Knock Five Tones: Polk County's UFO Years

Maybe they only knock on some of our doors.

Those chosen are as diverse as the reports themselves. Some never share the story. Some never even realize they had company. And some of us— maybe—have our names written in an appointment book in the distant stars.

And should my name be nowhere in those books, should no visitor arrive, they will still have given me a gift to be opened slowly, with many smaller surprises inside, and even more questions about each one.

This isn’t a story about proving UFOs. It’s a story about the connection, questions, and community. It’s about signals, searches, signs, and the accidental full circles that return us, again and again, to the same skies.

TONE ONE: CYPRESS GARDENS

On television, Walter Cronkite narrated the story of Apollo like it was a national family album. Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released in theaters that May, sending audiences out of the cinema and into silence. And in Winter Haven, Florida, Cypress Gardens staged its daily waterski extravaganzas—-pyramids of sequined skiers forming against manicured gardens and glassy lakes. That summer Johnny Carson himself arrived to film Johnny Carson Discovers Cypress Gardens.

JUNE 2, 1968 THE OBJECT IN THE WATER

While waterskiing at Cypress Gardens, Raymond Videtto “heard a sudden terrific ‘whoosh’ behind him simultaneous with something striking the water causing geysers of steam and spray.” The noise was “sufficiently loud to scare him,” and when he turned back, he found “the material contained in this package floating on the surface still warm to the touch.”

Videtto turned the material over to Dr. Joseph H. Purser of Polk Junior College, who inspected it with his students before sending it forward to the Air Force. The object was shipped through military channels to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, home of Project Blue Book, the Air Force’s official UFO investigation program. On June 12, Lt. Col. Hector Quintanilla, Blue Book’s final chief, reviewed the case. The object was repeatedly described as “light,” “porous,” and filled with “air holes” more like pumice than anything metallic or extraterrestrial.

As the last custodian of Blue Book, Quintanilla carried both criticism and legacy. His presence in Winter Haven’s record stands amid fragments and lab sheets that turned spectacle into geology, and local mystery into national paperwork.

Lt. Carmon L. Marano consulted Edward Williams of the Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, who confirmed a geological origin. The specimen, he noted, was about 90% silicon dioxide and 10% iron oxide, too light and porous to be a meteorite. Meteorites are dense and metallic; this fragment was fragile, filled with gas bubbles, and could just as easily have floated up from natural springs.

Internal memos circulated at Wright-Patterson. Officers like Lt. Matthews and Bill Marley added notes to the file. Marley acknowledged Quintanilla’s oversight but saw no reason to extend the evaluation further: the specimen was neither steel nor extraterrestrial. By the end of July, the case was closed.

What remains is not evidence of the extraordinary, but a brief intersection of local history and national investigation. For one summer, Cypress Gardens, better known for water-ski pyramids and television specials, appeared in the ledgers of Project Blue Book, its waters yielding a mystery that settled back into geology.

For the Air Force, the matter ended there. I found it nearly sixty years later, in a scanned file stamped Wright-Patterson and marked with the words Cypress Gardens and Polk Junior College. It felt like a relic I had been searching for all along—a grail for the “Winter Haven Goes Weird” exhibit I’d been building in my imagination. I didn’t yet know the trail would lead me backwards, forwards, and to more than one familiar doorstep.

AUGUST 9, 1961 THE ORANGE STAR

It was late on a summer night in Winter Haven. Cypress Gardens had just finished one of its famous evening water ski shows, and the crowd was dispersing. Among them was a mother with her son and a friend. As they walked back to the parking lot, she noticed something unusual, a small orange point of light hanging in the sky.

At first it resembled a star, but it grew steadily brighter and larger, descending toward the horizon. For a moment she believed it to be a meteor, streaking directly at her. She braced for impact.

But the object did not fall. Instead, to her astonishment, it banked. The glowing orange ball changed course, left a trailing tail of light, and then climbed back into the night sky.

