The B-Files: A flying saucer in Baltimore County?

All material in this article is sourced from declassified federal military records housed at the National Archives. Certain sections mirror a scripted episode of the sci-fi TV series “The X-Files.”

Text appears on screen: THE FOLLOWING STORY IS INSPIRED BY TRUE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS.

LOCATION: LOCH RAVEN DAM — NIGHT — OCT. 26, 1958

A pair of headlights pierce through the moonless evening.

CAMERA FOLLOWS as PHILLIP SMALL and ALVIN COHEN (late 20s) drive around the bend. They spy an egg-shaped object, hovering 75 to 100 feet above the double-arched steel frame of the bridge. It is iridescent, shimmering like an overexposed Polaroid. Suddenly their car engine stalls. The lights shut off. The radio falls silent.

Small fiddles with the key in the ignition. Cohen shifts uneasily. The men exit the car and peer at the white orb above the bridge. Thirty seconds pass.

The egg SHOOTS up. A BRILLIANT FLASH OF LIGHT ENGULFS THE SKY. A CLAP OF THUNDER REVERBERATES. A BLAST OF HEAT RIPPLES THROUGH THE AIR. In the blink of an eye, the egg is a speck of distant light. Then, nothing.

What happened?

Whatever Small and Cohen saw at the Loch Raven Reservoir nearly 70 years ago, that night has left an indelible impression on Baltimore folklore.

Their story, which coincided with the beginning of Cold War-era anxieties and American preoccupation with close encounters of the third kind, has been preserved in military records.

Declassified transcripts from the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book — a government-sanctioned inquiry into UFOs — show that as soon as the fluorescent egg disappeared, Small and Cohen turned their car around. They didn’t dare cross the bridge.

They found a phone booth at the intersection of Joppa Road and Loch Raven Boulevard and rang the Ground Observer Corps, a post-World War II Civil Defense organization dedicated to watching the skies for enemy aircraft.

“Aww, come on now,” a corps member told Small in disbelief. The then-27-year-old insisted that he still wanted to file a report, but the man hung up.

Small dialed 911, and two Baltimore County Police patrolmen responded to the scene. They listened and filed an incident report. Records show Small and Cohen told the officers from Towson that their faces were burning. Both men were afraid they were exposed to radiation.

A doctor from what is now the University of Maryland St. Joseph’s Medical Center told Small and Cohen that they “had nothing to worry about.”

In interviews with four employees from Peerce’s Plantation, a restaurant a mile up the road from Loch Raven Boulevard, Air Force investigators realized that Small and Cohen were not the only eyewitnesses.

Robert Hargraves and John Lomax said they saw the “glowing light” just one day after Small and Cohen reported their burns.

The restaurant colleagues said that light “disintegrated” before their eyes, but didn’t tell anyone because “they felt that they would be called ‘crazy,’” according to military records.

Those transcripts show that several other Peerce employees heard the same “double boom” that Small described as a “thunderclap” as the egg disappeared from the sky on Oct. 26, 1958.

‘I wish I hadn’t seen it.’

The Loch Raven UFO also caught the attention of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, another civilian-led research nonprofit.

Co-founded by U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Donald Keyhoe in 1956, the committee advocated for transparent, scientific investigations of UFOs. Members were skeptical of those who claimed contact with aliens.

Armed with Geiger counters used to detect gamma ray radiation, investigators traveled to Baltimore County in the days after the sighting to interview Small and Cohen. They photographed the bridge, measured the men’s burns and took samples from the white dots that appeared on Small’s car, according to federal records.

It is unclear what the since-defunct organization found. Archival documents from the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena are maintained by the National UFO Historical Records Center in Albuquerque.

No matter how many times they repeated their story to various investigators, Small and Cohen seemed consumed by the terror they experienced.

“I am sorry I saw it,” Small told the Air Force. “I wish I hadn’t seen it. ... I hoped what I did see would add to the national interest or national information that would maybe help understand these things a little better.”

The lieutenant assigned to investigate the Loch Raven UFO made the following conclusions:

• The weather was not to blame.
• The egg-shaped object was positioned too low in the sky to have been an aircraft.
• “Natural fluorescent gases” were ruled out because of the noise the object made.

Out of over 12,000 encounters recorded in Project Blue Book, less than 6% were officially “unidentifiable.”

The Loch Raven UFO was one of them.

Officially ‘unidentifiable’

Paul Carr, 68, doesn’t think Small and Cohen were crazy.

The retired astronautical engineer from Silver Spring has collected and investigated several hundred reports of supernatural sightings through his volunteer research organization Aerial Phenomena Investigations.

“We don’t have any definitive evidence of other civilizations in the universe, but it sure does seem like there should be,” said Carr, who founded the group 15 years ago. “What’s so special about us?”

Just last week, the U.S. Department of Defense released another batch of unresolved cases compiled by the government — spanning from 1949 to June of this year.

Carr explained that his organization ranks all the reports they receive on a strangeness scale from zero to five. Zero means the phenomenon is explainable. They’ve never ranked a case above a four.

“A five would be a slam dunk ... they’re here,” he said, referring to the proverbial extraterrestrial.

Although Aerial Phenomena has never formally investigated the Loch Raven UFO, Carr said they would probably label the strangeness in between a two and a three, given the number of eyewitnesses and physical evidence.

Today, Bridge #1, or the Yellott Bridge, where Small and Cohen hid behind their car that night, no longer exists. The bridge was demolished in 1988 and replaced by the safer, modern version that stands today.

Last week, on the embankment where the bridge once began, local historian Josh Bell noted that Loch Raven has long been the site of a series of inexplicable events.

“There’s been a lot of really interesting weird, true crime things that happened,” Bell said. “A lot of horrendous murders, a lot of unfortunate suicides.”

The reservoir itself sits on a ghost town named Warren, a forgotten mill community flooded in 1921 to expand the region’s drinking water.

In 1977, an Ohio businessman named Wilbur Charles French went missing near Loch Raven, Bell added.

When French first disappeared, an Ohio psychic called Baltimore County police to relay a message she received about French, a “bridge” and the name “Sarah.”

E. Jay Miller, a former police spokesperson, told The Baltimore Sun he got goosebumps when French was pulled out of the reservoir in 1984 and Miller saw “Sarah” written in graffiti on the bridge.

“We don’t diminish things we don’t know,” Miller said then. “Who knows what’s happening with the mind?”

LOCATION: AIR FORCE BASE, WASHINGTON D.C. — DATE — NOV. 13, 1958

LT. BERT R. STAPLES presses play on the tape and Small’s voice crackles through the recorder. The investigating officer begins transcribing on his typewriter as the young man speaks.

Small (VOICEOVER)

I do know that they exist, now that I have seen it myself. I am not saying that it was a flying saucer, I don’t know. I do know there are at least such things now as UFOs.

DISSOLVE into the typewriter as the lieutenant continues to hunt and peck across the keyboard. Hours pass. Staples is ready to file his report.

Staples

(muttering under his breath as he types)

As far as this investigation has gone, this UFO remains unidentified.

THE END