Unusual week for Bellingham Police includes mysterious runaway tire and a UFO sighting
One incident “is still a mystery.” The other — well, the truth is out there.
The Bellingham Police Department fielded a couple of . . . unusual calls for assistance in the past week— one for a runaway tire on State Street and one for a UFO.
At 1:44 a.m. Monday, March 22, they received a call for a car suffering damage from a wheel rolling down a hill. According to the caller, a person had been rolling a tire down the hill in the 1000 block of North State Street, Lt. Claudia Murphy told The Bellingham Herald in an email.
“This did not make sense to the officer when he saw the scene, as the tire was several feet uphill from where the dent in the vehicle was,” Murphy wrote. “The officer was not able to determine where the tire came from, nor who was rolling it.
“The investigating officer believes the tire fell off a moving vehicle traveling south on (North) State Street and rolled into the parked car. It is still a mystery.”
That came nearly four days after police received a call at 5 a.m. Thursday, March 18, reporting a UFO being spotted from the 600 block of Kentucky Street.
“The caller saw several bright, white lights in a line in the sky,” Murphy wrote. “And they reported the lights were just about evenly spaced, traveling from the southwest to the northeast at stratosphere altitude (due to size of objects). Estimated to be traveling at satellite speed.”
Bellingham Police were the first agency the UFO had been reported to, though Murphy said the caller had the phone number to the National UFO hotline “handy.”
“Gotta say, this one is a first for me, reporting on a UFO sighting,” Murphy wrote.
Assuming the caller did report the UFO sighting to other agencies, it would be the first so far this year in Whatcom County, according to the National UFO Reporting Center.
The index of reported sightings, which was last updated March 2, includes 21 so far this year in Washington state, but none in Whatcom County.
The center shows there were 12 sightings reported in Whatcom County in 2020 — four in Bellingham, two in Lynden and one each from Ferndale, Everson, Lummi Island, Nooksack, Deming and Maple Falls. That’s up significantly from the four reported in 2019 — all in Bellingham.
