The Portage County police chase
The account
Two Ohio deputies chased a glowing object through the early morning hours for more than a hundred kilometers, all the way into Pennsylvania.
What investigators found
Project Blue Book concluded the officers had seen a satellite and then the planet Venus, a conclusion the witnesses disputed.
The story
In the early hours of April 17, 1966, deputies Dale Spaur and Wilbur Neff of Portage County, Ohio, reported a bright object that rose from a patch of woods near Ravenna and lit up their patrol car. They followed it along the roads for about an hour and a half, crossing the state line into Pennsylvania. Other officers, including a policeman from the town of Conway, said they saw the same object before it climbed and vanished.
The case made headlines and drew pressure from local politicians. The Air Force's Project Blue Book attributed the report to a satellite and, for the final stretch, to the planet Venus. The officers never accepted that explanation, and the episode became one of the most cited cases of the era, later remembered as the inspiration for a chase scene in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".