by John A. Keel
Most of the numerous witnesses scattered in the flight path of this one described it as a brilliant orange sphere.
Not only do our “meteors” refuse to obey the laws and regulations set down for them by our learned astronomers, but they also have an unnerving habit of traveling in formations with a military-like precision.
Northern Texas had its first big UFO flap in 1897, and the darned things have been hanging around the Panhandle State ever since. During the summer of 1951, the citizens of Lubbock, Texas, were enthralled by the aerial lights that were visiting their city night after night. These glowing somethings flew in perfect V formations and were photographed by a young man named Carl Harton on Saturday, August 25, 1951. His series of pictures were widely published and became known as the Lubbock lights. Although the Air Force took the sightings and the pictures very seriously at the time, they later attempted to explain them away as merely being the reflection of the city lights on the bellies of birds flying overhead. Think about this one for a minute. Mr. Hart’s little Kodak must have had a most remarkable lens, for it is unlikely that such minor “reflections” would pick up on film at all.
The Great Circle Route
The state of Nebraska has a long and complicated history of UFO sightings. During the heavy but little-publicized flap of July-August 1966, some very definite patterns emerged. On Tuesday, July 5, 1966, at 10 P.M., a group of four witnesses reportedly viewed “a large octagon-shaped object with colored lights…The lights dimmed and brightened, and the object swooped twice over a field and then went back into the air.” This took place about three miles northwest of Norfolk, Nebraska.
On the ninth and tenth of July, there were sightings in North and South Dakota, the states north of Nebraska. On July 11 there were several sightings in Iowa, the state bordering Nebraska on the east. The South Dakota sightings took place in the southwest corner of the state, close to the northwest corner of the Nebraskan border. If we had been able to collect this data fast enough, we could have successfully predicted that a flap was due in Nebraska, and statistically the odds were that it would take place on a Wednesday night at 10 P.M.
Shortly after 10 P.M. on Wednesday, July 13, 1966, a blazing object hurtled across the skies, heading southward from the northwest. About 10:10 P.M. scores of people in Muny Park, Cozad, Nebraska, saw “a very bright object with multicolored smaller bright stars trailing it.”
If it had remained on that course, it would have angled straight across Kansas, and all of the later Kansan reports would have described a northwest to southeast course. However, a flood of reports from Kansas, including sightings by policemen, attorneys and many others, described the “meteor” as passing from northwest to northeast. This meant it had to be skirting the Nebraska-Kansas border.
There was a particularly heavy concentration of reports from Central Nebraska from small communities such as Scotia, Ord, Burwell, Comstock, Arcadia, and North Loup. All of these were consistent, describing the object as passing from southwest to southeast. Another cluster of sightings was reported from the Omaha area on the eastern tip of the state. These all stated that the object was going from southwest to southeast.
A larger picture can be drawn from this. The “meteor” came from the northwest, perhaps from Wyoming or South Dakota; it then executed a turn somewhere south of Cozad, bringing it over Kearney, Nebraska, and moved along the Nebraska-Kansas border toward Missouri-Iowa. Then it turned again and headed northward toward Illinois.
The sheriff of Warren County, Illinois, was sitting in front of the police station in Monmouth, Illinois, that night when he observed a fiery orange ball arcing across the sky toward the northeast. A few minutes later he received an excited phone call from a Galesburg, Illinois, woman who said she and her three children had been driving along the U.S. 34 bypass when they saw a green light seemingly skirting the treetops. A white-colored fire seemed to burst from it, she reported, and it appeared to dive toward the ground in the northeast. Thinking that a small plane might have crashed, she stopped at the nearest farmhouse and called the sheriff. He rushed to Monmouth Park, the area of the sighting, but found nothing. Eight other persons in the region called radio stations and newspapers to report similar sightings. All agreed that the object was green with a red ring around it and trailed a short red tail. One other person besides the sheriff reported seeing an orange object. Everyone reported that it first appeared in the southwest and traveled northeast.
What lies to the northeast of Illinois? Michigan, of course.
A few minutes after 11 P.M. Michigan time (10 P.M. Nebraska time), Jack Westbrook and Charles Frye of Willis, Michigan, were walking across Rawsonville Road when Mr. Frye exclaimed, “Look at that!”
Both men saw what appeared to be a silver disk with one red and one white light on it. They estimated that it was no more than 1,000 feet high. The object moved forward swiftly, stopped, seemed to reverse itself, circled around, moved up and down, and finally shot out of sight. They said they watched it for about seven minutes and heard no sound.
“This is not a swampy area,” the Ypsilanti, Michigan, Press noted when it recounted the sighting on July 15. “And the only possibility of reflection would be from the microwave relay tower which has three red lights, but the object went over the top of it when it left.”
Were all the Nebraska, Illinois, and Michigan sightings of completely different objects independent of one another? This remains a possibility, of course, but once more we are confronted with surprising and unlikely coincidences involving correlations of time and geographical movement. It is highly possible that a UFO—or a group of UFOs—passed from Wyoming, crossed Nebraska, and then turned northward into Illinois and Michigan.
