This article was published in the daily newspaper The Pilot, North Carolina, USA, on May 4, 2003.
A local man and his wife saw what he describes as a UFO Wednesday night. The unidentified flying object appeared as a bright white light, hovered for a minute, and then flew across the sky "with the speed of a meteor," said Fred Lloyd, an assistant golf pro at the Whispering Pines Golf Course.
The light appeared to him and his wife, Nancy Lee, above the treetops on the right hand side of the road on U.S. 1 near Niagara, N.C. at about 9 p.m. as the two were coming home from church, Lloyd said. The entire sighting lasted less than two seconds.
"The light was much bigger than a meteor," Lloyd said, and brighter than the moon. When Lloyd and his wife first noticed the UFO, they saw it out of the corner of their eyes, Lloyd said, and it appeared as if there were two or three lights. When they got a better look, then it was just one.
When the light headed north and disappeared, Lloyd said the sighting left him feeling excited and a little out of sorts. "It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up," he said.
Lloyd joked about whether people would think he was odd for claiming to have seen a UFO.
"Half the people who know me think I'm credible, and the other half know I'm not," he said, "My wife is one of the most credible people in the world."
Prominent American ufologist George Fawcett of Lincolnton, N.C. is looking into the case. Fawcett has investigated over 3,000 UFO sightings in 80 different countries over 60 years.
"Sightings usually happen near military bases or nuclear power plants," Fawcett said.
"Lloyd has no idea what he saw, but be believes it wasn't a meteor or an airplane."
"This, to me, has no explanation," he said, "Nothing I know of in the sky can act like that."
