WEEKSVILLE, NC

FROM UFO NEWSCLIPPING SERVICE - LUCIUS FARISH EDITOR/PUBLISHER

DAILY ADVANCE, ELIZABETH CITY, NC

By Bob Montgomery

EX-RESIDENT CLAIMS TO HAVE SEEN SHIP, CREW NEAR HOME

To the 12-year-old Weeksville boy, it would be a sight he would never forget.

There in the evening sky, a spacecraft, looking like an upside down paper cup, was hovering over a neighbor's house. The craft wobbled slightly each time that it belched sparks and it was blasting heat powerful enough to scorch the grass on the ground.

And then, just as he was getting used to the sight, the youngster said he saw small living beings emerge from a door on the craft. They tinkered with the craft a short while, and then after returning inside, the spaceship rose and hurtled off into the evening sky.

UFO investigator Jim Sutton, Sr. says the youngster who claims he witnessed that unidentified flying object in 1961 is now 66 years old and living in Florida. The man wants to know if anyone else who witnessed the UFO sighting over Weeksville is still alive and has enlisted Sutton to help him find out.

Sutton, state director of the eastern Carolina Mutual UFO Network, says the man -- who has requested anonymity -- isn't sure of the exact location where he saw the UFO. But the man mentioned "Pritchett town road," and believes it was "close to the Elizabeth City town line," Sutton said.

There is no Pritchett Road in Pasquotank County. There is a Pritchard Street, but it's in the city limits.

The man also says his family lived in a house owned by a "Mrs. Outlaw," who apparently was a substantial property owner. Pasquotank tax office officials say they have no record, however, of any Outlaws still owning large tracts of property near Weeksville.

In the written account of the sighting he provided Sutton, the former Weeksville resident says the evening he saw the UFO started out just like most others.

"After eating dinner, my mother told me I could go outside and play, but be home before dark. So I walked up the road towards Mrs. Outlaw's house on the corner of the road." the account states. "I only got as far as the empty field between our house and hers when I heard sounds. I could hear a humming noise and then spitting noises, like touching two live electric wires together.

"As soon as I turned to the direction of the sound, I saw sparks shooting out of the side of this strange-looking thing in the sky. The bottom of it was shaped kind of like a layer cake with a bulky shape on top of it, sort of like and upside down tapered paper cup."

The man said the object had several square windows or holes, appeared to be "yellow with a very slight tinge of rusty orange color," and that "each time the UFO would turn, it would rise slightly then shoot sparks out of one of those square holes on the side and wobble badly."

The object remained in the sky above a nearby house for several minutes, he said, emitting an intense heat.

A crowd gathered to watch, and as it became dark the object became illuminated, the man said.

In front of a throng of onlookers, the man said, a group of small beings exited a door on the side of the object. They didn't look like any human beings the man had ever seen.

When they finished working on the craft, they got back in the UFO and it rose upward into the sky, the man said. The spaceship then "seemed to accelerate faster and faster."

"It was only a few seconds before it became a small light dot that disappeared," the man told Sutton.

Two US Air Force investigators visited the next day to interview eyewitnesses, the man said. But for some reason, they didn't want to talk to him.

"I told the Air Force man I saw it," the man says in this account to Sutton. "And he said, 'I don't take statements from kids.' Then he walked up the road."

The man said the Air Force representative also told him the military didn't plan to take the eyewitnesses' reports seriously.

The man told Sutton that the family that lived in the house beneath where the UFO hovered was later moved out by the federal government. He also claims that vegetation around the property turned brown and died, apparently from the heat of the spacecraft.

After the family moved out the house was "always guarded by two men in black suits wearing a black fedora hat," the man said in his written account.