Editor’s Note: “Strange sightings in Lewis County” is an ongoing series by Chronicle reporter Owen Sexton focused on the unexplained.
With World UFO Day having just passed on July 2, a recent report showed Washington residents have the third lowest odds out of residents from all 50 states of spotting something unidentifiable in the sky.
The report, compiled using information from the National UFO Reporting Center by Action Network, showed that Washingtonians log around 94.5 sightings per 100,000 residents — meaning the odds of an average resident seeing something strange in the skies are 1 in 1,058. The only two states where residents have lower sighting odds were Montana and Vermont.
This report comes just as the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has released its own trend analysis of UFOs, which government officials now refer to as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs.
Founded in 2022, the AARO was established to investigate UAP sightings reported by DOD personnel on or near sensitive military installations. 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.
One of the aspects of sightings looked at by the AARO’s trend analysis looked at the shape, or morphology, of UAPs being reported.
The analysis found that the most reported sightings were those of lights in the sky with no discernable shape, making up 38.4% of sightings reported by DOD personnel. Oval-shaped objects on the other hand, made up 4.2% of reported sightings.
Despite the disparity between how many times these two types of UAPs have been sighted by DOD personnel, both have been sighted by residents in Lewis County.
Back in 1957 Vader resident Wanda Smith, a teenager at the time, not only saw a silent, unidentifiable light shining brightly above her, but was followed home by it, she said. Since then, she’s also seen lights off in the distance over Ryderwood.
And in 2023, Centralia resident and owner of Kifer Construction, Chuck Kifer, was one of seven witnesses to a strange, silent oval-shaped object as he and his fellow construction workers prepared to start their day one overcast November morning.
The Chronicle spoke with both Smith and Kifer to learn the details of the strange things they saw in the skies above Lewis County.
Chased by a light in Vader
It was late in the evening one night when Smith was walking home visiting her father, who was living in the Northern Pacific Railway section house by the train tracks working as a foreman.
Born and raised in Vader, Smith has lived there for most of her life, except during her time serving active duty in the U.S. Air Force from 1960 to 1963 — during which she was a forward on the Air Force’s basketball team, a pistol team member and even marched as a part of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural parade. After getting married and becoming pregnant, receiving a discharge, she went on to rejoin the military, serving another 23 years in the U.S. Army Reserves.
Now 83, Smith took The Chronicle to the area in Vader where she said an anomalous light began following her in the fall of 1957.
“I haven’t been down here in years,” she said. “... When us kids were little, we used to always come down here and meet dad when his crew got off work. They’d always walk up town and go to the tavern for a beer, and us kids would wait out in front by the store. Dad would take us and get us a 5-cent ice cream cone.”
Smith’s mother had sent her brother to the section house to tell her to come home for the night, and she was walking south along the train tracks back toward Sixth Street in Vader. While her brother had run ahead home, Smith walked home and had gotten to around 100 yards of the alley connecting Sixth Street to the tracks when she passed a steam engine.
“They used to always let off steam on us kids, because they knew us,” Smith said. “I got right beside that steam engine, and this light came on.”
At first, she thought the blinding white light was coming from the engineers.
“I looked up at them, and there was nobody in the train. I looked up over my head, and it’s just this bright light, that’s all you could see,” Smith recalled. “You couldn’t see anything but the light. It was like a spotlight shining down.”
What made the light even stranger was the silence. No chopping of helicopter blade slaps or engine noise of any sort.
“There was no sound, not one bit of sound,” she added.
Not knowing what to do, Smith just kept walking, and the light just kept following her. Eventually, she reached her father’s toolhouse right at the alley. Becoming wary of the light following her, she started running.
“I ran all the way up here. B Street is the next street that goes up north. I went down to my cousin’s house, and they came out and looked up,” Smith said. “It was still there, bright as it could be, but there’s still no sound. It couldn’t have been a helicopter.”
One of her cousins, Hayden Hancock, ran to get the town marshal, while Smith and her other cousin, Jewel Hancock, remained alongside, mesmerized by the strange, silent spotlight which had followed Smith.
“Hayden went down to the tavern to get the marshal, and Jewel and I stood out there looking up. All of a sudden it just zoomed (off). It was gone, towards Winlock,” Smith said. “It was so fast, but no sound still, nothing.”
To this day, she still has no idea what that strange white spotlight was, or what it was coming from, or why it was following her. It wouldn’t be the last time she would see or hear about strange lights though.
A couple decades later, Smith learned of a similar story of a Toledo teenager who, while driving home after visiting friends in Layton Prairie during the late 1970s, suddenly had a spotlight shine down on her and follow her.
According to Smith, the light also interfered with the car’s electronics.
“Her whole car lit up, and her radio started messing up, going to static and going in and out. It scared her to death,” Smith said. “She lived over where the Cowlitz RV Park (now) is … and her sister said she came running in the house hysterical, just screaming and bawling. That thing had followed her all the way into the driveway, and then it just disappeared.”
Additionally, over the many decades living in Vader, Smith has seen anomalous lights off to the southwest horizon appearing to be over or near Ryderwood.
While she knows she may never get answers to what that strange light was or why it was following her, Smith still wanted to share her story so perhaps one day, the mystery might finally be solved.
An oval-shaped object in Centralia’s skies
While back in 1957 Smith didn’t have the advantage of having a smartphone with a digital camera, in 2023, Kifer did.
