In 1968 I was 20 years old, a sophomore in college and a fulltime reporter for the Amarillo Daily News and Globe-Times. I covered crime – on the overnight shift.
One day, I got a tip from a kid out of Wellington, Texas, about 100 miles east of Amarillo in the Texas panhandle. The tip: His mom and dozens of other Wellington residents had seen UFOs in and around town.
Nothing particularly odd there. Before Christmas I’d received several calls from a DPS trooper and, separately, from a deputy sheriff about UFO sightings around the Childress area.
My youthful enthusiasm for gathering this story and writing it up for publication in a very conservative newspaper in a very conservative part of the country was met with rejection by the city editor, a grim man in no way eager to please a witless news upstart. He thought the very idea was silly and might harm the credibility of his newspaper.
Another equally young reporter, John DeBaun, liked the idea, though, and we joined ranks to persuade the city editor otherwise.
Early on a Monday morning, John DeBaun and I were in a drugstore in downtown Wellington. We met the tipster’s mom, then split up. I interviewed folks walking around town. DeBaun went to the farm home of Carroll Wayne Watts in nearby Loco. Yep, that’s the actual name of the town in north central Childress County, named for the locoweed that grew in the area.
The people I talked to included bankers, auto mechanics, teachers, retirees, and local merchants. Some had seen UFOs multiple times. A couple of witnesses said their dogs had alerted and barked angrily at the objects.
At the Watts farm, both the farmer and his wife told of a singular sighting during which Carroll Wayne was abducted and medically examined. It sounded far-fetched, but astonishingly Watts had photos of the craft and the crew. These were Polaroid instant photos, the kind processed within the camera body itself. We reasoned he couldn’t have possibly faked them. He informed us that, unfortunately for us, Time Magazine had already bought rights to publish the photos.
In the pictures, the craft was cigar-shaped and was hovering above a plowed wheat field. One shot showed grey human-like creatures in the foreground, with the UFO behind them. The photos lacked some clarity, but many of those instant camera pictures of that time were similarly faulty.
Leaving Wellington that evening, John and I were flummoxed. The people we talked to seemed truthful. It seemed highly unlikely that they were in collusion on a massively made-up story.
As part of follow-up reporting, I talked with Dr. J. Allen Hynek of Northwestern University, at the time head of Operation Blue Book, an Air Force investigation of UFO claims. He was particularly impressed by the existence of Polaroid instant photos and barking dogs.
I also talked to Air Force personnel at Amarillo, Wichita Falls, and Altus, Oklahoma. Not a single official source had anything to offer on military aircraft being on maneuvers in the Wellington area at the time of the sightings.
Our editors published two stories, both on the front page, about the Wellington sightings. A staff artist used our descriptions of the Polaroid pictures to do drawings to accompany our stories. The articles were picked up by wire services and versions were published around the world.
My editors were glad to allow bigger newspapers to dig into the story, and John and I were told to back off. Reflecting on our time spent with Carroll Wayne Watts, DeBaun and I concluded that he was a private man uncomfortable with public scrutiny that might take him away from his simple family farm.
The old staffers at the Amarillo paper had never liked even the idea of the story. It was way too out of the ordinary. Their preference was to bury it and move on to something of more interest to their readers like crop reports and Friday-night football scores.
And so, in the end, the truth really was out there - just not followed-up in the morning edition.
Carroll Wilson is a Texas journalist for 50 years. Author, radio show host and teacher, he sings in church, plays guitar and does some art. He’s most happy to be a husband, dad and grandfather. Has a very good dog.
