Elmwood-style Saucer Causes Blackout

A California story from September, 1976 uniquely parallels George Wheeler’s Elmwood encounter in April of that same year. Wheeler described a saucer type of craft with a long black hose-like appendage hanging off the bottom. Bill Pecha offered a similar description of saucer that appeared over his barn on the evening of September 9, 1976. He said, “I saw these objects hanging down, like cable like fixtures hanging down below it.”

Pecha was watching television at his rural home in Colusa, California around 1:00 AM when the power failed. He went outside to check the power supply. His whole farm had gone dark. At the time, Pecha did not know that the blackout extended to the entire county. He looked up and saw a craft hovering over his barn. He described it as a huge saucer-shaped craft with a high dome. The craft appeared “as big around as the whole barn.” The air around him felt heavily static charged and his skin seemed to tingle. Frozen in place, he stared at it for some two minutes. The craft made no sound at all. Pecha took note of the cable like extensions hanging from the craft, and he seemed to see them retract.

I looked up and this is when I seen the huge object above my house and over parts of the barn. I judged it to be at least 150 feet across, it was saucer shaped with a high dome, it was very shiny on the underneath, it was a porcelain type finish.. and I was getting a tremendous shock all over my body, my hair was standing up and I had an electrical static feeling on the hair on my arms and on my head. As it moved out over the field I could start seeing more portions of the top half which was domed shaped and concaves on the side of the dome – sort of like a lemon squeezer.

Pecha said, “It looked to me like it was drawing electricity out of the power poles. It has these beams on the transformers … I don’t know if it was just looking at them or drawing energy from them, but it looked to me like it was drawing something from it.”

Pecha retreated back into the house to get his wife, Linda. By the time he called her to the window, the object had withdrawn by several miles , but they could see it returning, sweeping the ground with three giant spotlight beams. The lights illuminated the neighbors farm with a huge beam, some three-hundred feet in diameter.

The Pechas panicked, woke their children, loaded the family into the pickup truck, and fled into the night. Pecha drove without headlights to try to evade the craft but the UFO seemed to pursue them down the road. A mile or so into the chase, Pecha needed to apply the brakes to cross the railroad tracks, well-aware that the brake lights would betray the truck’s location. “I figured, Oh Christ! He’s really going to find us now!” At that moment, the craft sped away like a flash toward the Sacramento area. “It just went away so fast, you can’t believe it!”

Pecha described the craft he saw as an upside down cup, but he said, “I hate to say this, but you know the move they have on TV called The Invaders? It looked identical to that.”

Pecha saw two other smaller lights in conjunction with the main craft. A short time later, the power returned. Pecha called the police, and the police referred the case to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) hotline.

Although separated by half a continent, the Pecha story has a lot in common with the Wheeler incident. Both happened in the middle of the night, both describe a lit saucer-like craft approximately the same size with appendages extending from the bottom. Moreover, Pecha said the craft seemed to be siphoning power from the transformers of the power line. It’s been often suggested by investigators and locals that the Elmwood craft are attracted to the high voltage powerlines outside of Elmwood.

Whatever the case may be, the Pecha encounter is an intriguing story on its own. Fortunately, we can hear the original NUFORC interview with Pecha. Click on the video below to get his first-hand description of the event the day after the incident.

Bill Pecha – Colusa, California, September 9th, 1976.