Lawrence J. Coyne
Before the sighting
Born 1938. Long-serving US Army Reserve aviator based out of Cleveland Hopkins / Cleveland-area Army Reserve aviation unit (316th Medical Detachment). Experienced UH-1 pilot with thousands of flight hours by 1973. No prior public UFO associations.
During the sighting
On the night of October 18, 1973, Coyne was pilot in command of a Bell UH-1H helicopter returning from Columbus to Cleveland with crew Sgt. John Healey, Sgt. Robert Yanacsek, and 1Lt. Arrigo Jezzi. Near Mansfield, OH, at approximately 2,500 ft, Yanacsek spotted a red light pacing the aircraft. The light closed rapidly on a near-collision course. Coyne put the helicopter into a powered descent (collective full down) from ~1,700 ft toward ~600 ft. The object — described as a cigar-shaped craft with a red bow light, white tail light, and a green directable beam — stopped above and ahead of the helicopter, swept the cockpit with a green beam, and then departed. When Coyne next checked the altimeter, the aircraft was at ~3,500 ft and climbing with the collective still bottomed — a maneuver the crew could not explain. The magnetic compass spun and was reportedly inoperative afterward. Ground witnesses (the Mansfield-area Coyne / Healey families known to investigators) independently reported the encounter from the ground.
After the sighting
Coyne filed a Military Incident Report through normal Army channels; the original report and subsequent FAA/Army correspondence are preserved in the Project Blue Book successor files at the National Archives and in Jennie Zeidman's monograph for CUFOS (A Helicopter-UFO Encounter Over Ohio, 1979). All four crewmen gave consistent statements separately to Zeidman and to other investigators. Coyne testified about the encounter to the United Nations on July 14, 1978 as part of Grenada PM Sir Eric Gairy's UN UFO initiative — clearly establishing that he was alive and active then. He continued his Army Reserve career, retired as a Lieutenant Colonel, and gave occasional interviews into the 1990s. Some online sources state he died in 1998; I was not able to independently verify that date from an obituary in a mainstream newspaper or from official Army Reserve records during this research session, so death_year is set to null and a bias flag is added.
Research notes
Among the strongest multi-witness, instrument-correlated US UAP cases. Four trained military aircrew, immediate official Army incident report, independent ground witnesses, magnetic-compass anomaly, and an altitude/airspeed event the crew could not reproduce or explain by normal flight dynamics. Jennie Zeidman's CUFOS monograph is the definitive primary-source synthesis and reproduces the original Army reports. Coyne's UN testimony in July 1978 is the firmest independent fix on his being alive at that time and is sufficient to flag the unverified 1998 death-year claim. Score reflects: career-credentialed observers (4), immediate official report through chain of command, instrument anomalies, ground corroboration, and decades of consistent restatement. Held just below 9.0 because the principal physical traces are aircraft-state reports rather than persistent ground evidence and because Klass's meteor hypothesis, while not accepted, has not been formally falsified to universal satisfaction.