July 1952 — Point Defiance Park, Tacoma, Washington
THINK ABOUTIT ENTITY ENCOUNTER REPORT
1952 Point Defiance Park, Washington: Two Hours of Missing Time and a White Room
A 9-year-old boy in Point Defiance Park, Tacoma, Washington watched a yellowish-white light move back and forth across the sky one night in July 1952 — and his next clear memory, by his own much-later account, was of sitting in a plain white room on a stool, surrounded by many small beings speaking in a language he couldn’t understand. He remembers arriving home at 11 p.m., two hours after the light first caught his attention, with no memory of what filled the time in between beyond that single, fragmentary image of the white room.
Date: July 1952
Sighting Time: 9:00 p.m. (2100)
Day/Night: Night
Location: Point Defiance Park, Tacoma, Washington
Urban or Rural: Park/wooded area within an urban setting
No. of Entity(‘s): Many (unspecified exact number)
Entity Type: Humanoid (type unspecified)
Entity Description: Many small beings, remembered as talking among themselves in an unknown language; no further physical description survives
Duration: 2 hours of missing time (9:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m.), with only a brief, fragmentary memory of the interior “white room” surviving from that interval
No. of Object(s): 1
Description of the Object(s): A yellowish-white light, seen moving back and forth in the sky before the witness’s memory becomes fragmentary
Shape/Size/Color of Object(s): No solid shape resolved — described only as a yellowish-white light; size not specified
Distance to Object(s): Not specified
Height & Speed: Not specified; light was observed moving back and forth rather than in a single direction
Number of Witnesses: 1 (the 9-year-old witness)
Special Features/Characteristics: Two hours of unaccounted-for time between the initial light sighting and the witness’s return home; only a single, isolated fragment of memory survives from that interval — sitting on a stool in a white room, surrounded by many small beings conversing in an unfamiliar language; no memory of transport, entry, or exit is described
Case Status: Unresolved — a child witness’s account reaching researchers 36 years after the claimed event (source dated 1988), with no independent corroboration and only a single fragmentary memory rather than a continuous narrative
Source: Nick H. Edwards, CUFORN Bulletin, Nov/Dec 1988
Summary/Description: One night in July 1952, at approximately 9:00 p.m., a 9-year-old witness in Point Defiance Park, Tacoma, Washington saw a yellowish-white light moving back and forth in the sky. He recalled seeing many small beings that seemed to be talking in an unknown language, and had the sensation of being in a white room, sitting on a stool. His next clear memory is of arriving home at 11:00 p.m. — two hours after the sighting began — with no further information about what occurred during the intervening time. The account was not documented until 1988, 36 years after the claimed event.
Related Cases: Shares the missing-time/child-witness/fragmentary-memory structure with other cases in this archive’s broader collection, including the 1955 Colorado missing-time case and the 1955 Connecticut child contact account — a recurring pattern worth noting across decades rather than treating any single instance as uniquely reliable
Detailed Report
The Point Defiance Park case reaches the record only through a 1988 CUFORN Bulletin article by researcher Nick H. Edwards, describing an account from a witness recalling events that occurred 36 years earlier, when he was 9 years old. At approximately 9:00 p.m. one night in July 1952, in Point Defiance Park, Tacoma, Washington, the boy saw a yellowish-white light moving back and forth across the sky.
What happened next is preserved only as a single, isolated fragment rather than a continuous memory. He recalled seeing many small beings, which seemed to be conversing among themselves in a language he didn’t recognize. He also recalled the sensation of being inside a plain white room, sitting on a stool. No memory of how he got from the park to that room, what happened while he was there beyond that single image, or how he returned survives in the account.
His next clear, continuous memory is of arriving home at 11:00 p.m. — two full hours after he first noticed the light in the sky. The gap between the initial sighting and his return home constitutes the case’s missing-time element, though unlike more detailed missing-time accounts elsewhere in this archive, no fuller narrative of the interval ever emerged, even decades later.
No independent corroboration — a second witness, a family member’s account of the boy’s condition or behavior upon returning home, or any contemporaneous documentation — survives in the available source material.
RESEARCHER’S NOTES
The Point Defiance Park Case — A Single Fragment, Not a Full Narrative
- The genuinely unaccounted-for two hours is the case’s most concrete element. Regardless of what filled that interval, a 9-year-old being unaccounted for from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. is, on its own terms, a real gap in the timeline that something must explain.
- The memory itself is unusually sparse compared to similar cases in this archive. Rather than a detailed, if delayed, narrative of the interior experience, only a single fixed image — the white room, the stool, the murmuring beings — survives, with no surrounding detail ever recovered even by 1988.
- The 36-year gap between event and documentation is substantial, and this was a child witness at the time. Childhood memory recalled at such a distance, especially of a fragmentary and dreamlike nature, deserves particular caution — a pattern this archive applies consistently to other delayed-childhood-memory cases.
- No named witness, family corroboration, or any documentation from 1952 itself has been located. The case exists entirely within a single 1988 magazine article, with no way to independently trace or verify its origin.
- The case’s title on this archive carries a built-in question mark (“Abduction?”) — appropriately, given how thin and fragmentary the account actually is. That honest uncertainty is preserved here rather than resolved in either direction.
The Point Defiance Park case is genuinely thin — a single fragmentary childhood memory, recalled decades later, anchored only by a real two-hour gap in an otherwise ordinary evening. It’s preserved here exactly as thin as it is, without smoothing the missing detail into a fuller story than the source actually provides.
“He remembers arriving home at 2300. No other information.”
— Nick H. Edwards, CUFORN Bulletin, Nov/Dec 1988
