Utah UFO Sightings
1947: UFOs CHASE A SMALL PLANE OVER UTAH
"On the clear sunlit afternoon of July 12, 1947, Earl 'Skip' Page, his wife, Beulah, and their nine- year-old son, Ronald, were flying a two-seater (private plane) from Las Vegas (Nevada) to Salt Lake City" when they nearly collided with a squadron of UFOs high above Utah Lake.
"At roughly 3:30 p.m., a group of silver-colored, disc-shaped objects zipped past the Pages' plane, coming within 50 feet of the aircraft at the same altitude."
Fifty-one years later, Beulah, now 82, and Ronald, 60, vividly remember the encounter.
"'At first we thought it was birds. We just saw the movement,' Beulah, a Salt Lake native said in a telephone interview from her home in Olympia, Wash. 'My husband turned the plane to where they were going and they zoomed away like crazy. It got kind of scary when we turned toward their direction. They just disappeared.'"
"The entire sighting lasted only a few minutes. The Pages didn't notice markings, windows or even how many objects were in the cluster. Ronald thinks there might have been three."
"'There was definitely something there,' said Ronald, who was squeezed in between his parents but had a good view of the sky. 'Those were the days before we had jet airplanes or anything like that. I'd seen fighter aircraft in those days, but they weren't anything like what we saw.'"
Arriving in Salt Lake City, the Pages told their story to relatives and friends. But, fearing ridicule, they declined to share it with the media.
"'I remember it made them nauseous because they didn't know what it was,' said Marilyn Page, Beulah's niece, who lives in Wyoming. 'It was just something completely new they'd never seen. It was kind of a shock."
Earl Page was born in Bountiful, Utah in 1911. In 1943, he moved his family from Salt Lake City to Hanford, Washington to work as an electrical engineer at the USA's then-secret plutonium processing plant in Hanford, Washington state. Page was maintenance supervisor at Hanford when he died of a heart attack in 1960.
Interestingly, the Hanford plant itself was visited by two daylight disc UFOs in 1953. (See the Desert News of Salt Lake City for July 6, 1997, "Family saw silver discs zipping through Utah's skies" by Zack van Eyck. Many thanks to Lou Farrish of UFO NEWSCLIPPING SERVICE for this story.)
1972 Photos