Charles Tougas of the Meteorite Recovery Project at Lincoln, Nebraska, was the man the press turned to for the answer. He said that special cameras had recorded the event, and he estimated that the “meteor” had appeared somewhere near McCook, Nebraska, and had plummeted to earth somewhere outside of Phillipsburg, Kansas, a few miles to the southeast. A search for it was launched at Phillipsburg, but the object was never found. If the “meteor” had enjoyed such a very brief lifespan and had traveled such a very short distance in the western part of the state, it is very unlikely that it would have been so clearly seen in the Omaha sector hundreds of miles eastward and that all of the witnesses would have described it as moving to the southeast. And it certainly would not have turned up in Illinois—still farther to the northeast.
The “meteor” explanation simply does not work in this case. There are too many ifs and too many unnatural coincidences.
All of the descriptions were uniform. A newsman in Brewster, Nebraska, described it as being “the size of a basketball; the white fore end changed colors, going from blue to green, trailing a long tail.” A young witness on a ranch near Scotia said it was “round like a basketball, with a brilliant band of orange light encircling it.” He said it crossed the southern skies and was visible for about half a minute. Witnesses in York, Nebraska, said it was green, while one report from near Pleasanton, Nebraska, described it as being a “bright, whitish-yellow light.” Brilliant white lights were mentioned in a scattering of reports, but the overall consensus was that it was green or “blue-green with a red band around it.” Viewers in Kansas thought it was green.
Only two groups of witnesses reported hearing any sound. Both were located in the central Nebraskan cluster. People driving near Arcadia said they saw “a flashing red light” and heard “more than one explosion.” George Bremer of Ord reported the same thing. (Viewers of that 1913 “meteor” chain in Canada said that the objects produced a heavy rumbling sound, indicating that they were low enough in the atmosphere to displace the air as they passed.)
One week prior to the Nebraska flap, a “green object with a long white tail” appeared over Muskegon, Michigan, traveling a horizontal path from east to west. It was seen by police officers and other reliable witnesses. The date was Wednesday, July 6, 1966
. The time, 11 P.M.
At 10 P. M., Monday, July 11, a round blue object was observed over Lake Erie by witnesses in Ashtabula, Ohio, facing in the direction of Michigan. Some noted that it seemed to have a long tail. One person described it as “a round ball of bright blue light with an outer rim of pale gold.” It appeared to descend westward.
When we drew a great circle on a map of the United States, looping through Nebraska and curving up through Monmouth-Galesburg, Illinois, to Michigan, we found that the other end of the curve cut across the northeastern part of Wyoming. A quick review of our clippings and general report data revealed that that very section of Wyoming had a UFO flap a few days before the Nebraskan “meteor” arrived. Extensive UFO activity was also reported farther to the northwest around the Glacier National Park in Montana that month. (Great Falls, Montana, has been the site of many UFO spectaculars for the past twenty years.) Brilliant, fast-moving lights appeared in Glacier National Park nightly on precise schedules, passing from the northwest to the southeast. This course would have carried them to the Wyoming flap area and, if extended along a perfect curve, would have continued to Nebraska to the McCook-Cozad sector.
So the plot thickens once again. Our Nebraska “meteor” of July 13 was merely part of an overall flap involving several states, and all of the sightings fitted neatly into a near-perfect circle beginning in northwestern Montana, looping through the Central States, and curving upward through Illinois and Michigan and back into Ontario, Canada, with a bit of overlapping into Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the western tip of New York State—all active flap areas. If we continue the same circle into Canada, we find that the uppermost part of it would rest in the densely forested and sparsely populated regions of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Both of these provinces had long UFO flaps in 1967-68.
Thousands of sightings can be fitted into the “great circle route,” and often the dates are staggered so that it does appear that the phenomenon moves systematically from point to point along the route. We were, therefore, not surprised to receive clippings from Canada concentrated along the same circle. For example, on Wednesday, August 7, 1968, Harold Howery, a businessman from Hanna, British Columbia, was driving west from the village of Reveistoke late at night when a circular object suddenly descended about 60 feet in front of his car, swaying from side to side like a pendulum. It was one large light, he said, of a light-blue shade. There was no noise, and his car didn’t stall. The object hovered for a few moments and then flew off southward. Southward from Reveistoke would have taken it into the area of the Glacier National Park in Montana.
Circles and Straight Lines
The brilliant French researcher Aimé Michel made a careful study of the French sightings of the 1950s and discovered that the objects often pursued a straight course across France. Sighting reports could be aligned along these routes, and in some cases, the speeds of the objects could be calculated, and other data could be extracted. This finding sent ufologists all over the world scurrying to their maps, and many attempts were made to try to figure out a worldwide route. But eventually it was learned that the straight-line theory was limited and unworkable on a worldwide scale.
France is a small country compared to the United States, and so the distances traveled are much shorter. I made many efforts to work out similar straight-line routes and discovered that UFO sightings within a given area during a specific period of time were confined to sectors with a radius of about 200 miles. The objects sometimes do follow a straight course within these sectors, but they vanish (or no reports are received) outside of the 200-mile boundary.
