The Thousand Oaks
Incident
Thousand Oaks is a sprawling suburb of Los Angeles,
some forty miles from the City of Angels. To the east rise the Santa
Monica Mountains and twelve miles to the west shimmers the Pacific
Ocean.
Sapra Street was originally intended to cut across
the hills that border the eastern portion of Thousand Oaks and work
began from either side, but, for some reason, they never met, so now
there are two Sapra Streets, separated by about a third of a mile of
scrubland and two hundred and fifty feet of elevation, both ending
in cul-de-sacs.
Steve’s family lived at 2130 Sapra, the lower
section of the unfinished road, in 1975 and during November of that
year, they had an extraordinary encounter with something that may
have been literally ‘out-of-this-world’.
Interviewed by Brian Vike for his HBCCUFO Radio
Show, Steve and other members of his family recounted what happened
over several nights and the impact it had on their lives over the
following years. This article will also reference the written
statement that was sent by Steve to Brian’s website,
www.hbccufo.org.
The house, recounts Steve, was the last house on a
cul-de-sac and the hills beyond stretched out to Simi Valley for
miles and miles. The incident happened in several different stages
over a number of nights. The first night, at about seven or eight
o’clock, Steve, who was twenty-years old at the time, his brother,
Rick (19), their cousin and a few friends were sitting outside,
playing guitar and generally hanging out as young men do, when all
of a sudden, from over the house, a blue fireball, about a third
larger than a basketball, about two feet in diameter or so, came
shooting over their heads and hit in the field across the street.
“The minute it hit, it let out tentacles of energy
in all directions that covered the whole field,” Steve recalled. “It
didn’t make a sound at all. Me, my brother and this guy name Mark
were the only ones who saw it and we were like, ‘Whoa! What was
that?’ But it dissipated instantly and you could see nothing, so
everybody was laughing at us, telling us that they didn’t see
anything and things like that.”
They continued playing guitar and hanging out and
about a half hour later, a pine tree a couple of streets away
spontaneously burst into flames. They watched as a fire truck
arrived and the fire was extinguished. Steve, Rick and Mark
remembered seeing this fireball and thought it was probably related,
despite the tree being about half a mile from the point where the
fireball came down in the field. According to a local newspaper, the
fire had been caused by the shorting-out of an electrical
transformer. Steve did not recall if there were any power failures
in the area that night, but he was certain that if there had been
any, he would have noticed. If a power transformer had blown, he
would have expected to see some lights go out, but none did, as far
as he was aware.
The next morning, Steve and his brother set out to
investigate the field across the way, hoping to find some evidence
of what they had witnessed the previous night. Expecting to see burn
marks in the grass where the fireball had struck the ground, they
were surprised to find nothing at all. Everything was undisturbed,
as though nothing had happened.
Steve and his wife at the time, Viv, who was
pregnant, had just moved back to his parents’ house after living for
a while in Alaska. They
were in their bedroom later that day when Rick came in and said that
he could hear something in the hills behind their house. It was
about seven-thirty or eight o’clock in the evening.
They all listened and, roughly a mile or so in the
distance, they could hear a bizarre scream. They had no idea whether
or not it was a person or an animal, but it would scream three or
four times, then fall silent for a while before screaming again.
They mused that it might have been some kids goofing off in the
hills, although to get up there meant a rough trek through thick
bushes. There were no roads or tracks up in the hills. It was also
dark and would probably be dangerous to go tromping out there
without a flashlight. Westlake village now exists in the spot where
they heard the eerie screams coming from, but thirty-two years ago,
it was raw, undeveloped land.
The following night, Steve and his brother, Rick,
were sitting up in his room, watching television, when Rick suddenly
shushed everybody and turned down the volume on the TV set. Only a
hundred yards or so up the hill, the screaming had started again!
Steve described it as ‘the most incredible scream
that I’ve ever heard in my life’. He said it was otherworldly and
primeval, though sounding more human than animal. He researched
animal screams on the internet, even going as far as to listen to
alleged Bigfoot recordings, but he never found a match for what was
heard in Thousand Oaks that night. He described it as sounding more
female than male. In his written account to Brian, he wrote: “Part
human, part animal? Pain? Fear? Certainly wasn't happy.” Whatever
was producing this shriek, Steve and his family knew that something
was wrong out there in the dark.
