Since my recent post The UFO - Ohio Police Chase of 1966, I was directed to the following information by a relative of Portage County Sheriff's Deputy Dale Spaur, one of the police officers who was involved in the chase:
HE CHASED A FLYING SAUCER, NOW HIS LIFE IS SHATTERED
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Sunday, October 9, 1966
by John De Groot RAVENNA (AP)--In his world of loneliness and twisted nightmares, Dale Spaur wonders if the nightmare will ever end. It began six months ago with "Seven Steps to Hell" and ended with a flying saucer named Floyd. In the predawn hours of a gentle April morning, Portage County Sheriff's Deputy Spaur chased a flying saucer 86 miles.
NOW THE STRANGE craft is chasing him. And he is hiding from it, a bearded stranger peering past the limp curtains of a tiny motel room in Solon.
He no longer is a deputy sheriff.
His marriage is shattered.
He has lost 40 pounds.
He lives on one bowl of cereal and a sandwich each day.
He walks three miles to an $80-a-week painters job. His motel room costs $60 a week. The court has ordered him to pay his wife $20 a week for the support of his two children.
That leaves Dale Spaur exactly nothing.
THE FLYING saucer did it. "If I could change all that I have done in my life," he said, "I would change just one thing. And that would be the night we chased that damn thing. That saucer." He spit the word out, "Saucer." An obscenity.
"MY ENTIRE LIFE came crashing down around my shoulders," he said. "Everything changed. I still don't really know what happened. But suddenly, it was as though everybody owned me. And I no longer had anything for myself. My wife, my home, my children. They all seemed to fade away."
Spaur's wife Daneise now is alone with her two children. She has filed for divorce and is working as a waitress in a bar at Ravenna.
"Something happened to Dale, but I don't know what it was," she says. He came home that day and I never saw him more frightened before. He acted strange, listless. He just sat around. He was very pale."
"THEN LATER, he got real nervous. And he started to run away. He'd just disappear for days and days. I wouldn't see him." "Our marriage fell apart. All sorts of people came to the house. Investigators. Reporters. They kept him up all night. They kept after him, hounding him. They hounded him right into the ground." "And he changed."
Then one night, Dale came home very late. He isn't sure what happened. He walked into the living room. There were some other people there. Things were very tense. Very confused.
HE GRABBED his wife and shook her. Hard. He kept shaking her. It left big ugly bruises on her arms. He doesn't know how or why...
That was the end of July. Daneise filed assault and battery charges. Dale was jailed and turned in his badge. A newspaper printed a story about the deputy who chased the flying saucer being jailed for beating his wife. When he got out of jail, Dale ran...left town, turned his back on everything.
BUT THE SAUCER followed him, locked in his dreams. In Ravenna, Daneise can only say, "Dale is a lost soul. And everything is finished for us."
In Solon, Dale said, "I have become a freak. I'm so damn lonely. Look at me...34 years old and what do I have? Nothing." "Who knows me? To everyone I'm Dale Spaur, the nut who chased a flying saucer.
My father called me several weeks ago. A long time ago we had a fight. I hadn't heard from him for years. Then he calls me."
"DO YOU THINK he called to ask how I was...to say 'I love you, son... To see if I wanted to go fishing, or something? Hell, no. He wanted to know if I'd seen any more flying saucers."
"I tried to go to church for help. I went to church and the minister introduced me to the congregation. 'We have the man who chased a flying saucer with us today,' he said."
Dale Spaur wept as he told what the flying saucer named Floyd had done to him. He calls it Floyd because he saw it once more while he was still working for the sheriff's department.
THE RADIO operators knew civilians were monitoring their broadcasts. So they agreed to use a code name if the flying saucer was seen again. They called it Floyd...Dale Spaur's middle name. Dale was driving east on Interstate 80-S one night in June [1966]. He looked up. There it was. "Floyd's here with me," he whispered into the radio.
Then he parked the car and sat there, alone. This time Barney Neff was not with him. Dale did not look out the window. He lit a cigarette and stared at the floor of the cruiser. He sat there for nearly 15 minutes...not looking outside, not wanting to see Floyd.
WHEN HE LOOKED up, Floyd had disappeared.
Yet it still follows him. And it has ruined his life.
THIS he believes.
