Jana Cone
The Tifton Gazette
January 25, 2007 10:27 pm
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KELLTOWN — A South Georgia ufologist has reported a sighting of a UFO in a small community between Moultrie and Tifton about a week ago.
The UFO was sighted near the community of Kelltown in Tift County about 6:15 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 17, according to Billy Rachaels of Thomasville, who documents UFO sightings for the national organization Mutual UFO Network.
“It was spectacular,” Rachaels said.
Rachaels said the sighting was made of a lone unidentified flying object just at dark along Highway 319 South.
“It was flying at fairly low level,” Rachaels said. “It had a lot of lights. It had a ring around the center of it, like the planet Saturn.”
Rachaels said UFOs with the ring around the center are not seen as often as other shapes.
“It was impressive,” he said. “About 10 to 12 cars pulled over to the side of the road so they could watch it.”
Rachaels, who was born and raised in Thomasville, worked in Tifton for three years at WTIF. “I have been a radio-newsman for 35 years,” he said. He is now retired and documents UFO sightings as a hobby.
“I was working in Tifton during the UFO wave of 1972 to 1974,” he said. “The sightings started near Dawson and eventually spread to 12 states. There were just a lot of sightings.”
Rachaels recalled a sighting in 1973 that occurred between Tifton and Ashburn.
“A woman was on Interstate 75 going to Ashburn and all of a sudden her car went dead,” he said. “She had to have her car towed in.”
The woman said she saw a spacecraft and spaceman nearby her vehicle.
Rachaels said he spoke with the woman’s mechanic and the man told him the woman’s car engine had melted from the inside out.
“Spacecraft have been known to stop car engines,” Rachaels said.
Around that same time, Rachaels said a UFO was seen in Doerun. It was flying close to the bridge at the Ocklocknee river.
“The spacecraft actually landed in the roadway and blocked traffic,” Rachaels said. “The man who saw that one said it looked like the top of a grain silo.”
Rachaels said he has been documenting sightings for 40 years now.
“I take it very seriously,” he said. “Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan reported seeing UFOs and both Barry Goldwater and Gerald Ford were very interested in the subject.”
Rachaels said his first sighting was a daytime sighting in Thomasville in 1967.
“It was going along in level flight, real close, about 2,000 feet above us,” he said. “One minute it was there and then it was gone in a second.”
“There was no exhaust and no sound,” Rachaels said. “The craft was smooth, with no openings.”
He said it was shaped like a barbell, long in the middle and round on the ends. “It was shiny,” he said, “like polished silver.”
Rachaels said that within minutes the sky filled with U.S. Air Force planes.
“I think they were tracking it on radar,” he said.
Rachaels pointed out that not all UFOs are spacecraft.
“Anything you can’t identify is a UFO,” he said. “Lots of people see things that are UFOs but not all of them are spacecraft.”
Rachaels said MUFON “is the most prestigious (organization) in the UFO field.”
“It has been around since 1969,” he said.
Rachaels said MUFON meets the first Saturday of each month in Boston, Ga., at the Boston hardware store.
“We have been meeting there since April last year,” Rachaels said. “Before that we met in Cairo.”
“We get together and talk about the latest sightings,” he said.
The Tifton Gazette was unable to confirm the UFO sighting in Kelltown last week by contacting the Tift County Sheriff’s Office and the Georgia State Patrol for any incident reports.
“We didn’t have any reports of a sighting,” David Haire, public information officer with TCSO, said.
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