They pursued the object for about half an hour, ending up in Pennsylvania before losing sight of the UFO. Several other police officers became involved in the chase, and several civilians reported witnessing the same object, or a similar object in about the same area, during this time.

The UFO encounter earned significant mainstream publicity, and probably inspired a scene in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where three Indiana police cruisers are depicted chasing several UFOs into Ohio, eastbound across state lines.

After interviewing one of the police witnesses, Project Blue Book (the official UFO investigative arm of the U.S. Air Force) determined that the witnesses had chased a communications satellite, then the planet Venus. This conclusion was rejected by the officers involved as ridiculously inadequate, and was furthermore subject to some wider criticism, contributing to the opinions of some observers that Blue Book was a failure as an investigative project. The UFO chase was one of the cases that contributed to the creation of the Condon Committee, ostensibly an independent scientific investigation of UFOs.

Shortly after 5.00 a.m., Spaur and Neff had stopped their police cruiser to investigate a car seemingly abandoned off the side of road near Ravenna, Ohio. Earlier, there had been police radio chatter about witnesses in and near Akron, Ohio who had telephoned police with claims of seeing a large, bright disc flying through the skies.

While examining the abandoned car, Spaur noticed a bright light seeming to approach from behind a nearby hill. Alerting Neff, they both watched as the light came closer. They reported that the light came from a large, oval shaped object that hovered at between 50 and 100 feet in altitude. The object then turned sharply and shone an extremely bright light at the officers.

Neff and Spaur said they ran back to their police cruiser. While the object hovered nearby, Spaur radioed the sheriff's office and told them about the UFO. He was ordered to stay where he was until others could arrive with a camera. (Officers were mistakenly sent to the wrong location, and no photos were ever taken of the UFO.)

The oval was about 35 to 45 feet in diameter, said Spaur and Neff, and seemed to be about 18 to 24 feet thick. The bottom was rounded, and they could not see much of the object's top due to their position below the object. A bright conical spotlight shone from the bottom of the object. According to Spaur and Neff, whenever the object moved, its edge would tip in the direction of its motion.

Spaur and Neff said that the object then rose in altitude to about 300 feet, and began to emit a loud humming sound, as its light grew ever brighter. It began slowly drifting through the air, its spotlight shining brightly on the ground as it moved, and Spaur and Neff followed in the police cruiser.

However, the object would accelerate away from them whenever Spaur and Neff approached. Deciding to follow the object, Spaur and Neff radioed their intentions to the police dispatcher. Via the radio, Deputy Robert D. Wilson suggested that Spaur should shoot the object, but Spaur refused.

The chase continued, mostly in a southeasterly direction, and soon Spaur and Neff entered Mahoning County, Ohio. They traveled along U.S. Route 224 at up to 100 miles per hour, in radio contact throughout. As the sun rose, Spaur and Neff said they could better discern the object's shape: it seemed to be metallic, resembling aluminum or silver, and the top was a flattened dome. There was, Spaur and Neff asserted, a slender projection at the rear-center of the object; they called this the object's "antenna".