Trumbull County UFO Incident

By midnight on December 14, 1994, the Trumbull County 911 center in Warren, Ohio, had already logged several UFO reports from residents near Sampson Road, according to Kenny Young, and just after midnight more calls came in about low-flying lights over Liberty Township. Dispatcher Roy Anne Rudolph handled most calls but the extraordinary volume proved hard to dismiss.

Sergeant Toby Meloro (also spelled Tobe Melero) of the Liberty Township Police was among the first officers to head toward the lights. As he approached the lights, his patrol car suddenly lost all electrical power. Engine died, radio went silent, every system shut down. An intensely bright light descended above him. He exited his disabled vehicle and saw a giant, circular object with a luminous core. It was silent and enormous. After about thirty seconds it moved away; his car powered back on without him turning the key.

Rudolph later stated that at least 14 to 15 officers observed the phenomenon, their reports discussed on police radio. Officers from multiple departments described a brilliant red light on something huge, a bluish-green object with apparent flames, or a blue shape resembling fighter plane tail fins.

Lieutenant James Baker of Brookfield Township climbed an abandoned radar tower and reported three objects in a triangle pattern with the center object slightly higher. The lights changed colors in unison, red, yellow, green, and blue, while military aircraft appeared to be pursuing them.

Dispatch phoned the FAA control tower at the Youngstown-Warren airport around 1:00 a.m. The controller reported no traffic or unidentified targets within a 60-mile radius of Youngstown. Only one plane had departed half an hour earlier, and nothing else was present.

The Youngstown Air Reserve Station was contacted. Captain John Keytack stated no planes, experimental or otherwise, were flying that night; the base operates C-130 cargo aircraft rather than jets.

Officers sought no publicity and the case stayed buried until 1996, when Cincinnati-area researcher Kenny Young accidentally called Liberty Township Police while researching a different incident. He interviewed involved officers and conducted an in-depth study. His requests for Freedom of Information Act documents on the case were denied. The tapes surfaced another way: several telecommunicators at the county 9-1-1 center read his 1996 report, “The Trumbull County Disturbance: The Wrong Liberty,” and, acting as private citizens, found a backup set in another storage area after the originals were said to be missing. In 1998, four years after the incident, Young finally obtained the audio.

Astronomers have proposed that bright planetary scintillation, such as from Mercury or Venus, could account for color-shifting lights described by witnesses, though this does not address objects descending near the ground or Meloro’s electrical failure. At least one officer explicitly distinguished what he saw from stars and ordinary air traffic.