Seeing Red: A UFO Experience

Part 4 of 5: Missouri is Weird - I know what I saw so stop asking if I believe

My interest in extraordinary phenomena began during the late 1970s when two of my nieces and I saw something unexplainable one evening. At the time of our sighting, I had no idea strangeness plagued Missouri. Looking back in this decade, I can tell there was a pattern of odd activity that followed the Mississippi River and the cities that closely bordered its path.

Beginning in 1975, cattle mutilations became the latest in unexplained Missouri events. Over 7000 cases were reported across the contiguous States by 1978. At least four mutilations were reported in Elsberry, a Mississippi River town just 30 minutes south of the 1972 Momo sightings in Louisiana, MO. Accompanying the Elsberry mutilations were eyewitness reports of lights in the sky from 1978 to 1979—the same rotating colors that had been seen over southeast Missouri during the 1973 flap.

Our sighting took place on a warm evening. We were likely on summer break, or at least, not a school night. My sister, Chris, and her two girls came to visit one night after dinner. They would often stop by for short visits once or twice a week, or I would spend time over at their house. I was the youngest of five children and only six years separated me and Chris’s daughter, Julie. Even the ten-year gap between me and her youngest, Jill, was less than the age gap between us sisters. We spent a lot of time together as kids and my nieces were my unofficial little sisters.

Even though I can’t remember the exact year of the sighting, I was able to narrow it to the warmer months of 1977 or 1978 using a couple of clues. First, my bedroom window was open, so it was likely summer. Second, we played a game and Julie was old enough to read the cards, so she was at least age six. In January 1979, they moved to Georgia for nine months. I spent my summer break with them. When I returned from Georgia at the end of the summer, my other sister was engaged and moved out of our house. I moved from the middle bedroom to her old bedroom that fall and started High School. I am confident it was not 1979, or afterwards, because the sighting happened in my old bedroom.

My room had just one window, and it was very square, with a thick wooden frame. It opened like a hinged door to the eastern sky. Looking out onto the horizon the glow from distant streetlights could be seen above our neighbor's pitched, horizontal roofline. Our house sat on a downhill slope and had a steep-pitched roof, which made the ceiling of my upstairs bedroom similarly angled.

In 1978, I was thirteen, and Julie and Jill were seven and three, respectively (or all a year younger if the sighting occurred in 1977). That evening, Julie and I sat on the floor of my bedroom playing Clue. We took turns rolling the die, moving Professor Plum and Miss Scarlet (or two other figures) around the board until something caught our attention.

Julie’s face was glowing red. And as soon as I noticed, she too noticed the same about me. We looked towards the window where the light entered the room. A red hue covered the walls and our bodies. For the light to permeate the room as it did, it had to be above the neighbor's roofline, but at an angle that could cover the walls and shine close to the floor where we sat.

Sketch of our St. Louis City home and the location of the bedroom where the sighting occurred.

As city kids, we were accustomed to a lot of environmental noise. North Broadway traffic flowed past the bottom of my residential street. Horns sounded from the semis entering and leaving the trucking facilities at Hall Street. The Mississippi River was close enough to hear barge horns passing the area and the cargo trains chugging along the parallel tracks. Commercial airplanes commonly flew overhead on their way to and from St. Louis Lambert Airport, and occasionally, they were low enough to vibrate the windows. The noises waned in the evening but never vanished.

But what we experienced had no sound. We quickly bolted down the stairs, leaving the three-year-old in our wake, as we headed to the front door in a rush to see if we could see the red-light source outside. Jill still remembers her aunt and sister abandoning her in the scary room. Even a helicopter, equipped with a red searchlight, looking for a Hall Street prison escapee would have made plenty of noise. Fortunately, no convict was on the loose that evening (occasionally, it happened, and my mom would lock down the house and bar us from going outside).

In the mid-1990s, Julie and I retold our UFO story at dinner. My sister realized for the first time that the experience did not come from our imaginations. My memories from this random night have lasted over the decades, even though most other childhood memories faded.

All three of us remember the red light shining in the room. Of all the times we played together as kids, this moment is distinctly present today in our minds. I think that says something about the impact this unusual experience had on us kids. As adults, all three of us have talked about having strange dreams that involve that middle, upstairs bedroom on Canaan Avenue. We joke about it being haunted because there has been no rational explanation for our experiences.

I wanted to find answers for that evening, so a few years ago I began digging into UFO reports and news stories. In July 1978 there was quite a bit of activity in Missouri. About 45 miles to the southwest of St. Louis, the town of Union had reports of orange lights zipping over treetops and at least one close encounter. One woman filed a police report after a UFO hovered over her car before it lifted the rear end of it. She temporarily lost control of the vehicle and almost had an accident. Police examined the car and found two indentations on the trunk lid. Around the same date and 90 miles southwest of Union, multiple eyewitnesses reported lights over the Fort Leonard Wood area, including a bright flashing red light that passed over the witness's home.