It retraced its path and finally vanished into the dark. The entire episode lasted less than a minute.

Four years later, she wrote to the Air Force, still shaken and searching for answers. “A comet burns up or falls,” she explained, “and a rocket from Earth goes up then down. But this … this came down and then went up.” She included a handdrawn diagram of the object’s descent and ascent over the Gardens.

Project Blue Book received the letter in 1965. The case was catalogued, analyzed, and explained away: the sighting, officials said, bore “the characteristics of jet aircraft with afterburner.”

The file was closed.

TONE TWO: THE SKY DOESN’T CLOSE

Records indicate the knock had already been reported in Polk County skies before the Cypress Gardens cases, earning multiple mentions in Project Blue Book.

On July 7, 1947, Lakeland sign painter and former Navy seaman Hiram Griffin looked up from Highway 92 when he heard a swishing “shrill whine.” Five glittering, turtle-backed objects shot thousands of feet upward in seconds. “Very fast,” he recalled. “No wings. Jet jobs, maybe—one leading, towing the others.” They climbed out of sight, leaving behind a memory so vivid he later built a model of what he had seen.

A decade later, on an October night in 1957, the quiet roads of Polk County lit up. Drivers along Highway 60 reported a glowing white light with a bluish edge that hovered over the citrus trucks and then shot skyward at an impossible speed. Several independent calls reached the sheriff’s office at the same time. “It gave me the feeling it was watching us as much as we were watching it,” one witness admitted.

Seventeen years after Griffin’s sighting, on November 20, 1964, another Lakeland resident reported a bright object “larger than a star” that hovered, shifted sideways, blinked out, and returned to nearly the same spot. A second witness described “two or three lights together … separating, coming back, and fading out.” Blue Book investigators suggested Venus, but even their notes admitted the motions were “not entirely consistent with planet or star.”

Five years later, in July 1969, television audiences turned their eyes skyward for another reason, watching Apollo 11 astronauts step onto the Moon.

By the year’s end, physicist Edward Condon’s Air Force– funded study declared further UFO research unnecessary, leading to the official closure of Project Blue Book. But when one door closes, another often opens quietly in the back.

TONE THREE: SIGNALS FROM CENTRAL

After high school, I stayed in town and attended Polk State College, the receiver of our Blue Book Famous rock. There I encountered professors who would help grow a love for science fiction literature. That love would eventually get a brick-and-mortar location, in a candy shop in downtown Winter Haven called Confection.

It was mid-century sci-fithemed, complete with a robot named Zondar from Venus. For Christmas, I had a window painter paint alien-themed windows with saucers and Santa.

And then they began to come in. No little green men, but locals with stories. One man sketched diagrams like the tic-tac, various saucers, and the sport model. Others offered memories of sightings years before. The windows had become a signal.

I didn’t know it at the time, but decades earlier a similar signal had been sent from the very same street.

THE SOUTHEAST PARANORMAL INFORMATION BUREAU

In November 1975, the Lakeland Ledger ran a story about a new office in downtown Winter Haven: the Southeast Paranormal Information Bureau (SEPIB). Its director, West Perrine, explained that the bureau existed to provide information on UFO and Bigfoot sightings and the Bermuda Triangle. Its headquarters in the Arcade on Central Avenue were lined with clippings and reports.

SEPIB was described as a place where interested residents could stop in, read accounts, and find information that was not easily accessed.

The bureau was small, but it connected Winter Haven to a larger grassroots network of UFO archives that had sprouted across the country in the 1970s. It was a local attempt to collect what would otherwise be dismissed.

The kind of information the community would need in years to come.

TONE FOUR: THE 1979 WAVE

By 1979, the knock returned with force.

On January 4, Winter Haven police officer Ron Perdue reported seeing a glowing disc above the Polk Community College Student Center at four in the morning. He estimated it at 150 feet across. It hovered for three minutes before gliding away.

