Close Encounters of the Key Peninsula Kind

It was 7:30 p.m. on a Sunday in the early fall of 1960. It was late enough to be dark, but still early enough that children could play outside in the last lingering light.

Eleven-year-old Claudia Loy and her 9-year-old sister Debby Englund — then the Olson sisters — were horsing around on the lawn with their older sister Donna and cousins Cindy and Robin Radonich at the Radonich family’s home near Devil’s Head in Longbranch. From their perch 1,000 feet from the shoreline and 100 feet above the beach, they could see where the Nisqually Reach met Drayton Passage, Anderson Island just across the water, and the usual evening twilight glowing against Mount Rainier, looming beyond.

Then came the unusual.

As they looked up, they saw something hovering above the trees that lined the bluff: a large, silent spherical silhouette of an object rimmed with lights. For a minute or two, it slowly drifted southwest along the shore before disappearing into the night.

“We weren’t scared,” remembered Loy, who has lived in the area nearly all her life. “We thought it was cool; we were screaming and jumping up and down. But we joked, ‘What if they come and get us?’ ”

To the five girls, the unique-looking craft was like no airplane or helicopter they had ever seen. It fit only one story: the same one they knew from 1950s comic books and sci-fi shows, where “they” came silently from the skies.

Such stories, whispered around campfires or shared with a nervous laugh at family dinners, have circulated across the Key Peninsula for generations. Yet the stigma of admitting to seeing something unusual in the air often keeps them from becoming public.

For those willing to talk or look for answers, few guides are better than James Clarkson, former Washington State Director of the Mutual UFO Network. A retired military police officer, Aberdeen detective, and state fraud investigator now living near Port Townsend, Clarkson has spent decades applying law enforcement techniques to the mysteries of UFOs, or today’s term of choice, UAP — Unidentified Aerial (or Anomalous) Phenomena. The newer term sidesteps the baggage of “flying saucer,” a phrase that first entered the Washington state lexicon after a pilot described strange objects near Mount Rainier in June 1947. That report is often considered the first official UFO case in modern history, just weeks before the far better-known incident at Roswell. Since the National UFO Reporting Center started collecting data, Washington has logged more than 7,500 UFO/UAP sightings, the highest count in the nation.

Clarkson’s investigative rigor has made him one of the Northwest’s most respected voices on the subject. He approaches UFOs the way he once approached his own police cases: gather evidence, weigh testimony, and decide what conclusion the facts will allow.

“The most interesting witnesses are those with something to lose by coming forward: law enforcement officers, military personnel, professional pilots,” Clarkson said. “People whose careers depend on honesty, logic, and reason. If they tell you about a UFO, that’s significant.” He calls such sightings “high strangeness.”

One of Clarkson’s most vivid high strangeness cases unfolded in Vancouver, Washington, in 2014. A federal agent, wary of ridicule and professional risk, eventually agreed to meet Clarkson after first demanding absolute confidentiality. The agent described a “classic flying disc” crossing the sky on a bright afternoon, banking slightly so that the sun flashed against its metallic surface — before, in his words, it simply wasn’t there anymore. Moments later, an F-15 fighter jet tore across the same stretch of sky. Clarkson tracked down FAA radar data that showed an unidentified object with no transponder in the same location during that time.

“That’s as good as it gets without bringing you a UFO on a trailer,” he said.

The investigator’s measured confidence lends weight to accounts that might otherwise be dismissed, even in rural communities like the KP, where unusual lights in the sky tend to attract attention.

A woman living in Home, who asked not to be named, described sitting on her terrace during the day last summer when a raven began dive-bombing something 50 feet up, just above the trees. At first, she thought it was something caught in the wind, until she realized it was a shiny metallic sphere, “about the size of a golf ball — moving through the air at maybe 5 to 10 miles an hour.” The raven harassed it repeatedly, but the object never wavered. “I’m pretty logical and I try not to jump to conclusions,” she said, “But the raven was giving it everything, and it didn’t change its path at all. I can’t explain that.”

She quickly dismissed the idea that it could’ve been a drone, saying it didn’t have propellers and was silent.

Decades before the sighting in Home, Debby Englund recalled a similar moment from that night in 1960 at Devil’s Head. Earlier that day, before the larger object appeared, Englund was at her grandparents’ house right next door to the Radonich house. She was looking through her grandfather’s 18-inch telescope across the water when she saw “a dot going up and down and sideways” above McNeil Island.

Clarkson later suggested these two sightings may have been what he calls an “Unoccupied Vehicle of Unknown Origin,” and mused that humanity has often sent explorers out before settling new lands, or for scientific research; why wouldn’t “others” do the same?

Other KP locals have described even stranger events. A longtime resident recalled a series of encounters stretching back decades: a silver disc above a schoolyard in California in 1974, glowing orbs in a cornfield two years later, a multicolored, diamond-shaped object over a highway in 1997. Each, they said, seemed to mark a turning point in their life. “I equate each sighting with a personality change or ‘upgrade’ that made me a better person.”

Around 2021, in the Rocky Bay area of Vaughn, a witness and their daughter “stared with jaws dropped open” as a massive, triangular craft with rows of lights hovered just above the trees, pivoted silently, and glided toward the east without a sound.

Clarkson is cautious about broad theories, but decades of casework have revealed consistent themes. Rural areas, like the Key Peninsula, tend to produce more compelling reports. “If you’re in an urban area, there’s too much distraction and too many lights. When you’re in a more rural area, if something looks really odd, it’s very readily apparent.”

Another pattern: water. “Bodies of water and UFOs go together like bread and butter, Clarkson noted. Nuclear sites are another hotspot, and the Key Peninsula is only 25 miles away from Bangor’s nuclear submarine base in Kitsap County.

Skeptics would point out that eyewitnesses can misperceive familiar phenomena — planes, satellites, drones — in extraordinary ways. Clarkson acknowledges as much. Of the cases he investigated, many could be explained as natural or man-made, a few were undecidable, and the rest fell into that rare category of “UFO gold.” But he is equally convinced that some reports can’t be dismissed so easily. “Even with strict standards, the field is fascinating,” he said. “The history is extraordinary, and these experiences can change people’s lives. I’ve always felt there’s an essential truth under it all.”

Where skeptics urge caution, Clarkson urges curiosity. He doesn’t have ironclad proof that UFOs are alien or nonhuman, but does feel there’s enough credible evidence to justify his more than 2,000 investigations.

“In law enforcement, you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt for conviction, but only a preponderance of evidence for an arrest warrant,” he said. “If the evidence points to a conclusion, then that’s my conclusion.”

On the Key Peninsula, that truth flickers just out of reach: in the shimmering oval that startled a family of young girls in Longbranch in 1960, in a raven’s futile assault on a metallic sphere in Home, in the silent shadow of a triangle gliding over the trees in Vaughn. These stories may never be explained to anyone’s satisfaction. But they linger — etched in memory and retold across generations — reminders that for all we know for sure about the skies, there is still room for mystery.