Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum […] observed an unconventional craft on December 29, 1980, at 9:00 p.m. and suffered serious, life-changing medical consequences.

Betty Cash (51) was in the driver’s seat of her 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass, traveling toward her home in Dayton, Texas, about 37 miles northeast of Houston, with Vickie Landrum (57) and Landrum’s grandson Colby (7) after a night out in search of a bingo game. The two friends and young Colby had discovered that the regularly scheduled bingo games in nearby Cleveland and New Caney had been cancelled due to the holidays. But their trip was not a total waste. They made the decision to stop at a truck stop restaurant at U.S. Route 59 and Farm to Market Road 1485 with an all-day breakfast menu. They left the restaurant before 9:00 p.m. and headed on their 28-mile journey home on Farm to Market Road 1485.

After they had driven approximately 12 miles, they spotted a bright light in the distance that sparked their curiosity because of its luminosity and unusual appearance. Little did they know that soon they would round a curve and encounter a fiery craft hovering over the road near the tops of the pine trees. The ominous craft, only 130 or so feet in the distance, was belching flames.

Betty made the split-second decision to brake rather than risk driving under the craft. Suddenly, the motor went dead and Betty could not remember if it had simply died or if she had turned it off. She and her passengers could now see that it was as large as a water tower, and possibly 60 to 80 feet above the road. It was surrounded by a glow that made it difficult to discern its shape. Vickie remembered an oblong shape with a rounded top and pointed bottom, whereas Colby recalled its diamond shape. All agreed that although it was only 40 degrees Fahrenheit, the craft’s heat warmed the area. When it ascended, a red-orange flame shot out from its underside and when it stopped it emitted a sound similar to air brakes. In addition to this the trio heard a shrill beeping noise.

Vickie stood beside the passenger door with her hand on the roof of the vehicle, looking toward the strange object. She held her terrified grandson close, shielding him from the intense light and heat. Neither of the women held a prior belief in extraterrestrial visitation, so they relied upon their religious beliefs for an explanation. Vickie, a fervent Christian, believed that Jesus would emerge from the glowing object and told her hysterical grandson to look toward the dark part for Jesus. Less than five minutes after they stopped, Vickie began to fear that Colby might run into the woods to hide, so she pushed him under the dashboard and shielded him while she steadied herself on its soft, padded surface. Despite her curiosity, after a few moments Vickie gave in to Colby’s incessant pleas to join him inside car.

Betty walked to the front of the car for a better view of the craft, shielding her eyes from the intense light with her upper arm. She could feel the heat radiating from the craft, but remained outside for five to seven minutes longer than Vickie and Colby. Finally, she conceded to Vickie’s pleas to return to the safety of the vehicle, but as she attempted to enter her Oldsmobile, she discovered that the door handle was too warm to touch. She protected her hand with her leather coat and opened the driver’s side door to discover that, despite the 40-degree outside temperature, the car’s interior was uncomfortably hot.

Finally, the craft emitted a huge burst of flames and rose into the air, departing southwest in the direction of Houston’s Intercontinental Airport. From a distance the witnesses could see helicopters streaming toward it. For the witnesses, the ordeal was over, they had survived, and it was safe to drive to their homes in Dayton. Little did they know that moments later, when Betty made a right-hand turn onto connector road FM 2100 toward FM 1960, they would again encounter the ominous craft. This time it was surrounded by up to 23 helicopters, some with dual rotors and some with single rotors. Cash thought that she saw a U.S. Air Force insignia on one of the helicopters, but Landrum did not notice a marking. This time the trio sped toward the safety of their homes.

The events on the night of December 29, 1980, changed the course of their lives forever. Suddenly and nearly immediately after the encounter the three witnesses suffered a constellation of significant physical effects that could only be attributed to their exposure to the fiery aerial object. They had been in good health prior to their encounter, with the exception of Betty’s hysterectomy in 1958 and heart surgery in 1976. She was under the care of a cardiologist, but had been enjoying excellent health and had ambitious plans for the future. She had never undergone chemotherapy or radiation treatments, nor did she exhibit evidence that she had ever been the victim of an electrical shock. Vickie’s health had been good except that she was overweight. She too had undergone surgery for a hysterectomy 22 or 23 years earlier, but had not suffered complications. She had been caring for her grandson and working nights as a waitress.