I took comfort in knowing that around the same time, others experienced unusual lights in the sky. I bet there were plenty more witnesses, perhaps you may even have seen something in the past but never reported it. It’s never too late. The internet has made it much easier to report strange encounters, including those that are so old you must estimate the year. I reported my childhood sighting twenty years ago to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) and eventually to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). It’s free to report, and both have a searchable database to look at other cases. (However, MUFON requires a membership to search their database, and NUFORC is free.)

If my sighting happened in recent years, I may have been able to catch it on camera. Most people now have smartphones equipped with excellent digital cameras so capturing photos and videos of lights in the sky is much easier than ever. But we live in a time where there are numerous satellites and drones flying overhead that contribute to mistaken sightings. Even so, there are apps that will identify lights in the sky that are supposed to be there—aircraft, satellites, and celestial bodies.

Of course, this doesn’t prevent anyone from faking it. With easy access to high-end video and photo editing applications, almost anyone can make a digital forgery. Some pics are so good it takes an expert analyst to debunk them. Even when the fake UFO photos are meant to be a joke, people download the images and spread them on social media as legitimate evidence. It further discredits the UFO subject and lessens the chance that our government, scientists, and the media will seriously study it.

This is also why the history of UFOs is so important. Look back to the early decades (the 1940s – 1950s) when pilots, military, and law enforcement reported close encounters. The technology in our air space was significantly less, as was the capability to easily fake photos and videos. And there were plenty of qualified researchers investigating these experiences, from scientists to retired high-ranking military officers, at least until they were humiliated into a lesser existence.

It has been seventy years since pilot Kenneth Arnold first saw saucer-shaped discs flying over the Cascades. Since then, UFOs have become synonymous with little green men, Hollywood sci-fi, and a belief reserved for the fringe of society. Most news stations refrain from covering important stories and investigating these events because they are uncomfortable with the topic. When they do cover the subject, the stories include sarcastic comments and jokes to make light of a situation that is not the least bit humorous. By the end of the 1960s, credible witnesses reported their encounters anonymously to organizations like MUFON or never reported them at all.

Yet, if there are foreign objects flying around in our air space, then it should be a national security and safety concern for all of us. In recent years, several UFO videos were captured on military jet cameras and then leaked to the press. It resulted in high-ranking military witnesses sharing their firsthand experiences on Capitol Hill. This also forced the government to establish a new public study, the first since Project Blue Book ended in 1969. Let’s just hope it's not another PR campaign to quiet the masses.

It should be noted that the Pentagon funded a study with a private company Bigelow Aerospace for several years before the story broke in 2017. If the content is considered the property of a private company, it can remain undisclosed to the public. Since taxpayers fund the government, it seems the only logical way to pay for secret research, over the years, is to inflate invoices so there is no money trail back to those inside the government. (I once worked with a guy who did that with our office equipment invoices. He eventually was sent to prison.)

Beginning in 2020, the government formed the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) task force to study select sightings.” UAP” supposedly replaced “UFO” to include a broader scope of anomalous reports. I spent years writing public relations and advertising spin, and in my opinion, it sounds more like a rebranding effort since “UFO” carries strong, negative connotations. If that is the case, then perhaps the government is attempting to seriously disclose what people have reported for nearly a century.

In 2023, a Gallup poll reported that 42% of Americans believe in UFOS, and one out of ten have had sightings. See…even the question sounds sarcastic because it asks, “Do you believe in UFOs”. Seeing a UFO means someone saw a flying object that could not be identified…no one said Martians or something else requiring belief. This is a great example of why the UFO phenomenon needs a makeover. When I was twelve, I knew I saw something I could not identify. It was not a matter of belief.

Studies also show most Americans believe life exists on other planets. Most scientists agree as the vast size of the universe dictates that life exists elsewhere. In a 2019 Gallup Poll, 68 percent of respondents believed the U.S. government knows “more about UFOs than it is telling us.” I wonder if it has changed since this summer when three credible witnesses testified under oath at a House Oversight & Accountability Committee hearing on UAP, held in Washington, D.C.

These witnesses gave credibility to documented military encounters and voiced concerns over safety in our skies. The government whistle-blower that came forward also reported an elaborate coverup and sophisticated disinformation campaign that has operated for decades. His statement makes the next installment of my Missouri is Weird series, even more intriguing.

In the early 1940s, before the alleged Roswell crash in New Mexico and before the term UFO or flying saucer existed, Southeast Missouri may have experienced a UFO crash and a USO (Unidentified Submersible Object) sighting just one year apart. Next week, it is time to look at the 1940 mysteries in Missouri and ponder the question, were they hoaxes or the beginning of a cover-up campaign?

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Search for Old Missouri News Stories

Tailgating UFO Story, July 30, 1978

Secret Pentagon Program Spent Millions To Research UFOs, December 17, 2017

The story behind the "Tic Tac" UFO sighting by Navy pilots in 2004, July 26, 2023

House & Oversight & Accountability Committee hearings July 26, 2023

Report a sighting or search the free database: NUFORC

Report a sighting: MUFON