Tuesday, October 8, 1968 - Sacramento, CA
I was the Publicity Director for "Sing Out Sacramento", a group of 200 teenagers and young adults affiliated with "Up With People!". Our group, along with the Sacramento Union newspaper and KOVR-TV (if I remember correctly), were sponsering an appearence of the national cast of "Up With People!" in Hughes Stadium at Sacramento City College where I was a first year student.
There were over 8000 people in the grandstand and approximately 185 cast members on stage. The Sacramento Union had issued me a camera to take "candid" shots of the cast and crowd during the show, from the viewpoint of the cast and back stage. The Union had a professional photographer in front of the stage.
The show was about 45 minutes in from the 8:00PM starting time. I was back stage on the football playing field and had just taken a great backlit shot of the cast in silhouette from the 50 yard line as they were singing "Freedom Isn't Free." The grandstand faces East, so I was facing West.
I backed up some more thinking to try and get the crowd in as well. After opening my lens aperature to its widest and shutter speed real slow, I looked up. To my astonishment a disk shaped UFO was hovering over the back of the crowd, moving from South to North about 25 degrees up from the horizon (the top of the pressbox on the grandstand was about 15 degrees above the horizon from my viewpoint). The object diffusely reflected city lights off of its bottom curvature and light from just-past-full moon on the edge. I could not see anything of the top.
It moved toward the North, stopped for a moment, and then took off straight up at a high velocity. As it got higher it got harder and harder to see as it was only visible in reflected light. It was gone in under two seconds, dwindling to a speck that disappeared in the dark.
Now the idiot of all time report. I stood there with my mouth agape, HOLDING A CAMERA and did not take a picture! I kick myself to this day that I didn't have the presence of mind to try and photograph it.
No one in the crowd saw it... but many of the cast members, who were not dazzled by the stage lighting, did. The following Autumn I transferred to Mackinac College in Michigan (the place where "Up With People!" was started) where I found my roommate in the dorm had been a member of that cast and had seen the UFO. He told me it was the talk of the tour buses the next day on the way to their next gig. The cast members who had not seen it did not believe those who had. There were several other singers from the national cast who were members of the student body at Mackinac who had also seen the UFO. We got together and compared notes. We agreed the object was approximately three times the size of the full moon... some said they saw lights or that it glowed. I did not see that. One student said he stopped singing and doing the choreography and just stood there until the guy next to him elbowed him. None of us saw it appear... all of us saw it zoom upwards.
My parents believed me but no one else did... frustrating.