Missouri's Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Missouri's Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Part 3: Missouri is Weird - Move over bigfoot, ET needs some love, too
The Air Force officially closed Project Blue Book in 1969, basically telling everyone there was nothing to UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects). I guess they forgot to tell that to the pilots flying UFOs over Missouri in 1973. If last week's tales of a Missouri bigfoot weren’t odd enough, then get ready for a recap of the greatest UFO flap of the 1970s, perhaps of all time.
A teacher, farmer, high school coach, airplane pilot, and law enforcement were just a few of the credible witnesses to encounter strange lights in the sky over southeastern Missouri in 1973. The activity centered around Piedmont, MO, though not limited to this site. Piedmont police received over five hundred reports of UFOs in this rural area in the early weeks of the flap. The sightings occurred with such frequency, it attracted the attention of a Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), professor, Dr. Harley D. Rutledge.
Rutledge was the dean of physics, but also a curious scientist. After seeing the unusual lights firsthand, he would initiate a project that would turn his skepticism into belief. The frequency of the sightings in the area around Piedmont gave Rutledge the idea to study the phenomena scientifically. Other SEMO scientists, engineers, students, and laypeople assisted with field research, making up the team for Project identification. The study had two major objectives, according to Rutledge: 1) to measure the physical properties of the lights and/or properties in the sky; 2) to identify their origin. The team would directly experience well over a hundred sightings in the first year. That is something, considering the study began in April 1973, six weeks after the first reported sighting on February 21.
The Clearwater High School basketball coach and some of his players were headed back to their hometown after experiencing a loss on the road. Coach Reggie Bone was driving near Ellsinore MO, located south of Piedmont, when he noticed a beam of light coming down from the sky in the distance. The team stopped a few minutes later and watched colorful, rotating lights on an object hovering above a field. The noiseless object suddenly headed over a forested ridge. From there, it flew over a farmhouse, where a second witness saw the bright light shine into her bedroom window as it passed through her property. She too would report the colored rotating lights.
The following evening, three more witnesses driving on a local highway saw the same lighted object. They chased the moving lights down the highway until they lost sight of it. They had followed the light to Brushy Creek, where other witnesses were standing on the road. They too were looking at the lights in the sky.
Hovering lights continued to appear near the heavily forested area of Brushy Creek for consecutive days that late February. The lights were distinctive enough for the residents to describe them as behaving differently than normal aircraft, but far enough away to not discern the exact shape. Residents reported blackouts and electrical interruptions, some saying their televisions would go to a static picture during a close encounter.
More details about the objects would emerge over the weeks. A high school photography teacher saw the unusual lights near her home repeatedly. She decided to station a camera on a tripod and capture the sky using a very slow exposure. One photograph showed a conical shape UFO, and it can be seen in an archive of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Famed UFO researcher Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who worked with the Air Force during Project Blue Book, weighed in on the photograph and the flap. He believed the image was a lens flare. His words insulted the seasoned photographer, who knew it wasn’t a flare. Even Post photographers agreed it was no flare.
Hynek also offended other witnesses by discounting their sightings as no more than hysterics. Sure, there were probably cases of misidentification as more people looked to the sky hoping to see something. But consider some of the early reports of credible witnesses who consistently described green, white, amber, and red blinking lights, moving in a circular motion that was about 25 to 30 feet long.
The sightings continued almost nightly. One resident had three vivid sightings, according to FATE Magazine. First, he saw the UFO on Highway 49, hovering over the road. Two weeks later he saw the light suspended near the same area. He described a dome-shaped top, with rotating lights (consistent with other reports). Then he saw the object silently fly over his farm.
About a month into the sightings, two witnesses near Clearwater Lake (Piedmont) saw the object rise out of the water. This was corroborated by campers who saw a light moving under the water on the other side of the lake the same evening. It attracted hundreds of people to the lake, just to wait for something to emerge, though they would be disappointed. Divers confirmed the USO (Unidentified Submersible Object) was not stationed underwater as one research enthusiasts suggested.
