(click to enlarge photos)
Published in The Seattle Times online on July 23, 2026
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on July 26, 2026
Seattle family witnesses – and believes – a hoax encounter of the 1948 kind
By Jean Sherrard
On a midsummer evening in 1948, the Rev. Lewis Randal drove north with his family along Highway 99 after Sunday church
services. While they crossed the Aurora Bridge, 14-year-old Leta Rae and her mother, Dorothy, witnessed something that left them astonished and terrified.
Hovering in mid-air was a cigar-shaped object.
Mother and daughter screamed and pointed. But before the younger children, Edith and Edwin, and their father caught a glimpse, the object had zipped off.
The shaken family took the first bridge exit and pulled in front of their Wallingford bungalow to compare notes.
A year earlier, the nation had become transfixed by reports of flying discs circling Mount Rainier. The reserved Randals, however, scarcely could have imagined that they, too, would be swept into such hysteria.
Within days, their neighborhood weekly newspaper — the North Central Outlook, published four blocks away in the basement of a Woodlawn Avenue Craftsman — splashed a photo on the front page: a wingless, double-decked craft, windows ablaze, hovering over Green Lake at midnight.
It had been snapped, the paper claimed, by an Outlook staff photographer. Any doubts the Randals harbored were erased by this evidence in black and white.
Years later, after writing a commemorative “Now & Then” column about the Outlook’s beloved editor and publisher Stan Stapp, Paul Dorpat recalled the UFO story to me with a chuckle.
“Stan told me it was a complete hoax,” he said. “He even confessed it to The Times.”
Indeed, two days after the Outlook coverage, a sheepish Stapp told The Seattle Times: “It seemed so fantastic I didn’t dream anyone would believe the story. Had I realized, I probably wouldn’t have done it.”
The photograph, he admitted, was a homemade composite — an airship drawn onto a Fourth of July fireworks photo taken at Green Lake.
The Randals missed the public confession. They kept the yellowed clipping for decades, proof positive of what had become a family legend and repeated to succeeding generations, including me.
Dorothy was my grandmother. Edith was my mother.
Today, UFO fever is spiking again with the new Steven Spielberg film “Disclosure Day,” declassified government archives and authenticated Navy footage that even congressional hearings cannot explain.
Unlike Stapp’s homemade composite, this evidence resists debunking. The confession never comes. We stand at the intersection of fact and fiction, confirmation bias and genuine mystery. Add AI into the mix, and the paths between them grow harder to navigate. At least in 1948, the truth got its boots on within two days.
Meanwhile, the Randal descendants occasionally gather at Green Lake, point skyward and wonder. Some things are inherited.
WEB EXTRAS
Click here for our Hoax Encounter 360 video!
Just below, the front page of the North Central Outlook, hoax photo placed above the fold:
A microfiche copy of the July 30, 1948 edition of the North Central Outlook from the UW’s Suzallo Library:
Stan’s confession:
