The UFO Case Police Chased and Buried — Until a Journalist Found the Recordings by Accident
- Cristina Gomez
- Jul 17
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 25
Fifteen police officers witnessed massive UFOs hovering over Trumbull Ohio communities, with one officer’s patrol car mysteriously losing power as a football field-sized craft bathed him in blinding light — all captured in real-time through authentic 911 recordings. the police tried chasing the UFO but to no avail. This is a crazy UFO police chase!
December 14th, 1994 started like any other night shift for Roy Ann Rudolph at the Trumbull County 911 dispatch center in Warren, Ohio. Just after midnight, she received what seemed like a routine call from a civilian reporting an unusual bright light hovering near Liberty Township. Her response was standard protocol: “Okay, well I’ll tell you what, we’ll check with the air base and see if they have any report of anything in the area.” She expected that would be the end of it.
But the calls kept coming. One after another, different voices from different locations, all describing the same phenomenon — a large, bright object with unusual lights hovering silently above Samson Drive near Fifth Avenue Extension. By the fourth call, Roy Ann could no longer dismiss what she was hearing. She radioed Officer Bob with urgency: “I swear to God, four calls in on an unidentified flying object over Liberty.”
When 33 News called seeking information, Roy Ann tried to downplay the situation with nervous humor, delivering what would become her most famous quote: “What the hell would they come to Liberty for? There’s no intelligent life in Liberty!” Despite her jokes, she was professional enough to recognize that multiple consistent reports demanded investigation. Callers were describing “a bluish purple glow with fire coming out the back, and it wasn’t an airplane.”
The UFO Police Chase
Rather than use the recorded radio system, Roy Ann made a personal phone call to Sergeant Toby Meloro, a trusted officer on his coffee break. She asked him to quietly check out the reports — a simple three-minute drive to Samson Drive. As Toby approached the location, an elderly man stood frantically waving his arms in the middle of the empty street. The man was clearly terrified, pointing to a large light hovering directly above his home. Toby checked for any scent of alcohol but found none — the man was stone sober and genuinely frightened.
Continuing about 200 feet down the road, Toby spotted the object himself — a brilliant, pulsating light unlike anything he’d seen before. He immediately radioed Roy Ann to confirm visual contact, but then something extraordinary happened. His patrol car suddenly lost all electrical power. The engine died, the radio went silent, and every electrical system shut down simultaneously. Above him, a blinding light descended, bathing his vehicle in radiance so intense he couldn’t look directly at it.
Instinctively reaching for his sidearm, Toby cautiously stepped out of the disabled car. Through squinted eyes, he witnessed an object roughly the size of a football field with a distinct saucer shape and intensely luminous core, hovering in complete silence. For approximately 30 seconds, Toby stood transfixed beneath this enormous craft. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the object began moving away, and his patrol car powered back on by itself without him turning the key.
When Roy Ann’s voice crackled over the radio asking why he’d been out of service for several minutes, Toby was confused. “Several minutes? What do you mean? I was only gone for a few seconds.” The time discrepancy was impossible to explain — from his perspective, the encounter had lasted maybe half a minute, but dispatch logs showed he’d been unresponsive for several minutes.
The incident expanded beyond Liberty Township as officers from neighboring jurisdictions reported similar sightings. Officer James Baker from Brookfield Township climbed an unused radar tower for a better vantage point and made the most dramatic observation of the night. His radio transmission captured real-time terror: “I’m looking at them and oh my God, this is weird. And they’re not planes because here goes the planes and I can see the planes blinking red. I think they’re scrambling planes out of the air base to go check them out.” Baker was simultaneously observing three unidentified objects changing colors in perfect unison — red, yellow, green, and blue — while military aircraft appeared to be pursuing them.
When Roy Ann contacted the local air base for information, she met swift dismissal. Despite explaining she had “five accounts, five calls in on this object” that was “low to the ground,” the operator’s response was immediate: “There is nothing out there.” He offered only an 800 number for UFO reports and showed no interest in investigating or correlating the reports with radar data.
As the night progressed, Roy Ann’s curiosity overcame her skepticism. When officers urged her to step outside and see for herself, she did exactly that. Calling the air base again, this time out of breath from running outside, she declared with excitement: “I’m going to look at it now myself!” She actually left her dispatch station twice that night to personally observe the phenomenon. Years later, she would admit she did indeed see the UFO but chose not to report it due to the intense stigma surrounding such reports in 1994.
The Case Resurfaces
The story might have remained buried forever if not for a fortunate mistake in 1996. Journalist Kenny Young, investigating a 1988 UFO sighting near Dayton, was accidentally connected to Liberty Township Police Department in Trumbull County due to an operator error. For two weeks, Young researched what he thought was the 1988 case, becoming increasingly confused as details didn’t match. When he realized the error, he had stumbled upon the 1994 Trumbull County encounter.
Young’s persistence in requesting police radio recordings initially met with denials — officials claimed no such recordings existed. But his dedication eventually impressed a county employee who located backup recordings. In 1998, four years after the incident, Young finally obtained the audio that documented one of the most thoroughly recorded UFO encounters in history. His investigation revealed additional suppressed details, including an air base security guard who admitted seeing the object but couldn’t identify it, and unconfirmed rumors that military jets had indeed been dispatched to investigate.
The Trumbull County incident stands as one of the most credible UFO cases on record, supported by hours of authentic 911 recordings, multiple trained law enforcement witnesses, and real-time documentation of events as they unfolded. It serves as a compelling example of how extraordinary encounters are often buried by institutional pressure and social stigma, only to be rediscovered years later through the persistence of dedicated researchers.
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