More than 35 years passed before Bill Schroeder and his cousin, Dennis Force, talked openly with each other about a perception-altering incident that went down while both were on military duty in Florida. Prior to that, whenever the two were visiting and a UFO show appeared on TV, “We’d say to each other, ‘Do you remember the night ...?’” recalls Schroeder from his Tampa-area home in Safety Harbor. “That’s all we had to say. It’s not something you forget.”
Mindful of potential national security obligations, neither discussed what happened one evening during the last few days of March, maybe early April, 1967. Schroeder was manning a radar scope in Key West, as a member of the Army Air Defense Command’s 6/65th Hawk missile battalion. Force was with the USAF’s 644th Radar Squadron in Homestead. The two were as close as siblings; when four targets appeared out of nowhere and lit their respective screens, they chatted it up over their headsets, thinking they had both acquired the same bogeys. It wasn’t until years later when they realized they’d been monitoring completely separate events. Florida MUFON posted Schroeder’s recollections recently on YouTube.
In a nutshell, Schroeder was watching strong returns on four bogeys moving from the Florida Keys across the Everglades, west from the Atlantic to the Gulf, then back again, in box formation. Simultaneously, Force’s radar was painting four box-formation UFOs heading south from around Fort Lauderdale to North Miami, veering east over the Atlantic, before heading back again. “Something terrible must have happened, in either the Atlantic or the Gulf,” recalls the retired cop and private eye. “It’s exactly like what we’re doing in the South China Sea now. They were flying in grid patterns, like they were looking for something. It was definitely systematic.”
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