CIRCLEVILLE — The first sign that something was amiss at the Hartinger home about 1 a.m. on that long-ago February night was that Pal, the family’s beloved collie, just wouldn’t stop barking.
The next thing Pete Hartinger knew, his brother had shaken him awake, dragged him from his bed and pulled him toward a second-floor window. And there it was: the brightest light he had ever seen in the sky, holding steady maybe 1,000 feet up. Hartinger — a 17-year-old high school junior back on that Feb. 27 in 1958 — watched in wonder as the saucer-shaped object floated over the local feed mill before drifting out of sight.
But his life-changing moment wasn’t yet over.
Hartinger recalled what happened just seconds later. “A totally different object came back. It was a reddish-orange object, a circle just like the setting sun. It stopped and hovered in midair … and the top half folded down onto itself.”
Then it tilted toward the ground and was simply gone.
“That just blew my mind,” said Hartinger, now 79. “That, to me, was a no-doubter. People ask me all the time, ‘Do you believe UFOs exist?’ No, I don’t believe. I know.”
That was one of four sightings that Hartinger has had, the first having occurred just five days prior when he and a buddy were headed to a high school basketball tournament at the Pickaway County Fairgrounds.
By the time he graduated from high school in 1959, Hartinger had joined a national UFO research group, and he hasn’t stopped studying unidentified flying objects since.
By January 1989, he was fully embedded in the culture and had found two other men in Pickaway County — Jon Fry and Delbert Anderson — who shared his interest. Together, the three friends founded the Roundtown UFO Society (RUFOS), which still meets on the second Thursday of every month.
In 31 years, only six meetings have been canceled, and a meager $10 will buy you a lifetime membership.
>> Video: Founder of UFO group discusses sighting on Pickaway County farm
These days, the research and work that the society does is in high demand because UFOs are, shall we say, having a moment.
The Department of Defense in April authorized the release of three videos of sightings by Navy pilots — one from 2004 and two from 2015. In one of the videos, as the object is shown on the screen, a pilot can be heard saying: “There’s a whole fleet of them,” before continuing, “My gosh. Look at that thing, dude.”
Then The New York Times and The Washington Post wrote high-profile stories about once-covert government programs that studied such craft. In July, the Times spelled out that the government’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force still exists under the Office of Naval Intelligence. At least some of the government’s findings from over the years are expected to be released publicly sooner rather than later.
All this is a long way of saying that the members of the Roundtown UFO Society are enjoying their own kind of moment as well.
“I think this is the biggest story of our lifetime,” said Hartinger, who after a stint in the Army spent 20 years with the Ohio Air National Guard and retired after 33 years with the DuPont chemical plant in Circleville, the city he’s called home for most of his life. “Our goal is to condition the public to not be skeptical.”
And people these days are most assuredly hungry for information.
At 35, Cameron Jones is among the younger members of the society (there are about 70) and runs its social-media accounts. In the four weeks between the July and August meetings, the reach of RUFOS’ tweets almost doubled, and the group had 65 new followers in that time, a record.
Holly Zachariah
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