At first I termed these sectors base areas, but this was misunderstood by many UFO enthusiasts, and soon after my first article on UFO base areas appeared, teenagers everywhere were out scouring the countryside looking for underground UFO hangars. So I adopted the term “windows” as a good substitute.
Every state in the United States has from two to ten “windows.” These are areas where UFOs appear repeatedly year after year. The objects will appear in these places and pursue courses throughout the 200-mile limitation. These window areas seem to form larger circles of activities. The great circle from Canada (not to be confused with the traditional geographic Great Circle) in the northwest through the Central States and back into northeast Canada is a major window. Hundreds of smaller windows lie inside that circle. Another major window is centered in the Gulf of Mexico and encompasses much of Mexico, Texas, and the Southwest.
Many windows center directly over areas of magnetic deviation such as Kearney, Nebraska; Wanaque, New Jersey; Ravenna, Ohio. In the 1950s, teams from the national Geological Survey Office quietly flew specially equipped planes over most of the United States and mapped all of the magnetic faults in the country. You can obtain a magnetic map of your locale from the Office of the Geological Survey, Washington, D.C. 20242. If you have been collecting UFO reports in your home state, you will probably find that many of those reports are concentrated in areas where magnetic faults or deviations exist.
UFOs seem to congregate above the highest available hills in these window areas. They become visible in these centers and then radiate outward, traveling sometimes 100-200 miles before disappearing again.
So if you are eager to see a genuine example of our phenomenon, pick a good Wednesday or Saturday evening, visit the highest ground in the area closest to you that has a magnetic fault, and watch the sky around 10 P.M. The best times are the last two weeks in March and the first two weeks in April, all of July-August, the last two weeks in October, and the first weeks in November and December.
Explanations and Contradictions
After having reached a series of conclusions and theories in 1966-67, I was naturally obliged to test them out and determine their validity. So a good part of my research in 1968 was devoted to such experimentation. There was no national UFO furor in 1968. In fact, public interest in the subject declined sharply.
The decline of UFO publicity in 1968 did not mark a decline in sighting reports, however. On the night of March 3-4, 1968, thousands of people in more than twenty states watched weird lights in the sky from 8 P.M. to 4 A.M. One group of men working on the Ohio River near Ravenswood, West Virginia, reported to me that they watched a series of large, luminous globes circle and go through the familiar falling-leaf motions for two hours that morning between 2 and 4 A.M. People driving north on the New Jersey Turnpike from Washington to New York told me that they observed a formation of unusual aerial lights continuously for more than an hour. Innumerable other sightings on that date trickled in from all over the country for months afterward.
The Colorado University report devotes several pages to this minor March flap. Project Blue Book received a total of seventy-eight reports for that night and explained them as being the disintegration of a Soviet satellite—Zond IV—re-entering the atmosphere. Dr. William K. Hartman of Colorado University noted that this alleged rocket re-entry occurred in an area inhabited by 23,000,000 people, so those 78 reports represented a microscopic percentage of the total number of probable observers. Only thirty of those reports were deemed detailed enough for study and analysis, meaning, no doubt, that they occurred somewhere around the same time as the rocket reentry. Such reentries are usually visible for no more than five minutes. The objects quickly burn out in the atmosphere, a process that most often requires less than two minutes. This particular re-entry took place at approximately 9:45 P.M. on Sunday, March 3, 1968, so it could not possibly explain the numerous sightings made before and after 9:45-9:50 P.M.
Dr. Hartman thus attempted to explain thousands of sightings by analyzing thirty that conformed to the rocket re-entry thesis.
This same explanation has now been used by the Air Force for several other flaps, including the worldwide flaps of the summer of 1967. In July 1968, Walter Sullivan, the New York Times science editor, published a review of the March 3 sightings, using the rocket explanation and quoting the National Investigation Committees on Aerial Phenomen
a as claiming that there had been a sharp decline in UFO reports and no significant flaps for two years. Apparently NICAP had not heard of the massive waves in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and New York State in the fall of 1967.
All hell broke loose in South America again in 1968, with innumerable landings, low-level sightings over major cities, and a wide variety of contacts. There was so much UFO news in June 1968 that some newspapers in Argentina had to relegate the story of Senator Robert Kennedy’s tragic murder to the inside pages, their front pages being devoted to flying saucers.
Spain also experienced a monumental UFO wave throughout the summer of 1968. Hundreds of people reportedly saw strange formations of flying objects over Malaga, Madrid and the Balearic Islands. On September 8, 1968, a Spanish Air Force jet pursued a glowing pyramid-shaped thing over Madrid for sixty-five minutes, finally losing it at 50,000 feet. It was tracked on radar and photographed.
On the night of Sunday, September 15, another one of our strange “meteors” appeared over the New England states, following the usual northwest to southeast course down from Canada. That week an enormous new flap erupted in the busy Ohio-West Virginia sector. Mrs. Mary Hyre, the Associated Press stringer in Point Pleasant, was inundated with hundreds of phone calls and sighting reports. She wrote only one newspaper article on the flap. In a telephone conversation that fall, she told me, “I’ve discovered that the less I write about these things now, the more people tell me what they’ve seen. Most of them don’t want any publicity at all, and if they think I’m going to write up their story, they shy away from telling it.”