On the evening of 29 December 1980 Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and her seven-year-old grandson were driving a back road north-east of Houston when they stopped in front of a diamond-shaped object throwing flame downwards. The car's metal grew hot enough that Vickie's fingerprints were left in the dashboard. Then the object moved off, surrounded by what they counted as some two dozen helicopters. Over the following days all three developed burns, vomiting and hair loss — a picture doctors described as radiation injury. Betty Cash spent weeks in hospital. They sued the United States government, seeking to establish military involvement; the case was dismissed because no agency would claim the object. The medical records survive.

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Wanaque and the Lights over the Reservoir

Through the winter of 1966 a bright object was seen for weeks over the Wanaque reservoir in New Jersey, hanging above the ice. The witnesses included the mayor, the chief of police, the men on duty at the dam and dozens of residents; on some nights reports came in from several points on the shore at once. The dam keepers maintained that a beam from the object had melted a hole in the ice. There was no checking it — the ice was gone by spring. The wave came back in 1967. Neither the Air Force nor the police found an explanation, and Wanaque survives in the literature as a rare case whose principal witnesses were town officials on duty.