As they listened, the screaming appeared to be
slowly getting closer to the house, while moving from left to right
on the hill. This was an area that was covered with purple sage so
dense that only small animals would be able to get through,
certainly not a person. With each scream, it sounded three or four
feet closer to their position. When it seemed no further than fifty
yards away, the three of them decided that ‘it was time to get Dad’!
He was a tough veteran of the Korean War and very little could shake
him.
Steve realised that he had not heard a sound from
either of their German shepherd dogs. At the slightest noise, they
would start barking, but he had not heard anything. So, while Rick
and Viv went to get dad, Steve went to check on the dogs. He opened
the garage door to the backyard and expected, as usual, to have the
large animals bound on top of him, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Not willing to go out into the backyard alone, he closed the door
and followed Rick and his dad out of the front door of the house. As
Rick and their father headed down the driveway, Steve decided to go
around to the gate that led to the backyard and give it a rattle to
see if it provoked a reaction from the dogs.
Meanwhile, whatever was up on the hill was still
screaming at about thirty second intervals.
With no reaction from the dogs, Steve went back
round to the front of the house and could see his dad and Rick
looking up the hill, about fifty feet from him. Suddenly, they both
looked up into the sky and then ducked. Just then the thing out
there on the hill emitted a ‘horrendous scream’ that was at least
twice as loud as anything they had heard before. They ran back up
the driveway to Steve’s location, partially behind the house.
“Did you see that?” asked Dad. Steve had only seen
them duck down. Rick and their father explained that two, blue
fireballs had streaked over their heads and hit the hill as the loud
scream had cut through the night air. There were a couple more
shrieks and ‘the thing’ fell silent for a while.
Steve was perplexed, as he should have been able to
see what had happened, despite being partially behind the house. He
had seen them duck, so he should have seen the fireballs. He could
not explain it. They described the fireballs as being much larger
than the one that they had witnessed two nights earlier. Steve said
it was the only time in his life that he had seen his dad scared.
Steve recalled that during the whole incident, ‘it
was like being in a vacuum’. Normally, they would hear traffic on
the road, crickets and other animals out in the hills, but while
this thing was shrieking, there was nothing.
They went back inside the house and tried to call
Steve’s cousin, who lived next door, but nobody answered the phone.
They then called the Thousand Oaks Police Department. At about
eight-thirty, a pair of police officers arrived in a squad car.
Their dad explained what had happened to the
policemen, but did not mention the fireballs. He said that they had
heard what sounded like somebody in distress up on the hill, perhaps
a child or a woman being assaulted. The family did not really
believe what was being recounted to the police officers, but they
wanted somebody in authority to check it out.
The officers shone their flashlights up onto the
hill, but nothing could be seen. All was silent – no screams, no
animals, nothing. They stayed for about twenty to thirty minutes
before climbing back into their squad car and driving away.
As soon as the police car turned right onto Erbes
Road, less than three hundred yards from their house, a huge scream
came from the hill behind their home. Should they call the police
again? The screaming continued and, by this time, it seemed quite
close to the back of their cousin’s house.
Steve estimated that his cousin Kim’s room was level
with where the screams were coming from and barely fifteen feet
away. “Even with her stereo on, she should have heard it,” he said.
They were told later that nobody had heard a thing.
After the police had gone, they took a flashlight
out to the backyard and found the two dogs in their doghouse,
shaking. They managed to get them into the garage, dragging them by
the collar.
They went back inside and their father told them
about an incident that happened when he was a radar technician for
the US Air Force at Sioux City in 1952. One night, they got an alert
that something was coming down from Canada at eighteen-hundred miles
per hour and at an altitude of about eighty-thousand feet. He did
not know what it was, but everybody was told not to discuss it at
the time.
Anyway, they attempted to continue their evening in
a normal way. Steve, Viv and Rick returned upstairs and Mom and Dad
watched television downstairs. There had been no noise from the hill
for a while and everything seemed tranquil.
Then at about eleven-thirty or twelve o’clock, a
huge scream erupted from outside. Steve yelled down for his dad and
both their parents came rushing upstairs. All five of them piled
into the bathroom that adjoined the parents’ bedroom - it had the
best vantage point to look out at the back of the house.
