Richard Beckwith has been fascinated most of his life by UFOs and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe other than on one small, indistinct blue marble orbiting our sun.
So much so, he’s investigated hundreds of UFO sightings and reports of unexplained phenomenon around Wyoming.
Late Saturday night and into the early morning hours of Sunday, the Rock Springs attorney was rewarded by not only seeing his first UFO, he captured more than 40 minutes of it on video.
The pulsating orange blob of light bobbing back and forth in the night sky above Sweetwater County resembles a glowing Tylenol, while others viewing a clip of it Beckwith posted to Facebook say it resembles a police car strobe.
Whatever it is, Beckwith said it’s the true definition of a UFO.
“It’s ‘unidentified,’” he told Cowboy State Daily. “That’s all a UFO is. It’s something that’s ‘unidentified.’ It doesn’t mean it’s an alien (spaceship). You can’t say that it’s aliens. All you know is it’s some kind of object in the sky that you can’t explain.”
What The Heck Is That?
As Wyoming state director for the Mutual UFO Network, Beckwith has taken and investigated hundreds of UFO reports over the years. After earning a degree in molecular biology, he went to law school and now is a practicing lawyer, including serving as the city attorney for Rock Springs.
When he got a call from a friend late Saturday to come check out an unusual light in the sky, Beckwith went right over. But by the time he got there it had disappeared, so he went home.
When he was called and told it was back, Beckwith rushed out again, this time with his camera equipment. And after setting up his camera with a 400 mm zoom lens on it, the phenomenon appeared again and he pressed record.
In the sky above Scotts Bottom Road east of Green River in southwest Wyoming, the light seemed to oscillate back and forth for about 40 minutes, and at one point a smaller white light seemed to come out of it, hover for a few moments, then disappear.
In the video, the movement of the object seems to be consistent with camera movement associated with having a high-powered telephoto lens equipped. But Beckwith said the camera was on a tripod and stationary.
“The camera wasn’t moving. (The object) was oscillating back and forth in a very steady rhythm,” he said. “It was in the air, and even with my telephoto lens, the best I could get was a bright orange light.
“There’s a clip where this little white orb (that’s) clearly associated with the object comes out, and those objects are moving. The movement is very steady. That movement is definitely not camera shake.”
Now, Investigate
After the light disappeared, Beckwith said he and his friend drove down the road to investigate and make sure there was nothing there that could explain what they’d just witnessed. There they met another vehicle coming the other way with three teenagers who reported seeing the same thing.
“They said, ‘We saw it too. We were up on the hill and it appeared above us,’” he said.
Now the real investigation begins, Beckwith said. That includes checking with local airports, and he's preparing a Freedom of Information Act request for a nearby radar installation for what it might have picked up.
There’s also lots of math to try and pinpoint the location of where the lights were in the night sky, based on interviews with others who saw it.
“Once I’m able to get all the details from them, I can use triangulation to do that,” Beckwith said, adding that also could help determine how big the object was.
Everyone Has An Opinion
While he knows he saw a UFO, because it’s unidentified, Beckwith isn’t willing to say he saw a spaceship or a reconnaissance vessel for an otherworldly invasion.
“Unless it lands on your lawn and people come out and say, ‘Hey, I want to introduce myself,’ we just can’t say what it is,” he said.
But that hasn’t stopped people responding to his video on Facebook from chiming in with their theories.
“Those are lights on a military aircraft and I’m guessing the white light you saw emitting were some type of sortie for training exercises,” speculated Jenny Nicodemus.
Another thought that “it’s probably a high-school kegger and bonfire.”
Jim Shelton states mater-of-factly that what Beckwith saw high in the sky was “my campfire.”
And several said it resembled the orange oscillating light in the front grill of the famous KITT car from the 1980s TV show “Knight Rider.”
Max Galbraith coordinates the planetarium at the University of Wyoming. After viewing Beckwith’s video, he wasn’t ready to proclaim it a true UFO.
“It’s certainly an interesting video,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s certainly hard to place where it is in the sky or anything like that. I guess if they were in Green. River looking over Scotts Bottom Road, then that would mean they were looking east over what could be a number of industrial sites.”
While the UW planetarium doesn’t get many calls from people who see things in the air, it does field a few, Galbraith said.
And in the case of Beckwith’s video, he said he can’t tell if the object is “actually flying … (or) somebody on a hill with an LED strip.”
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com and Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
