3 Contra Costa County boys, all were about 14 years old at the time.
They said they saw saw a cluster of red lights which seemed to be joined together, and another blue light which seemed to be darting around the larger structure.
They were observing the lights when apparently the craft darted some 3 miles away from their location in around 5 seconds before returning and landing in a nearby field, near Mallard Slough Road in an area between the railroad tracks and the marsh.
Apparently, the 3 were considering hitchhiking to a local hang out called The Pump House, when they had their close encounter.
They fled in terror when strange creatures came toward them, walking like stiff robots surrounded by smoke or steam vapor.
Police officers & scientists who interviewed the boys said all 3 told the same story, in detail, in separate interviews, and said the boys were genuinely & deeply frightened by whatever they experienced that night.
This incident has now gone down in the record books as one of only 3 apparently credible cases of a close encounter of the 3rd kind reported in the United States that year, according to the center for UFO studies in Evanston, IL.
The center, directed by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, has a number of distinguished scientists as investigators and consultants.
The center was established recently as a place where people can report UFO incidents without fear of ridicule and with the assurance that there will be a credible follow up investigation, according to Richard Haines, a psychologist for a government agency, who as a hobby helped investigate the West Pittsburg UFO sightings.
Haines was impressed by the depth of similar detail in the separate stories told by the 3 boys.
However, he noted, there is no independent corroborating evidence by other eyewitnesses.
The boys are not expert observers, such as pilots or ship navigators.
There were no UFO radar sightings that night.
There were no obvious marks on the ground or magnetic changes in the Earth at the supposed landing site when Haines visited the location a month later.
There is a chance this could be a hoax or some kind of illusion, he said, noting that there are many possible psychological interpretations of such a story told by boys from broken or incomplete homes who were out late at night, in a strange, dark place.
He noted that the boys reported getting only brief, ill defined views of whatever it was they encountered.
Further interviews under hypnosis probably would not produce more details, for the following reasons:
I do not believe that the evidence which now exists, as of this time, warrants further investigation.
This incident in Contra Costa County has gone into the international record books.
People interested in the question of UFOs will be talking about it and writing about it for years.
For that reason, it is worth examining in some detail.
As a historic event, the incident at West Pittsburg is one of the last reported sightings of allegedly alien creatures to have occurred in the United States before the advent of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The movie made UFO watching a popular backyard sport in the United States.
The boys, then 14 years old, who reported the sighting are, Lennie Young, who then lived with his mother, Mary Clark, at West Pittsburg.
Lennie now lives with grandparents in Walnut Creek.
Lennie said he is familiar with the area and has spent many nights in the meadow where the sighting happened and knows that what he saw was not human beings walking in the darkness.
George Ferrera, son of Muriel Wilder, of Pacheoo.
He had never before been to West Pittsburg and came to town to spend the night with his friend Patrick, who used to live in Pacheco.
Police said George was the calmest of the frightened trio on the night of the sightings.
His mother said he still has nightmares about the event, I believe he saw a UFO, Mrs. Wilder said.
Patrick Morrison, who then lived around the corner from Lennie Young, in West Pittsburg.
The boys fled in terror to Morrison's home after the sighting.
His mother, Wanda Morrison, recently remarried and they now live on Clear Land Circle.
Sometime before 11:00 p.m. the 3 boys were at a grassy field North of Willow Pass Road near Mallard Slough Road, in an area between the Santa Fe Railroad tracks and the marsh at the edge of Suisun Bay.
They were considering hitchhiking to the nearby community of Shore Acres or going to The Pump House, a nearby unauthorized gathering place for local young people.
The Pump House, which is near the reported UFO landing site, is a castle like structure of concrete and steel, complete with a moat and a bridge, housing the pumps which during some seasons lift fresh water out of the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta for the Treated Water Division of the Contra Costa County Water District.
According to the story the boys later told to Haines and to Contra Costa County Deputy Sheriff Douglas Pendleton, they saw a group of bright red lights, apparently joined together, with a blue light flitting like a firefly around the other lights.
They said the object flew away rapidly, covering what on the map would be more than 3 miles in about 5 seconds, and then came back and landed nearby.
The descriptions vary somewhat, but all remember it having a row of square lights, like windows, with one window larger than the others.
None of the boys called it a flying saucer, Young said it was round but flat.
Ferrera compared it to a flying building.
Morrison recalls lights blinking on and off and reflecting from the sides of the object.
Then, the boys said that emerging from darkness between themselves and the UFO they saw 3 creatures 50' to 150' away, barely visible in the light from street lamps and a nearby liquor store.
Lennie remembers that they were like smoke, they were black, and they had no faces.
But he did recall that he didn't know if they had arms or heads, it was like they had no clothes on.
They were walking towards us, were about 5'6" to 6' tall.
I've stayed out all night in that field several times and I know what people look like walking in the dark.
They were not people, they were something else.
Pat Morrison said that they were weird looking, walking slow.
They looked like they were wearing long skirts over their heads.
They were black, and walked as if they were linked together, like figures in a chain gang.
George Ferrera remembers them as gray objects, with a kind of human shape, but no eyes, and walked like robots.
George's mother said since that night the youth has had nightmares and refuses to go back to West Pittsburg.
His friends had a hard time convincing him to go see the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mrs. Wilder mentioned.
Haines said that as the boys fled in terror to Pat Morrison's house, they said they looked back, and for a while the figures seemed to be following close behind.
Mrs. Morrison called the sheriff's office.
Pendleton said all 3 gave the same story and offered to take a polygraph test.
The boys did not appear to have been drinking or using drugs, Pendleton said.
The deputy said the boys appeared to be genuinely terrified and one boy was shaking badly.
Haines, who works for NASA and makes UFO investigation his avocation, said he has conducted 3,000 UFO inquiries, concentrating on sightings by pilots.
I found that the boys had a consistent story with a level of detail present that does not appear to have been manufactured.
If they had made up the story, they would have had to remember it very well, their fright was very real, Haines said.
He determined that the weather was clear and it was unlikely that the boys were seeing their own shadows reflected on ground fog.
He said no American aircraft carry the colors described by the boys.
He made a magnetometer survey of the grassy field and found no evidence of magnetic changes or scorched grass or holes at the supposed UFO landing site.
While the psychologist was making engineering surveys, a well known engineer was trying to probe into young Ferrera's unconscious memories, but found the boy was not a good subject for hypnosis.
James A. Harder, a professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, investigated the West Pittsburg sighting in his capacity as director of research for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in Tucson, AZ.
Harder said there was no physical evidence at the scene and his talks with the boys indicated, there was nothing more we could recover other than what they had already talked about.
Allan Hendry, editor of the International UFO Reporter said that this is a 50/50 case if there ever was one.
Hendry said he talked to the airport tower supervisors who were on duty at the time at Oakland, San Francisco & Travis Air Force Base and said there were no reports of UFOs by pilots or on radar that night.
He said two aerial advertising firms in Oakland were not flying at the time.