The Cash–Landrum encounter

On the night of 29 December 1980, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Landrum's seven-year-old grandson Colby were driving home through pine woods near Huffman, Texas, when a large diamond-shaped object blocked the road at treetop height, venting flame downward with intense heat — the car's dashboard reportedly soft to the touch. After it climbed away, the three counted a large formation of tandem-rotor helicopters, which they identified as CH-47 Chinooks, apparently escorting it; other witnesses in the area independently reported heavy helicopter traffic that night.

In the following weeks all three suffered illness consistent with radiation or intense ultraviolet exposure — Cash most severely, with burns, hair loss, and weeks of hospitalization. Their claim against the United States, on the theory that anything escorted by two dozen military helicopters was a government device, was dismissed in 1986 after every service branch testified it owned no such craft and had no helicopters in the area; the Army's Inspector General inquiry — instigated at a senator's request — likewise found no unit that could account for the formation.

The result is the record at its most uncomfortable: documented injuries, a specific and falsifiable helicopter claim that no institution would own, and a court disposition that turns on the object's nonexistence rather than the witnesses' unreliability. The Bergstrom AFB interview tapes, in which base personnel took the women's account seriously enough to record it at length, survive. No explanation on the record covers both the object and the helicopters.