On Jan. 7, 1979, Jeanette Bagley described an object “larger than a star but smaller than the moon” hanging over the campus before streaking away.

April 5, 1979, counselor Jude Macion and student Pat Boss reported two lights “like headlights” gliding silently over the college, repeating the maneuver thirty minutes later.

Oct. 11, 1979, freshmen Rick Myers and Mark Cobb, repairing a car near Lake Roy, saw a sudden silver flash. Around the same time, Phil Guthrie and Bill Cheeseman spotted a “bright white elongated light” in the sky on State Road 540 near Thornhill Road. They reported that it vanished without warning around twenty minutes later. The Winter Haven News-Chief covered the sightings below the headline “Monday’s UFO report not an individual phenomenon.”

TONE FIVE: THE KNOCK RETURNS

In preparation for a Temporal Screen article exploring UFO films, I watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” for the first time.

There had been no scene before, and there has been no movie moment since, that has reached me as deeply as the one in which François Truffaut, playing a character inspired by the legendary Jacques Vallée, makes his effort to communicate with the visitor whose arrival represents the culmination of a lifetime’s work. His face, upon receiving the reciprocated hand movements (Zoltán Kodály’s hand-sign system, a method of using hand signals to teach music), is an expression beyond joy, beyond thoughts of the moments before and those after; the expression we wear when the wonderful we hoped for but didn’t plan meets us where we stand.

That night, I began a journey that would lead me to decades of hallmarks in ufology, speculation, and pure fiction, to days turned around by the connections I would find to people, places, and experiences tracing circles and strange lines back and forth.

Among my most treasured memories from my “UFO year” have been evenings spent listening to the archived recordings at the National UFO Reporting Center.

I found my favorite call within the humanoid encounter file; in the late eighties a Missouri man described a cigar-shaped craft and beings who pointed at him “like he was in a zoo.” He was indignant, not at their presence, but at their lack of manners.

The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), founded in 1974 by Ron Gribble, provided the public with a means to report sightings systematically. The Federal Aviation Administration instructed pilots to refer such encounters to NUFORC. Airports, police stations, and the military directed thousands of callers to what was “basically a telephone, tape recorder and desktop computer run in an underground bunker by one man who collects and publishes UFO reports from across the country,” explained Peter Davenport, who took over the one-man 24/7 operation in 1994.

Each call provides a window into what was most likely a call the witness had never expected to make after experiencing what they’d likely never forget and perhaps would never speak about again. A single father describing burns after an encounter, asking the operator to call him back because he couldn’t afford the charges. His dog would no longer approach him. In the sadness of his voice, I heard the loss of a world and a desperate attempt to make sense of the new one he’d just found himself in.

That there was a voice at the end of the line, one who listened without laughter, with the same reply for the often-asked question: “No, you aren’t crazy”, sends heart and hope to the moon. Within the human record, our highest achievements no doubt include those moments of sympathy in the strange, communion in chaos, and dedication to preserving details in danger of being lost.

THE ANSWER

Three years ago, I closed a sciencefiction-themed candy store on Central Avenue.

It wasn’t until later, in my own searches to gather information for this article, that I discovered the space I’d occupied had once been the SEPIB office—-the same downtown hub described in the Ledger article of 1975.

That realization landed like a chord played back across decades. The streets I thought I knew, the buildings I had passed daily, were already carrying the history I’d been chasing in films, in archives, in stories of strange lights over lakes.

I have to think that the world holds more for those who go looking, even if they know not what for.

We don’t yet know how to make sense of everything we see in the sky. We don’t know who we will meet down the road, or how the story ends, or if it ever really does. But if we can live in a state of companionship with the unknown, we live the known easier. I’m sure someone told me that once, but it was going to take me a year full of alien days to believe it for myself.

Much more than that, I find with each passing day more evidence, both in the archives and in the living memories of Polk County residents whose reports continue to this day, that we’ve never been alone.