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OHIO DEPUTIES CHASE, LOSE BRILLIANT UFO
The Cleveland Plain Dealer
Monday, April 18, 1966
by Douglas Bloomfield
Portage County Bureau
RAVENNA--Hundreds of persons in two states reported seeing a "brilliant and shiny" object over eastern Ohio early yesterday. Two Portage County deputies chased it 86 miles.
Portage County Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur said he and his partner, Deputy Sheriff W.H. Neff played tag with the mysterious object from 5 a.m. near Ravenna to 6:30 a.m. on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.
Police Chief Gerald Buchert of Mantua saw the object and photographed it in front of his home. He showed a print of his picture to the Plain Dealer but said the Air Force told him not to release it or permit photographs to be taken.
BUCHERT DESCRIBED it as "round when I looked straight up at it, but when it moved to the left--I feel like an idiot saying this--it looked like a saucer, like two table saucers put together."
The photograph showed an object with a very dark bottom and a very light top. Each half seemed to resemble a saucer seen from the side. The lighter top "saucer" was upside down.
Spaur described the object as about 40 feet wide and 18 feet high. He said he clocked it at speeds up to 103 mph as they chased it from Randolph Township to Conway, Pa.
A BRILLIANT beam of light from the object lit the area. Spaur said, "It was so bright, even with the sun coming out, it stood out. Its lines were very distinct," he said as he used the bell of a flashlight to describe the object.
"We were close, closer than I ever want to be again," he told the Plain Dealer. "I know nobody's going to believe it but its true." Spaur said all his former doubts about UFOs were removed.
"Somebody had control over it. It wasn't just an object floating around. It can maneuver. The only sound was a steady, faint humming like an electrical transformer when we first spotted it," he said. The sound was inaudible as the deputies chased the object, they added.
AT CONWAY, PA., Spaur said the object began hovering and was "going for altitude, straight up." After watching for about 20 minutes, he and the others went inside the police station to telephone U.S. Air Force officials he said, and when they came back outside the object was gone.
The Federal Aviation Agency's Air Traffic Control Centers at Oberlin and Pittsburgh said they spotted no unknown objects on their radar early yesterday.
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Excerpts from the original story ....Deputies Spaur and Neff were checking on a car parked alongside U.S. 224 between Randolph and Atwater. The car was filled with radio equipment and had a strange emblem painted on its side, a triangle with a bolt of lightning inside it. Above the emblem was written, "Seven Steps to Hell."
Behind them they heard a strange humming noise and turning, said they saw a huge saucer shaped craft rise out of a woods and hover above them, bathing them in a warm white light. Then it moved off. Leaving the mystery car behind, never to be seen again, the two deputies hopped into their cruiser and chased the object, sometimes at speeds of more than 100 miles an hour. The chase finally ended when the cruiser ran out of gas near Pittsburgh. They said the craft they chased was about 50 feet across and 15 to 20 feet high with a large dome on its top and an antenna jutted out from the rear of the dome.
Now here's the break in the case after 40 years...
"Seven Steps To Hell" is an unofficial tab {used in Germany as a "badge of honor"} under the 7th's "Pyramid Of Power" patch. A lightning bolt would have been added by a Military Intelligence Unit. The 7th Army's Headquarters is still located at Stuffgart-Vaihingen, Germany. Now you have to ask what are they doing in the states? Well, a reserve Military Intelligence Unit The 353rd Comm Recon Co (Scty) of the 7th was moved to Pennsylvania in 1954. Was it one of the fabled Nazi Discs?
Perhaps they were tracking a true alien craft. The eyewitness accounts and new information uncovered by Frank Riccardi of Eyepod.Org attest to the fact that the 7th was there, with their radio equipment. Whatever the craft was the United States Military was tracking it and had arrived shortly before Deputy Sheriff Dale Spaur, and Special Deputy W.L. Neff arrived on scene. Full story, photo of the patch, and relavent links pertaining to the actual existance of the patch are on site at Eyepod.Org. This explains the harassment of the witnesses and the Military's quick move to orchestrate a full cover-up. Dale Spaur of course suffered the most... Here we are almost 40 years to the day... - www.eyepod.org
NOTE: there is another link of interest at Strangers in the Night - In 1966, Ohio cops chased a UFO into Pennsylvania. Then the government got involved, and things got really weird....Lon
