UAPs in the videos were. After the AARO was founded in 2022, its investigators took a look at these videos along with many others.
Many of the other sightings they examined have been debunked and the explanations are posted online. However, these videos are still simply listed as “unresolved” on the AARO’s website.
The AARO’s logo features the latin phrase, “Universum mutatio est. Vita nostra est quod cogitationes nostra facere est.”
Roughly translated, it reads, “The universe is change. Our life is what our thoughts make it.” It is a quote attributed to the ancient Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius.
To view both resolved and unresolved cases investigated by the AARO, visit its website at https://www.aaro.mil/ and click on the UAP cases tab.
