Ovando, MT - Oval

UFO Sighting in 1966 – Blackfoot Valley, Ovando, Montana I worked on a fire lookout tower in Western Montana during the summer of 1966. The lookout was on Monture Hill, west of Ovando, Montana. Ovando is located in the Blackfoot Valley, about 45 miles NE of Missoula, Montana. I was nineteen years old at the time.

During that summer there were several reports of UFO sighting in the Blackfoot Valley; I was skeptical of those reports. However, in the very early morning of the first or second week of August I changed my mind.

I had been trained to look for fires during my duty as a fire lookout, and thus was very sensitive to any new light that might have shone through the lookout’s glass window “walls” (the lookout building was about fifty feet above the ground, mounted on poles).

At approximately 3:30 am, I awoke to a bright light shining through the windows. Being a light sleeper, and having been trained to look for fires, I had no problem getting up to investigate.

The bright light was actually two brightly lit objects, both hovering over the top of Ovando Mountain. Ovando Mountain is in direct line-of-sight from Monture Hill. Its summit is approximately seven to eight miles away (north east) from Monture Hill, and is one of the more prominent mountains on the other side of the Blackfoot Valley from Monture Hill.

The two objects were yellow-orange in color. Both had a similar oval shape (side view). I estimate the larger object to be between 75 – 125 feet wide (this is only a guess). One was significantly larger than the other. The larger object hovered an estimated 30 to 40 feet above the top of Ovando Mountain; the smaller object hovered above the larger object.

As I watched the objects I observed them to hover over Ovando Mountain in what seemed to be perfect formation. I watched the objects for at least twenty minutes as they slowly hovered up, down and around the summit of Ovando Mountain. They then made a swift ascent and disappeared in a matter of seconds.

I have no idea what the objects were, but to my death, I’ll always believe they were something I’ve never seen before or after. The U.S. was becoming heavily involved in the Vietnam War in 1966 and there were armed forces training exercises in Western Montana that summer. These objects could have been part of a training exercise, a secret military weapon or something else. But I definitely saw something. That’s reason why these sighting are correctly called “Unidentified Flying Objects”.


((NUFORC Note: Witness indicates that the date is approximate. PD))