Our Arklahoma Heritage: Ouachita Mountain event from nine years ago still a topic of MUFON investigations

On the night of February 18, 2017, Orville Murphy, his wife Cheryl, and their adult son Josh stepped outside on their fifty-acre property in the Ouachita Mountains near Board Camp, Arkansas, ten miles east of Mena.

The three of them stood on a hill looking out over the land they had bought years earlier, intending to open a campground. What they saw instead was three enormous columns of pure white light rising from the next hilltop roughly nine hundred feet away.

Each beam appeared about thirty feet wide and shot some three hundred feet upward into the night sky, flat across the top, lasting roughly ten seconds before vanishing. Nothing else was present on the rural site. No vehicles, no people, no equipment running. The witnesses were left staring at empty darkness.

The following morning, they walked the hill and found the physical aftermath. Metal fence posts that had stood straight were leaning. A large metal sign they had erected for their mining license, one the wind had never managed to topple, lay on the ground. Hand tools that had been stacked were scattered.

There were no tire tracks, no footprints of ordinary size, and no other signs of human activity that could account for the changes. They called a friend who knew about the Mutual UFO Network. Arkansas investigator Race Hobbs reached them first. Because of the displaced metal and the credibility of the three witnesses, MUFON headquarters sent its Special Assignment Team, led by Chase Kloetzke, to the site within days.

Hobbs accompanied them.

The team brought Gauss meters and other instruments that measure electromagnetic fields and radiation. When the meters were placed against the leaning fence posts and the toppled sign, the readings jumped far above normal background. The metal objects were not only magnetized but polarized, showing distinct north and south poles.

Elevated electromagnetic and radiation levels were recorded at the event site. Soil and rock samples were collected and sent to laboratories. The investigators told the Murphys that only about three percent of reported cases leave physical evidence of this kind. They concluded the effects were external, not generated by anything already on the property such as power lines or local equipment.

Their working assessment, as the owners later described it, was that a craft had hovered over the hill, produced the beams, and may have interacted with the quartz crystals that underlie the land.

The Murphys had opened Board Camp Crystal Mine to the public in 2012 as a hand-tool-only dig after discovering quartz veins on the property. They deliberately avoided heavy equipment and blasting, partly because Native visitors had arrived independently and told them the land was special and should not be disturbed that way.

The crystals themselves are ordinary Arkansas quartz, formed hydrothermally millions of years earlier in the Stanley Shale, prized for clarity and piezoelectric properties. After the February event, activity on the property expanded. Game cameras began recording rocks that appeared to shift, roll, or rise without visible contact.

Orbs and smaller beams of light continued. Tree arches formed, living trees bent and twisted together in patterns that matched structures reported at other sites associated with large unknown primates. Rock stacks and arches appeared overnight, some stones too large for casual human arrangement.

Orville described multiple sightings of figures he estimated at nine to twelve feet tall. In one early encounter, while walking with Native visitors who were chanting, a tall figure rose from a ravine roughly fifty to seventy-five feet away with almost no visible effort, made eye contact, and was simply gone.

A large dead cedar was later found dragged a hundred to a hundred fifty feet across a road, accompanied by twenty-inch footprints that showed individual toe impressions, slight differences between left and right, and a gripping or grinding appearance consistent with a turning step under weight. Casts were made.

Visitors and investigators reported rocks appearing or being displaced after verbal requests, and instruments responding to questions directed at whatever was present. The owners began offering UnXplained Tours that walk guests through the original event site and show the structures and images.

In December 2023, Orville and another person named Jason saw a bright light appear at the top of a hill on the property. They walked toward it. Orville stepped into the light, and Jason followed. Both later described entering what they called a portal. Inside, they encountered beings and visual phenomena for which ordinary language was inadequate, including patterns of light one of them compared to fluorescent spaghetti.

They regained ordinary awareness back on the mine property with only partial conscious memory of what had occurred. The owners have written books titled Beams that detail the sequence of events from the original beams onward. The site remains open seasonally for crystal digging and for the tours, with no guarantee that any particular visitor will witness anomalous activity.

The combination of the 2017 instrument readings on magnetized and polarized metal, the ongoing physical traces, the reported large-figure encounters, and the later portal experience continues to be investigated by the owners and by others who visit. No conventional explanation has accounted for the full set of observations.