From the Vault: The Night a Glowing Dome Landed Near Uniontown and Two Hairy Giants Walked the Fence Line

UNIONTOWN, Pa. (Originally reported 1973): At about 9 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 25, 1973, people on the farms outside Uniontown, in Pennsylvania’s Fayette County, looked up and saw a light. It was large and red, and it was coming down.

About 15 people said they watched it descend toward a pasture. One of them was a 22-year-old man who was driving along a road near his father’s field. He stopped the truck, took his rifle and two neighbor boys, and walked up the field to see what had landed.

What he said he saw there has been told and retold for more than half a century, under two different names. This piece publishes 53 years to the day after that night.

✓ What we know

On the record: documents, statements, dates and places. Sources below.

• The first reports. On Saturday, Oct. 27, 1973, Uniontown’s Morning Herald carried the story on its front page, with a staff photo of the witness pointing to the spot where the object reportedly landed and two large creatures were walking. The paper identified him as George Kowalczyk, 22, and said the encounter took place in a field on his father’s farm in North Union Township.
• The investigator. The case was investigated by Stan Gordon, who then directed the Westmoreland County UFO Study Group, a volunteer group based in nearby Greensburg. In his 1998 account, Gordon says a state trooper from the Uniontown barracks phoned him at about 10:30 p.m. that night, just back from investigating the incident, and put one of the witnesses on the line.
• The police. According to Gordon’s accounts, the witnesses called the state police after the encounter and a trooper went to the scene. Skylook reported in February 1974 that Gordon and a state trooper both noted the witness was visibly shaken.
• The year. Gordon wrote that 1973 brought a major UFO wave across the country, with hundreds of sightings reported in Pennsylvania, and reports of Bigfoot-like creatures over a multi-county area in the same months.
• The checks. Gordon’s team found normal background radiation at the site, according to the Morning Herald and Gordon. Gordon reported that farm animals would not go near the spot.
• No tracks. No footprints were found at the scene, Skylook reported, citing Gordon. It added that no physical signs of a landing were evident, though the grass had been grazed short by cattle.

? What’s claimed

Accounts, testimony and theories, as told by the people who tell them.

The light. According to the Morning Herald, about 15 people said they saw “the landing of the huge, reddish, ball-like object.” Kowalczyk reported seeing an orange light in the sky over his father’s field as he drove, the paper said.

The dome. “This time it was completely white,” he told Gordon, as quoted by the Morning Herald. “It was about 100 feet in diameter, as big as a house, with a dome top. It was very, very bright.” The paper reported that it made a sound like a large lawnmower. Gordon’s later accounts describe a loud whirring and a high-pitched whine, and in 2014 he described the object to the Herald-Standard as a half-sphere with a bright white dome and a flat bottom.

The figures. One of the boys spotted something moving along a fence, according to the Morning Herald. Kowalczyk described two creatures, Skylook reported, one about eight feet tall and the other about seven, both walking stiff-legged. They were covered in dark, grayish hair, had long arms that reached almost to the ground and made crying sounds like a baby. There was a sharp smell like sulfur. In his 2014 interview with the Herald-Standard, Gordon added glowing green eyes “about the size of a half dollar” and said the figures seemed to have no neck.

The shots. One of the boys ran away in fear, the Morning Herald reported. Kowalczyk fired a shot into the air and then, as the creatures began to approach him, fired directly at them. Gordon’s 1998 account says tracer rounds were fired overhead first and then live ammunition.

The vanishing. “The larger creature made a moaning sound, raised his right hand, and the light in the field disappeared and the sound stopped,” Kowalczyk said, as quoted by Skylook. “The two creatures then slowly walked away.” He also said his eyes began to bother him and his pickup’s lights dimmed.

The glow. The Morning Herald reported that a glowing ring was seen around the spot where the object landed. In Gordon’s 1998 account, the trooper and the main witness went back to the field and found a glowing area about 150 feet across where the object had been. Gordon says the trooper told him “he could read a newspaper” by its light.

The night, as Gordon told it

Gordon has retold the case over the years, including in 1998 and 2014. His 1998 write-up, posted for the 25th anniversary, gives the fullest version from the original investigator.

In that account, the witness and the two boys came within about 250 feet of the object and about 75 feet of the fence line. The figures, he wrote, were “7 to 9 feet tall, covered with hair, and arms hanging down past the knees, and displaying glowing green eyes.” When the larger one turned toward the other, “almost touching it,” the object vanished and the sound stopped. The creatures walked slowly toward the woods.

