Mystery copters worry area resident

COEUR d'ALENE - The first time a low-flying helicopter buzzed over his Hunter Crest Drive home, it bothered Bailey Barrett and left him wondering what it was doing.

The second time it happened a month later, it concerned him a little more and again, left him trying to figure out why it was there.

"It's kind of scary when it comes in so low like that," the Coeur d'Alene man said.

It was about 3:30 Thursday when Barrett was emptying the trash and a loud noise rose in the backyard. He looked up and saw an olive green helicopter swooping in from the west, come down low near his home, and then head north.

That itself wasn't a big worry, except that last month, he said the same helicopter came in low and circled three times over his home near Canfield Mountain.

It attracted the attention of the neighborhood.

"Everybody on the street was out looking," Barrett said.

He was unable to find out who was flying the copter, or why it was there, despite calls to several agencies. Someone suggested it might be a government helicopter, but he said there were no markings or numbers to indicate where it was from.

"Nobody admitted to it then," he said.

Barrett didn't fret about it until that helicopter made a short return Thursday; this time even lower, no more than 100 feet above the tree line.

"It looked like he was going to crash," he said.

This time, he grabbed his digital camera and snapped a few pictures of it disappearing in the distance.

Barrett said he's lived in the home for several years and has never had that happened before.

"Near as I could tell, it was exactly the same one," he said.

Spokespeople with the Coeur d'Alene police and the Kootenai County Sheriff's Department both said they had no reports of low-flying helicopters on Thursday.

The Coeur d'Alene airport does have helicopters take off and land there, but had not received any calls about a helicopter buzzing low near Canfield Mountain, said an airport employee.