UFO spotted in Damon

By Tracy Gupton

Columbia Historical Museum Board Member

What one Damon resident remembers as “a lot of commotion,” her older brother sums up as “a lot of abnormalities going on.” The “commotion” got a surplus of media coverage 57 years ago and altered the lives of a pair of Brazoria County Sheriff’s deputies whose report of making contact with an unidentified flying object was met with skepticism and heavily scrutinized.

          But the stories told by former West Columbia Police Chief Bob Goode and former Brazoria County Sheriff’s Department Chief Deputy Billy McCoy never wavered and, because of the two men’s honest reputations and positions of authority as sheriff’s deputies at the time of the incident, were mostly accepted as factual. Visitors from outer space made an appearance in Brazoria County the night of Sept. 3, 1965.

          Goode and McCoy had worked security at the Sweeny Bulldogs’ home football game that Friday night and had been patrolling along Highway 36 between West Columbia and Damon when they observed a “brilliant purple glow” on the horizon in front of them at around 11 p.m. Testimony the two sheriff’s deputies provided Air Force investigators after their harrowing event revealed they saw a smaller, less powerful blue light emerge from the larger purple light.

          At first Goode thought the odd sight was just oil field lights off in the distance near West Columbia, but he soon agreed with McCoy, who was riding in the front passenger seat while Goode drove, that what was occurring had nothing to do with the oil field. 

          They estimated the purple and blue lights were more than 5 miles from the highway when they first noticed them, but McCoy told Air Force investigators those distant lights were right on top of them within 3 or 4 seconds. 

The bulk of the object was plainly visible at this time and appeared to be triangular shaped with a bright purple light on the left end and the smaller, less bright, blue light on the right end,” McCoy described the UFO to the Air Force in 1965. “The bulk of the object appeared to be dark gray in color with no other distinguishing features. It appeared to be about 200 feet wide and 40 to 50 feet thick in the middle, tapering off toward both ends.

          Goode had the Sheriff’s Department patrol car accelerating in excess of 100 miles per hour down Highway 36 while he and McCoy said the UFO hovered above them, bathing the interior of their car in bright purple light. Eventually the UFO’s pursuit ended, and the deputies observed it return over the roadside pasture at a distance from them.

          Kenneth Hoelewyn of Damon said he was a junior at Needville High School in the fall of 1965 and remembers the UFO incident clearly.

          “Bob Goode had been bitten on the hand by an alligator a few days earlier,” Hoelewyn recalls, “and his hand wound healed rapidly after Bob’s arm was exposed to the bright light” from the UFO.

          Kenneth’s younger sister Helen Noble, who is currently president of the Damon Independent School District Board of Directors, was in elementary school at the time but still remembers everyone around Damon and West Columbia talking about the two deputies’ claims of being overtaken by a flying saucer on Highway 36.

          Kevin McCoy, son of the late Billy McCoy, was the same age as Noble when his father became an instant local celebrity due to his run-in with the UFO. Kevin was interviewed many years ago by Houston TV station KHOU Channel 11 for a story on the 1965 UFO incident.

          “I don’t believe it could possibly be anything from this earth,” the younger McCoy told a Channel 11 interviewer in reference to what his father and Goode experienced out on the Damon highway. “Dad said what he remembered more than anything is he said it just absolutely scared the hell out of them.”

          The Brazoria County Historical Museum in Angleton has a file on the UFO incident which includes a taped interview with Billy McCoy recorded in 1985, 20 years after the incident. McCoy and Goode have both passed away but Kevin McCoy and Ray Goode, son of Bob Goode, are both believers that what their fathers said they encountered actually happened.

          “An Air Force officer talked to my dad,” Ray Goode mentioned on his Facebook page when asked about the famous UFO incident from 1965. “It’s a pretty cool story.”

          Rueben Grothe commented, “It’s true. I saw the gator, saw the wound (on Bob Goode’s hand), the redness after the UFO sighting,” in response to comments about the incident on Ray Goode’s Facebook page.

          George Scott remembered Goode and McCoy coming to his house in West Columbia the night of their UFO encounter. “The deputies made their first post-incident stop at my dad’s house. I opened the front door and could tell something had happened” by the looks on the deputies’ faces. 

          George Scott’s father was Jim Scott, former mayor of West Columbia who was serving as city judge in 1965. In his testimony to the Air Force investigator, Deputy McCoy said that Jim Scott and his family drove to the area where McCoy and Goode had seen the UFO later that same night the deputies informed them of their sighting but the Scotts reportedly did not see anything unusual.

          Ray Goode’s reference to his father being interviewed by investigators was a result of the two deputies reporting their unusual encounter to Ellington Air Force Base. Air Force Major Laurence Leach Jr.’s written report on the Damon highway incident stated, “There is no doubt in my mind that they definitely saw some unusual object or phenomenon.”

          Oddly, on the same night in 1965, there was another report of a UFO encounter in New Hampshire. “The Incident at Exeter” sparked an Air Force investigation and became one of America’s most celebrated and scrutinized sightings, second only to the 1947 crash of an unidentified flying object at Roswell, New Mexico.

          The Hoelewyn siblings said their father, Tom Hoelewyn, was a Texaco oil field worker near West Columbia and was good friends with former Deputy Bob Goode. Noble said her dad was Goode’s “go to person” for anything occurring on or near CR 4 in the Damon area.

          Kenneth Hoelewyn, who worked for NASA’s space program for 31 years as an electronics technician for Philco-Ford and later Lockheed-Martin on mission control communications systems, said his father had several jeeps that could be used to take Goode or other sheriff’s deputies into pastures in the Damon area when they needed to investigate anything off the beaten path.

          Both Hoelewyn siblings have experienced unusual sightings of their own in the Damon area since Goode and McCoy reported their encounter with the UFO. Noble said she witnessed “a horrific bright light that lit up” the interior of her house at night for 10 to 15 seconds, “then went away.”

          The following morning, she discovered a 6- to 8-foot circle of burnt grass around a plum tree in her yard, and the tree had been broken off about half-way up its trunk.  When her father Tom Hoelewyn, who passed away in 1993, saw the burnt circle of grass and damaged plum tree on their Damon property, he told his daughter, “You had visitors last night.”

          And Kenneth said he and his father observed an unusual bright light on the San Bernard River when they were on a coon hunt when Ken was young.  “We were running coon hounds on my grandmother’s property near Mound Creek when we saw a strange light about a mile and a half away,” Hoelewyn recalls.  “The light went from tree level to about 500 to 1,000 feet in the air, made a movement of a significant amount parallel to the ground the entire length of the rice field, then the light retreated.”

          Hoelewyn said he and his father went home after witnessing that odd phenomenon.  “I have no idea what it was. It was on Jules Todd’s, land and he never let anyone hunt on his property in those days.”

          In Deputy McCoy’s taped recollections of the UFO incident, he said they were “about two or three miles south of Damon” when he saw the very bright purple light on the horizon. “There was a bright moon out and it cast a shadow of the object on the ground immediately below it in the grass. The night was clear and there were no clouds or haze.

          “Neither of us had anything to drink on the night we saw the lights and the object,” McCoy said. He was 38 and Bob Goode was 50 in September 1965. They had both been working as deputies in the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Department for about 10 years at the time.

          “He firmly, from the time he saw it to the day he died, knew it was real, no doubt,” Kevin McCoy said in reference to his father’s UFO experience in 1965.