A Few Cases

Since I've been very interested in the nuts and bolts aspect of UFO investigation I haven't written in these pages very much about actual UFO sightings and experiences that I have investigated. To date I have completed 152 cases. More are pending. Some of those were identified as misinterpreted natural phenomena, man made objects and a few outright hoaxes, but a significant amount remain unknown.

The majority of these are simple flybys, sightings designated as FB1 on the Vallee scale. Someone looked up and saw something strange flying by. That's all. Objects sighted like this include glowing orbs, Saucer shapes, triangles and boomerang shapes. Often only a light is seen. The object did not land or interact with anything. There is no trace evidence. I can interview the witness but usually there is only one. After the interview I'm done. If the sighting can't be immediately identified as known object I'm left with “Insufficient Information” or “Unknown” as a conclusion.

Some of these are striking.

• In the Fountain Square area of Indianapolis a professional musician was sitting in his backyard about nine o clock on a summer night. He regularly did this on good nights with his wife while they smoked and looked for meteors. She was looking away when he saw a multicolored disk fly purposely from north to south. It was gone in two seconds, just long enough for him to get a good look. While not a witness his wife is an excellent artist and drew a picture from is description.
  
• While on duty, an Indianapolis Police officer watched several orange glowing spheres fly across the northern section of the city. The description he gave fit the profile of the glowing orb or OBOLs (Orange Balls of Light) that have been reported so often across the United States. The next night a woman reported an identical sighting near the Castleton Area.
• While flying from El Paso, Texas to Columbus, Indiana a pilot had a near collision with a UFO over Indiana. This occurred in 1974 and wasn't reported till much later. He was flying a Cessna Centurion and was in contact with Indianapolis Center when he saw the light in front of him. He provided this statement.

“We watched this oncoming light for what seemed like 5 or 10 minutes. Of course

we had no idea of its distance from us-there are no benchmarks up there to gauge distance, and at night time you might see a light many, many miles away. Soon I could tell it was getting much closer and I turned on my landing lights in the nose of the aircraft, in addition to my wingtip navigation lights as a precaution. The light just kept coming at our altitude and I was getting tense. In a moment it was close in front of us and I banked my plane sharply in a steep right turn and bank to get away.

“The very moment I did this, the object with its light, in the flash of a moment, abruptly reversed direction by rapidly climbing and proceeding more than 90 degrees to the right of its former course. Picture the bottom half of the letter “Z”. That was it’s trajectory. All of this happened in a split second and I observed what I thought was the tail of this object climbing in the darkness at incredible speed, with 2 less bright lights, which quickly disappeared from our view. Given our right turn position and the speed which this object displayed, I cannot describe it further, it just could not be made out in the darkness, and what seemed a split second. It was a frightening event.”

Sometimes the investigation leads off into strange directions.

• On March 29, 2014 at 10 about 10 PM a mother and her two daughters were driving west on I 70. They had just left the city and were approaching the Indianapolis international Airport which was on their right when all three observed an object in the sky that did not resemble in any way an airplane. The three women were adamant that they were very familiar with the configuration and light arrangement of commercial aircraft and other types of aircraft. They had driven in this area several times before. The object they saw did not resemble anything that any had ever seen in their lives. The object was described consistently by all three as a triangular shaped or V-shaped object with a single light at the apex of the V. The object was moving extremely slowly. It was moving so slowly that the mother was uncertain how it could remain in the air if it was an aircraft of conventional nature. All three observed the object for several minutes until they lost sight of it while driving. They did not stop.

I digitally recorded interviews with all three. Since the two daughters were minors I obtained a parental consent form from the mother to allow this interview. All three stories were remarkably consistent. The three women describe the observation only and did not give any indication that there was any abduction or missing time involved. All three were remarkably shaken by the event.

The object was described as a V-shaped object of immense size. The primary body of the object was essentially lost in overcast and the witnesses were all barely able to make out its shape. The object had a single light at the apex of the V. The apex of the V was pointing south. The object was slightly illuminated either by the light at its apex or the large amount of lights from the airport. It appeared to be flying very low and appeared to be very large described as the size of a large airliner.