When Betty Cash pulled into her driveway at 9:50 p.m., she had blisters and swelling on her head, face, back, and neck, and felt as if she was burning from the inside out. The skin under her ring that had been exposed to the craft’s heat as she shielded her eyes was burned. The next day, she was too ill to care for herself. A blinding headache, extreme weakness, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea overtook her. On January 2, 1981, she was admitted to Parkway Hospital in Houston, where her cardiologist Dr. V.B. Shenoy worked, and remained there for 12 days. Initially, she felt too apprehensive to tell her attending physician about her experience with the craft and how it had led to her injuries, out of fear that he would believe that she was delusional. She later told investigators that she was unrecognizable to her own family because of the swelling and weeping sores on her face and head. Her release from the hospital was short-lived. Her condition degraded and she was forced to spend an additional 15 days in treatment. This time she confessed the cause of her injuries to her medical team and was seen by an ophthalmologist, a radiologist, a neurologist, a doctor who performed an EEG, and a doctor who checked for heavy metal poisoning.

Mysteriously, some of the information pertaining to her condition vanished from her medical records. The results of her early blood tests completely disappeared from the hospital and could not be located even by her physician. As her health declined, her radiologists noted that her symptoms were somewhat typical of a person who had been exposed to whole-body radiation on a high level. The perplexing part was that the whole body radiation victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had perished, but Betty didn’t die, as had been predicted in textbook cases.

After Betty was released from the hospital, she was too ill to care for herself, so she went to live with her brother in Houston and later was cared for by her mother and sister in Fairfield, Alabama. Her doctor in Birmingham, Dr. Brian McClelland, had treated military personnel with radiation damage caused by radar systems. He stated that pulsed non-ionizing radiation can have an ionizing component that clouds the textbook explanation of radiation damage. He had seen it manifested in a variety of victims and perhaps this was the cause of Betty’s demise. Whatever the cause, Betty was never able to lead a normal life again. Her injuries were permanent and debilitating.

Betty’s medical records indicate that she experienced ongoing severe headache and nausea, abnormal redness of the skin, scarring and loss of pigmentation, eye inflammation, vomiting and diarrhea, swelling of her neck, loss of her fingernails on one hand, excessive hair loss and regrowth of a different texture, weight loss, and extreme fatigue. Her medical bills amounted to $10,000. This information became part of the supporting evidence that was submitted by attorney Peter Gersten to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in case # H-84-348, a lawsuit against the United States of America. He argued that Betty had been exposed to radiation as the result of negligence and reckless misconduct when the military allowed an experimental aerial device to fly over a publicly used road and come in to contact with her. He asked for 10 million dollars in punitive damages.

Vickie Landrum, who had less exposure to the craft than Betty, suffered general weakness, burns to a lesser degree, ongoing stomach pain, nausea, and diarrhea, eye inflammation and partial loss of vision, and partial hair loss and regrowth of a different texture that started six weeks after her exposure to the craft. She also suffered fingernail loss on the hand that rested on top of the car, loss of skin pigmentation in the area of her burns, and 24 pounds in weight loss. As is often the case with low-income families, her financial status precluded immediate access to medical care, so she treated her grandson and herself at their home. She stated that she had spoken with her family physician, but he had advised her that he didn’t know how to treat her and her grandson’s illness. Later, she spoke with Cash’s physician in Houston, but did not receive medical treatment from him. When her vision began to fail she was forced to seek medical treatment from an eye doctor in Liberty.

[Excerpt from Fact, Fiction, and Flying Saucers: The Truth Behind the Misinformation, Distortion, and Derision by Debunkers by Stanton Friedman, Kathleen Marden ISBN: 9781632650658]