Normally, he uses his phone to photograph things for construction work. He never expected to capture an image of an object he still can’t positively identify.
A current member of the Centralia Planning Commission and Historic Preservation Committee, Kifer is also running for a Centralia City Council position this year. If elected, he would be far from the first elected official to have reported seeing a UAP, as even presidents have reported sightings.
In 1969, before he was elected as Georgia’s governor, Jimmy Carter, along with local Lions Club meeting attendees awaiting a speech from him in Leary, Georgia, saw a strange light moving towards them. Eventually, the light stopped behind a line of trees, changed colors and then appeared to recede into the distance until it disappeared entirely.
“There were about 20 of us standing outside of a little restaurant, I believe, a high school lunch room, and a kind of green light appeared in the western sky. This was right after sundown. It got brighter and brighter. And then it eventually disappeared. It didn't have any solid substance to it, it was just a very peculiar-looking light. None of us could understand what it was,” Carter said, recounting the experience in 1973.
And in 1974 while serving as California’s governor, Ronald Reagan was flying at night with pilot Bill Paynter and two body guards in a Cessna Citation headed to Bakersfield, California, when a strange light suddenly appeared and was glowing steadily until it began to move, when it appeared to elongate. The light then suddenly accelerated in the blink of an eye and took off at a 45-degree angle disappearing almost instantly.
Reagan later recounted the sighting to a Wall Street Journal reporter, saying, “We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light. We followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens."
In addition to running for local office, Kifer was named the City of Centralia’s 2024 Volunteer of the Year back in January, and his construction crew awarded Volunteer Recognition awards for the time, equipment and labor they donated to the historic Fort Borst Blockhouse repairs last summer.
Before they ever carried out the Blockhouse repairs though, Kifer, along with his crew, were at Kifer Construction near Centralia’s Fairway Shopping Center getting ready for work on the morning of Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2023.
“I was in my office with my construction manager when one of my guys came in and said, ‘Chuck, you gotta come outside and look at this,’” Kifer said. “We walked outside and looked up, and it was just this black object. At first I thought it was debris, like something floating off. But there wasn’t any wind whatsoever, and no sound.”
The oval-shaped object was also moving around in a strange pattern back and forth. Prior to Kifer laying eyes on the object, his workers told him it first approached them, appearing to come from the direction of the Southwest Washington Fairgrounds at an estimated altitude of only a few hundred feet off the ground.
It then flew directly over Kifer’s office on Kresky Avenue and continued over to the field south of the Seminary Hill Natural Area.
“I was so mesmerized by it that it took me a second to pull my phone out to take pictures of it,” Kifer said. “The guys said before I came out, it came across out over a field, came down, some sort of lights came out of the bottom of it, then it came back up over to the parking lot where we were at. Then it took off.”
Despite moving, there was no discernable propulsion system, and like Smith’s light, there was no sound either — even when the object left.
“It was probably the size, if I could guesstimate, of one of those drums off of a concrete truck,” Kifer added.
Typical cement mixer truck cylinders are between 20 to 35 feet long and 10 to 12 feet tall. Having grown up near Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Kifer is familiar with conventional aircraft dimensions and seeing planes from a distance, and is confident in his judgement of the object’s size.
Along with making size observations, the oval-shaped object appeared to lack any conventional flight control surfaces planes normally have, such as wings and horizontal and vertical stabilizers.
“It was so weird. Some of my guys were so shaken up by it. They just don’t want to talk about it, since it kind of pierces what they would consider normality,” Kifer said.
Though a self-professed believer in UFOs before his sighting in 2023, Kifer added it still had a massive effect on him.
“I’ve believed in them for a long time with so much evidence, but there was something about seeing one I just can’t describe,” Kifer said. “It wasn’t an aircraft, because I’ve been looking at those my whole life. It wasn’t a floating balloon or piece of debris either because of how it was moving.”
Including Kifer, there were seven witnesses that morning in Centralia. Though some of Kifer’s employees do not wish to discuss what they saw publicly, they did file a report with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).
“MUFON came over with some recorders, and they interviewed us each individually to make sure our stories matched up,” he said.
Established in 1969, MUFON is a volunteer-run research agency which focuses on conducting scientific field investigations and documenting UAP and alleged contactee and abductee encounters.
While Kifer and Smith still don’t have answers as to what they saw, they are now part of the hundreds of thousands of people who have reported seeing a UAP in the skies above them nationwide.
Given the odds of having a sighting in Washington state — and Lewis County being the launching point for Kenneth Arnold’s famous 1947 sighting where he reported seeing nine metallic “saucer-like” objects while flying near Mineral — they won’t be the last ones to have strange sightings in Lewis County either.
As for the AARO’s own investigative efforts, its stated mission on its website declares, “Minimize technical and intelligence surprise by synchronizing identification, attribution and mitigation of UAP in the vicinity of national security areas.”
Like other DOD-led UAP investigative programs before it going back to Project Blue Book in the 1950s, AARO staff still seem solely focused on debunking UAP sightings. Not that debunking isn’t important, especially when dealing with some sightings that can be explained.
But by their own admission, there are still some which can’t be explained, listed only as “unresolved” on the AARO’s website.
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Have your own story of the unexplained? Email Chronicle reporter Owen Sexton at owen@chronline.com.