At this point, Steve estimated that ‘the thing’ was
only thirty feet away, moving from right to left right at the edge
of their property. He said that it sounded like the screaming was
coming from just above the level of the purple sage that covered the
hill, as though whatever it was out there was on top of the dense
brush rather than inside it.
Another shriek was heard, this time followed by a
loud, electronic-sounding beep. The thing screamed two more times,
each utterance being followed by the odd beep, and Viv ‘freaked
out’.
Steve admitted that they had seen
The UFO Incident, the TV
movie about the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, just a month or so
before. Viv, being six months pregnant, had recalled Betty
describing having a needle inserted into her stomach and she went
hysterical.
Steve stepped from the window and went out into the
hall to where Viv had retreated. Suddenly, a brilliant, white light
filled the entire house. Steve said that it appeared to come from
downstairs, make its way up the stairs and filled the rest of the
house. As it came up the steps, he thought he could see dark shapes
moving about, then it was blinding before blinking out in an
instant. This all happened in about half a second.
As soon as the light went out, everybody calmly
walked to their rooms. They could still hear the screaming from the
hill, but now it seemed further away. Steve looked at the clock in
his bedroom and it read four-thirty in the morning! Somehow they had
lost four hours. It was between twelve and twelve thirty when they
had been in the bathroom and now it was close to dawn.
Rick said that he had to be up for work and went to
bed. Everybody did likewise, as though nothing had happened.
Before he went to sleep, Steve remembered hearing
the thing screaming on the hill and could not now, thirty-odd years
later, imagine being able to sleep with that cacophony ringing out
in the early morning.
The next morning, Viv demanded that Steve stay home,
but Rick and their parents went off to work. Steve scrambled up the
hill as far as he could get, confident in the light of day, but
found nothing up there except two odd, intersecting circles in the
weeds, about eight feet in diameter.
Later, Steve’s mother would learn from a friend
that, at about eight o’clock that night, she had seen two cars
parked on Erbes Road, with the occupants watching a bright, white
light hovering over the area near their house, before blinking out.
Bizarrely, this lady quit her job that day and committed suicide
two weeks later.
Steve’s cousin said that they had not heard a thing,
despite being home all night. They had not even heard the telephone
ring when the family had tried calling them.
The dogs became sick and the younger male lost
control of his nervous system, resulting in him dragging his back
legs. He was put down a few weeks after the incident. The
veterinarians had no idea what had caused his illness. At first they
thought it was an incidence of the hip problems that German
Shepherds are prone to, but tests ruled that out. The older female
went blind and was put to sleep a few months after that night.
Just after his daughter, Cynthia, was born, Steve
and Viv moved to their own home, about five miles away. One day,
several months after the incident, Steve returned home to help his
dad move some things and decided to go up on the hill again. He was
surprised to find the two interlocking circles still plainly visible
in the weeds. That night, Steve went to sleep, feeling perfectly
fine, and woke up the next day in hospital with a temperature of 106
degrees F. For the next year, he would be sick and endure a battery
of tests, but nobody could find anything wrong with him, beyond his
blood having some unknown abnormalities and that he should not give
blood. At one point, it was suggested that he had cancer. He still
has occasional liver problems, but has come to the conclusion that,
seeing as he has lived for over thirty years with this, it is not
going to kill him now!
Their dad, who was a strong, fit man, passed a
physical with flying colours over a year after the incident. During
a company softball game at a picnic, he hit the ball, ran to first
base, had a heart attack and died. This was about eighteen months
after that night.
As to the missing time, the family say that they are
willing to undergo hypnotic regression in an effort to discover what
happened in this stolen four hours. Brian Vike is attempting to find
a reputable hypnotherapist that will be able to help these
completely ordinary people find out what really happened that night.
This case is absolutely fascinating and must be one
of the most intriguing stories of the last few years. What were
those fireballs? What was screaming out there in the dead of night?
Why did everything go deathly quiet and why did the neighbours
seemingly not hear anything, despite the shrieking being only feet
away? Were the health problems experienced by the family and their
pets afterwards connected with what they witnessed?
Brian Vike is trying to get to the bottom of this
and will keep us posted. Steve Johnson |
Updated 22nd August, 2012