Vickie Landrum

Early life and background

Vickie Marzelia Landrum (1923–2007) was a Texas woman in her late fifties when she became one of the three named witnesses in the Cash–Landrum incident, usually ranked among the most-discussed "physical effects" cases in American ufology. Very little biography survives from before 1980. She lived in the Dayton–Huffman area northeast of Houston, in the piney-woods country sometimes called the Big Thicket, and her 2007 obituary appeared in the local Big Thicket Messenger (see the document index at Blue Blurry Lines). She was a devout Christian, which colours how she herself understood what she saw. She was the grandmother of Colby Landrum, who was seven at the time of the event and was in her care that evening. She was a friend of Betty Cash, then 51, who owned a restaurant in Dayton and was the driver of the car.

Landrum is not remembered as a researcher, author or public campaigner. She is remembered because she was there, because she and her grandson were affected, and because she was the person who set the investigation in motion. Her significance is that of a witness whose testimony, injuries and legal fight became the evidentiary basis of a case.

The night of 29 December 1980

According to the accounts compiled by investigators, Cash, Landrum and Colby were driving home to Dayton after an evening out, on an isolated two-lane road through woods. At about 9 p.m. they saw a bright light above the trees which they at first took for an airplane heading for Houston Intercontinental Airport. Minutes later the light appeared closer and brighter, hovering at about treetop height over the road, with flame issuing from its underside and a strong sensation of heat. Colby, the youngest, was the one who insisted the thing was shaped like a big diamond; Landrum said at the first documented interview that she could not tell.

Landrum's role in the story is distinctive. When the object came down toward the road, it was she who was afraid they would be burned and urged Cash to stop the car. Both women got out; Landrum soon returned to the car to comfort the terrified boy, while Cash remained outside longer, and received the most severe exposure. Landrum later recast what she had seen in religious terms, telling Colby, in the words reported in Wikipedia's summary of the case, "That's Jesus. He will not hurt us." She is also the source of an unusual detail, brought out later under hypnosis, of small blue lights (reported in the National Enquirer on 5 August 1981).

After roughly twenty minutes the object rose and moved off, and the witnesses reported that a group of about 23 helicopters, many of them tandem-rotor CH-47 Chinooks, appeared to flank or escort it. Cash said she saw "United States Air Force" markings. Driving home on a different route, they were again in sight of the helicopters. The heat had made the car's dashboard soft enough to take a handprint, an image later shown in documentaries.

Injuries and medical record

That night all three experienced nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, eye irritation and sunburn-like skin symptoms. Cash fared worst: she went to the emergency room on 3 January 1981 and was in and out of hospital for weeks. Landrum and Colby suffered less. Landrum reported skin sores, hair loss, weakness, and light sensitivity; in April 1981 a cataract was diagnosed, which became the main objectively documented medical finding on her side of the case. Investigators and sympathetic physicians, among them Dr. Richard Niemtzow, who published "Alleged Medical Injuries from a UFO" in Flying Saucer Review (1984), argued the pattern resembled radiation or microwave exposure, though researcher Brad Sparks argued the rapid onset was inconsistent with radiation sickness and pointed toward chemical contamination.

The skeptical reading of the medical evidence is blunt. Skeptic Brian Dunning reported in a 2018 Skeptoid episode, as summarised in the Wikipedia article, that Cash's physicians attributed her hair loss to alopecia areata and that the only documented illness for Landrum was a cataract. Philip Klass noted that a Geiger counter found no radiation in the car and that no pre-incident medical baseline was provided. The Texas Department of Health, whose representative visited in September 1981, was unable to locate a residual radiation signature, and it could not even establish where the event had occurred.

Investigation

Landrum telephoned the National UFO Reporting Center on 2 February 1981 and, after a call to NASA, was referred on to John Schuessler, a NASA engineer and MUFON figure who directed MUFON's Project VISIT. Schuessler produced a preliminary report in March 1981 and later wrote a book, The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident (1998). Allan Hendry of the Center for UFO Studies also briefly looked at the case in April 1981. Local reporter Cathy Gordon of the Conroe Courier published the first newspaper coverage on 22–23 February 1981, followed by tabloid pickup in Weekly World News and the National Enquirer.

Landrum was hypnotised by Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle in July 1981, and later again for a segment of ABC's That's Incredible!, where it was done in front of a studio audience, a choice criticised by those who think hypnosis is unreliable for recovering memory. In April 1981 she and Colby had also gone to a Chinook landing zone in the Dayton area, where she told a pilot she had been burned by a UFO; he reportedly said he had been looking into a different UFO incident, so the encounter yielded little.

In August 1981, after Senators Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower raised the matter, the witnesses were interviewed by Air Force officers at Bergstrom Air Force Base on 17 August and told they might seek compensation. The transcripts remained unpublished until around 1994. In 1982 Lt. Col. George Sarran of the Army Inspector General's office carried out what the Wikipedia article calls the only thorough formal government inquiry; he found no evidence that the helicopters were U.S. military, and said he found Cash and Landrum credible. Independent corroboration came from Dayton patrolman Lamar Walker and his wife, who reported seeing about a dozen Chinook-type helicopters in the area that night, though they did not report a UFO, and a Huffman helicopter witness, John Plaster, was interviewed in 1982.

The lawsuit

With the encouragement of the Bergstrom interview, Cash, Landrum and Colby, represented pro bono by attorney Peter Gersten, filed suit against the United States government for about $20 million, arguing that an American military or NASA craft had injured them. Landrum was thus a named plaintiff in what has been described as the first U.S. lawsuit seeking damages for injuries from an alleged UFO. NASA, Air Force, Army and Navy officials testified. According to the account in Wikipedia, a federal district judge dismissed the suit on 21 August 1986, persuaded that no government agency owned such a craft and that no military personnel had operated the helicopters. The plaintiffs therefore never received compensation, and the defence's own internal enquiries have never surfaced in public documents.

The case for and against

Supporters stress that the three witnesses had little to gain, that Landrum and Cash repeated the core story consistently for years, that there were independent helicopter sightings, that the Army IG took them seriously, and that they sustained injuries that were real, whatever the cause. Investigators including Schuessler considered them sincere. The claim that the witnesses were burnt by their own government is also the main reason the case is repeatedly cited in discussions of AAWSAP research; the Blue Blurry Lines index lists a 2009 AAWSAP paper that refers to it.

Sceptics reply that the location was never fixed, that the first documented report came 34 days later, that the diamond shape came from a seven-year-old, that the medical evidence is thin or ambiguous, and that no military unit ever admitted to the flight. Steuart Campbell proposed in 1994 that the object was a mirage of the star Canopus. Others have suggested a classified aircraft or a nuclear-related accident rather than an alien craft. Landrum's religious reinterpretation and her hypnosis episodes give critics further reason for caution about her recollections, though not about her sincerity, which few commentators dispute.

Later life and legacy

Landrum largely retreated from the spotlight after the suit failed. Her friend Betty Cash died on 29 December 1998, exactly eighteen years after the encounter; Vickie Landrum died on 12 September 2007, aged 83. Colby Landrum appeared on the UFO Hunters series in 2009. The case was dramatised and discussed in documentaries including HBO's UFOs: What's Going On (1985) and Unsolved Mysteries (1991), and still appears in writing on potential directed-energy and aerospace accidents. Within the field, Landrum stands as an unusual figure: neither a contactee nor a crusader, but an ordinary rural grandmother whose body is cited as evidence by one side and whose medical file is cited by the other.