Meet the people who’ve made Orange County a worldwide leader in UFO research by Taylor Hamby
I
t was early August in 1965 and business as usual for Traffic Inspector Tech 2 at the Orange County Road Department. Overgrown foliage on street signs had brought Rex E. Heflin to Myford Road, near the intersection of Walnut Avenue in Santa Ana. He was driving northeast in a Ford work van, less than half a mile from Interstate 5, when his work radio suddenly went out. Heflin fiddled with the radio, attempting to contact Orange County Road Maintenance headquarters. Then he noticed something moving in the sky to his left. He figured it was a military plane, given he was just a mile from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. But it did an impossible move, then just hovered. Quickly grabbing his county-issued Model 101 Polaroid—used for taking photos of anomalies along OC roads—he instinctively snapped a picture through the windshield of his van. The aircraft was circular, squat, with a semi-flat top—similar in shape to a man’s straw boater hat.
It continued to move oddly—hovering and tilting, “similar to a gyroscope when losing its stability,” Heflin recalled years later. And then, almost as quick as it appeared, the machine flew up and shot away toward Old Saddleback, leaving behind a ring of blue-black vapor. Heflin had just seen an unidentified flying object. He took three photos of the UFO and one of the vapor it left behind. Three of the four made the front page of the Orange County Register (back then known simply as The Register) and eventually went national. He told the paper he was “reluctant to report the flying-saucer incident to the press or the military because I knew I’d be branded some sort of nut.” The Helfin affair is a story all unto itself, but you should know it involved the Air Force’s secret UFO investigation team, bona-fide men in black, the theft of Helfin’s photos, a mysterious phone call to him 30 years later that led to their reappearance in a Manila envelope in his mailbox. But it remains Orange County’s most famous UFO sighting. It also sparked a movement: 52 years after the incident, Orange County continues to be a hotbed of UFO research and has become the mother ship to the world’s largest UFO-investigation network.
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