Case description
At about 6:45 p.m. on October 4, 1973, petroleum consultant Gary Jay Chopic reportedly saw a strange object while driving west on the Simi Freeway near Santa Susana Pass. After noticing dust below the road, he stopped and looked toward a clearing roughly twenty-five to thirty metres away. The fuller press-derived account describes a pink-grey triangular craft hovering approximately three metres above the ground, with a blunt narrow nose and no conspicuous lights.
It carried a nested V marking on its side, a small transparent bubble on top and a hose extending almost to the ground. Chopic reported an indistinct light-coloured form moving inside the bubble. A normally proportioned human-looking individual in a silvery wetsuit then crawled around from the far side toward the craft's front, looked toward him and scrambled away. Its face remained dark and unresolved. A brief clicking sound accompanied this sequence.
The bubble reportedly swivelled and retracted; a low hum and sweet, incense-like vapour followed, obscuring the craft before it disappeared. Chopic subsequently contacted police. Another couple's earlier sighting concerned a different occasion and does not independently confirm this encounter. The fuller account's triangular hull differs from an elliptical description in an Atlas/NICAP abstract. Sources also compress or relocate the figure's movements, so the plate follows the fuller exterior-crawling sequence without assigning clear anatomy to the form inside the bubble.