The following evening, about 60 miles north of Piedmont and close to the Missouri-Illinois border, an operating engineer at the Central Illinois Public Service Company saw an object hovering over the transformer yard. The witness described a saucer-shaped object, about 25 feet in diameter, with a high-intensity red light coming out of what seemed to be portholes. It darted behind the power plant and then headed back towards the Missouri hills. The NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) incident report stated, “In 25-30 minutes [after the object was gone] 3-4 jets made 8-10 sweeps of the area about 2-3 minutes apart.”
By mid-April, sightings were reported in Piedmont, Bernie, Charleston, Dexter, Ellsinore, Farmington, Sikeston, and Perryville, MO. The only incident involving a physical injury occurred in early October 1973, which happened between two more southeast towns.
A Greenville, MO trucker was traveling south on Hwy 55, passing through Jackson, and heading towards Cape Girardeau. His wife (his relief driver) was lying down in the back of the truck cab. After noticing an illuminated object following him, he stuck his head out the window to see if he could see the light source.
The trucker’s wife heard him yell “Oh my God, I am burned and can’t see.” His glasses fell off, and he was temporarily blinded. He managed to safely stop the truck. She took him to Southeast Hospital in Cape where they treated him for facial burns. Though blinded for several hours, he completely regained his sight over the next few weeks with no permanent damage to his eyes.
The highway patrol sent the truck driver’s warped plastic frames to Dr. Rutledge for examination. After putting the twisted glasses under a microscope, Rutledge reported they were heated from within. The SEMO professor could not prove whether the trucker’s story was true, as he was able to reproduce the same effect with a road flare. This evidence would weigh against the Greenville man seeking workman’s compensation benefits to cover his medical expenses and lost wages.
Despite the ridicule, the truck driver stuck to his story and gave reporters a description of the object he glanced at on October 3, 1973. He said it was aluminum, shaped like a turnip, covered two lanes, and had red and yellow spinning lights.
After reading these 1973 encounters, I couldn’t help but think of the movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The initial sightings in the movie—the ones that drove Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss’s character) to carve his mashed potatoes into a mini–Devil’s Tower National Monument—strikingly matched some of the 1973 eyewitness reports from the flap area. Scriptwriting began late in 1973, so perhaps the nationally publicized eyewitness accounts inspired the writers.
By the end of 1974, the frequency of southeast sightings had slowed. Maybe the townspeople were tired of being ridiculed and stopped reporting them. Still, the research team continued to study sightings through the late 1970s. By then, UFO sightings and new irregularities spread up and down the towns along the Mississippi River along the Missouri-Illinois border.
This is where my own journey into the tales of the unknown began. In the late 1970s, I had an unforgettable close encounter. I consider it to be the root cause of my fascination with Missouri’s weird history. Next week, I will unpack that personal event along with the Show Me state sightings that go back to the late1930s, including an alleged UFO crash outside of Cape Girardeau. It happened years before headlines reported another alleged UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico.
Happy Halloween!
The sources for this story include multiple newspaper clippings, from various news sources including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A lengthy summary of the Brushy Creek sightings was published in FATE Magazine (May 1974 Volume 27 - Number 5). A copy can be found here, but there are a lot of annoying ads.
Also, if you can find a copy, I recommend Project Identification: The First Scientific Field Study of UFO (1981) by Harley D. Rutledge, PhD. It was really the first of its kind; an independent, scientific UFO research project. Old copies are rare and expensive. But, if lucky, you can find a library that might have it. The SEMO library had a copy a decade ago when my son was a student. He’s a good boy and checked it out for his Mama to read.
Finally, watch Close Encounters of The Third Kind and pay attention to the events that happen with the experiencers in Muncie, IN (before Drefyuss’s character loses it at the dinner table).