One boy had already run home, Gordon wrote. The other two left the field, moved the family to a neighbor’s house and called the state police. Gordon added a detail he says the main witness “has always stated”: before they left, the larger creature was seen in the woods about 10 feet away, and he fired at it. The shot struck the fence between them.

Speaking to the Herald-Standard in 2014, Gordon described the fence posts as six feet tall, with the first figure over eight feet and the second over seven. He said the larger one “reaches out as if to grab at that tracer,” and that “the moment it does that, the object in the field disappears.”

After midnight

What Gordon says happened next is the part of the case that made it famous among researchers. It’s also the hardest part to check. Every element of it comes from Gordon and the people who were there.

His team arrived later that night, Gordon wrote. The glowing area was gone, radiation levels were normal, and the animals still wouldn’t go near the spot. In the early morning hours, he wrote, some members of the party saw a farmhouse several hundred feet away “suddenly light up like daylight for several seconds.” A bull and a dog in the field seemed to be watching the woods.

Then, according to Gordon, the main witness, “a rather large individual,” began to growl while he was being questioned. He threw his father and Gordon’s assistant, George Lutz, toward the ground and ran into the field “growling like an animal and emitting screams, one which was near inhuman.” Gordon wrote that the man’s own dog approached as if to attack, then ran off whimpering, and that the man collapsed. Two team members said they were having trouble breathing, and the air filled with a strong smell “best described as rotten eggs.” When the man came out of what Gordon called “an almost trance-like state,” he talked about visions of the end of the world.

“Not knowing what could happen next we helped each other back to our vehicles,” Gordon wrote.

Gordon says the team called in the psychiatrist Berthold E. Schwarz, who traveled to Pennsylvania at his own expense and interviewed the eyewitnesses and the state trooper. Gordon points readers to Schwarz’s article, “Berserk,” in Flying Saucer Review (Vol. 20, No. 1). He dates that issue January to February 1974, while UFO Insight cites it as July 1974. Gordon also says he followed the main witness’s life for years afterward, and that “many para-normal events” reportedly occurred in the years after that night.

Two names, two towns

Later retellings of the case use a different name. In 1973, the Morning Herald and Skylook both named the witness George Kowalczyk. A 2023 account on the website UFO Insight, by Marcus Lowth, calls him “Stephen Pulaski” and places the farm in Greensburg. It cites Schwarz’s Flying Saucer Review article as its source.

Dead of Night Dispatch couldn’t establish where the name “Stephen Pulaski” first appeared or whether it was meant as a pseudonym. We are reporting both names as the sources give them: Kowalczyk in the 1973 press, Pulaski in later accounts.

The place is clearer. The 1973 Morning Herald put the incident in North Union Township, and Gordon and the Herald-Standard both place it in the countryside near Uniontown, in Fayette County. Greensburg, to the north in Westmoreland County, was home to Gordon and his study group, as the Morning Herald’s headline about a “W’moreland UFO Unit” reflects.

There are smaller differences too. Skylook called it “an Oct. 24 incident,” while Gordon’s accounts and the Herald-Standard give Oct. 25. Gordon’s accounts give green eyes, and UFO Insight’s gives green-yellow. Skylook reported no physical signs of a landing, while Gordon says a trooper saw the ground glowing.

What Gordon has said

Speaking to the Herald-Standard in 2014, Gordon said he has no answers. “I learned in the field in the early days, and it’s the same today, that many reports … may seem strange and unusual but when you investigate, a high percentage of sightings have a natural or man-made explanation, especially with UFO sightings,” he said. “But year after year, incidents occur that cannot be easily dismissed.”

He wrote in 1998 that cases in which a UFO and a Bigfoot-type creature are seen together are “historically rare.” In 2014, the Herald-Standard reported that officials who mention the 1973 report refer questions to Gordon. “That’s Stan’s case,” they told the paper.

Gordon also told the paper that “more and more cases with UFOs, Bigfoot and other strange creatures” led him to believe “we could, with some of these, be dealing with extraterrestrial creatures or something, for lack of a better term, as inter-dimensional.”

Fifty-three years later, the record still begins on Oct. 27, 1973, with the Morning Herald’s front-page photo of a young man in a field outside Uniontown, pointing at the ground.