That night the wind was northwest at 15 miles an hour. Skies were overcast with a ceiling of only 2600 feet. This is remarkably low. Only very low flying or in this the vicinity landing and taking off aircraft would be visible from the ground.

This section of I 70 is immediately adjacent to the southern end of Indianapolis international Airport. This is one of the busiest and largest airports of the nation. It is a central hub for many airlines including FedEx which operates, after dark, a consistent train of jumbo jets in and out of the airport. At any given time between the hours of 9 PM and 8 AM five or six FedEx jumbo jets will be in landing or takeoff patterns. Radar infromation is unavailable. There is a complete lack of cooperation by the radar operators at Indianapolis international Airport with any UFO investigation.

A few days after receiving this report I drove with my wife down I 70 taking the route past the airport that was taken by the three witnesses. We were specifically looking for any man-made structure stationary or otherwise that might account for the siting. We observe nothing of that nature whatever. There is no structures along this route that would account for the object is described by the witnesses.

After interviewing the mother about this particular incident she volunteered that she had a previous possible experience involving UFOs. As a child she had written a short story titled The Spaceship in My Backyard. It described herself as a child witnessing a space ship landing and meeting the occupants. She provide a copy of this story but with respect for her copyright I will not present it here. For reasons that the mother does not appear to quite understand this story had a significant impact on her and was very important in her young life. It was important enough that she felt she had to bring it to my attention. It is not clear and will not be clear without further investigation whether this is simply a science fiction story written by a young child or whether it represents extraterrestrial contact and a suppressed memory. I discussed the concept of hypnotic regression with her and she seemed open to the idea. So far this has not occurred.

A Problem with Expert Advise

A couple of weeks ago I attended an interesting UFO symposium at the Kokomo Indiana south library. Indiana MUFON State Director Stuart Hill and I were speakers. Also present was former Indiana MUFON Chief Investigator Glen Means who spoke extensively about the Kokomo Boom of April 16, 2008. Glen was one of the first FIs on the scene. The boom is still a topic of great interest in the area and several people in the audience reported hearing it.

Now let me state right now I am NOT going to offer here a definitive or any other kind of explanation as to what happened that night. But there is a point or two...

Glen's talk was about his own investigation of the event. He rushed to the area from his home in Peru as soon as he heard about it. His police scanner was on the entire time. Glen quoted a dispatcher as saying “We're on the phone with a meteorologist and he says it was a meteor.” Everybody chuckles. A meteorologist is an expert on weather not meteors and why would they call a weatherman anyway when they should have called an astronomer or something. Maybe something funny is going on.

Maybe.

Or maybe they called exactly the right person.

A meteorologist is someone who studies and is expert on anything that is in the atmosphere or falls from the sky, like for example meteors. The things he studies include electrometeors, lightning, and hydrometeors, rain, snow, and hail. He also studies lithometeors which is any solid matter falling or carried through the sky. This included dust picked up by the wind, sandstorms, and space born rocks.

Someone who studies only meteors and meteoriticist es is called a meteoriticist.

So who are you going to call? It's eleven o clock at night and everyone is excited and wants answers NOW. Do you have the number of your local meteoriticist in your pocket? Do you even know what a meteoriticist is? Have you ever heard of one? On the other hand the guy on the local TV station is expert in atmospheric phenomena and he always tells you when to look for the Persied Meteor Shower. Where's the phone?

All of this started with Aristotle who wrote his treatise, "Meteorologica” , on climate and weather. This great work covered all knowledge on the subject of the day including the related subjects of geology, astronomy and oceanography. It was all lumped together and didn't get sorted out for centuries. The very existence of rocks that fall from the sky was still a matter of debate in the eighteenth century. Many scientists just couldn't grasp the idea that rocks could travel through space like planets do. Those who insisted that rocks do fall from the sky called them “meteors”, the Greek word for anything suspended or falling through the sky.

So just maybe the meteorologist gave the police a good and informed answer. Not necessarily the right answer, he wasn't there, but a meteor remains one possibility of what caused the boom that night..