By Terri Jo Ryan

Tribune-Herald staff writer

Believe in them or not, flying saucers have played a role in Waco’s past and continue to excite the mind today.

Since the wreckage of an alleged “flying disc” was recovered 60 years ago by the U.S. Air Force from the deserts of Roswell, N.M., Central Texans have turned a curious eye to the skies.

But it was the flurry of UFO reports over Waco skies in the spring and summer of 1952 that had the newsrooms of the Waco Times- Herald and News-Tribune buzzing.

On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1952, an electronics instructor at James Connally Air Force Base (now the Waco campus of Texas State Technical College) named Lt. Edward Gaucher, 27, said he spotted 15 to 20 flying saucers from the Joy Drive-In Theater on Old Dallas Highway (State Highway 81 North).

He was at the theater with his wife and three children when he spotted what he called a formation of objects approaching him. They were about six miles away, about 5,000 feet in the air, and traveling an estimated 600 miles per hour. The reddish glowing objects were only seen for about 10 seconds, he said.

L.C. Headrich, operator of the Bellmead Bakery, said he also saw them that night from nearby Oaklawn Drive-In Theater, also on Highway 81. Their reports were dismissed by other observers the next day as merely sunlight reflecting off birds.

By they weren’t the only ones spotting UFOs in 1952. Hundreds of reports were taken by the U.S. military from Americans reporting aerial anomalies like flying discs, glowing domes, bluish cylindrical craft and “dark wings.”

Carl Freund of the Fort Worth Press, a former News-Tribune staff member, told the Associated Press in April 1952 he observed about 50 “glowing objects” over the Tarrant County Courthouse during the day.

And it turns out, just days before the flying saucers hit the media, a Connally AFB civilian instructor named Joseph E. Civello and his wife reported their own close encounter at the Oaklawn Drive-In Theater.

According to the Air Force’s files, on April 2, 1952, Civello and his wife noted a “flaming, yellow object” approaching them overhead from the southwest. The fast-moving cylinder appeared to be emitting particles, some kind of stream of sparks, from its tail — a tail much longer than any jet aircraft he knew, he said. It was eerily silent to boot.

On April 24, 1952, Leslie M. Parks of Waco, who worked for Tom Cuff Electrical Contracting Co., was watching a movie at the Oaklawn with his wife when he saw two groups of glowing tangerine discs cross the night sky.

Another dozen or so strange sightings were recorded that spring and summer in Waco.

In late September, according to the newspapers’ archives, the furor was about over. The Times-Herald received a postcard from an anonymous source who claimed a Waco citizen had figured out the flying saucer, “motors and all,” and wanted to get his blueprints to the Army “for help in the atomic field,” but didn’t know how to go about it.

Waco’s newspapers made merry of astronomical oddities throughout the months with reports of the nightly sky shows, dubbing the unidentified flying objects as “flying pumpkinheads,” “glowjoes” and “thingamadodgers.” They joked that the new city manager’s first order of businesses needed to be attacking the plague of sky-skippers. North Highway 81 was dubbed Flying Saucer Row.

tjryan@wacotrib.com

757-5746