(This article first appeared in the June print edition of the Hendersonian.)
Henderson County residents reported at least nine UFO incidents between 1950 and 1978, according to articles in The Gleaner. There were probably more than that because a lot of people who experienced unexplained incidents were hesitant to report them for fear of ridicule.
I’m not one of them. I don’t deny the existence of life on other planets. It certainly seems a waste of space for such a huge universe to have intelligent life (using the term loosely) on only one small speck of it.
But a lifelong career in journalism has trained me to be skeptical. I’d rather rely on hard data than belief or subjective anecdotal stories.
In the meantime, I’m keeping an open mind. None of us can truly experience life from the point of view of another. In that vein, then, I’ll remain respectful of the stories that follow instead of denying or laughing at them.
You must admit, though, that the idea of little green men seems a bit absurd. The image stems, however, from one of the most famous UFO incidents ever, which took place Aug. 21-22, 1955, in the Kelly community of northern Christian County.
Five adults and seven children showed up at the Hopkinsville police station and said they had spent four hours battling 12 to 15 aliens who had landed in a saucer-shaped spaceship.
The Gleaner ran a brief article Aug. 23 that said one of the aliens had been shot—but searches by personnel from the Hopkinsville police, the Kentucky State Police, and MPs from Fort Campbell discovered “no spaceship, no alien.”
The Gleaner ran a longer Associated Press story Aug. 24 that began, “Stories of a flying saucer and its crew of one-eyed men got some earthly scorn today when astronomers and military officials gave the notion the cold shoulder.” The story continued, “Fort Campbell officials said there was absolutely no basis for the report.”
The Gleaner poked fun at the story with a doctored photo that purported to show a saucer – complete with cup and spoon—hovering over the courthouse. “Considering all that has been thrown out lately about little men and strange spaceships, who would we be to disbelieve?” the caption read. “It is a saucer, isn’t it?”
There have been numerous accounts worldwide of strange lights and unidentified flying objects over the years. There is a timeline, put together by the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago, going all the way back to 597 A.D at https://cufos.org/PDFs/pdfs/UFOsandIntelligence.pdf
One of the earlier reports of strange lights I’ve seen in The Gleaner was published June 12, 1946: “The light, which was first reported by C.D. McIntosh, Cardinal Lane, seemed to move in an elliptical circle” toward the northeast.
The Gleaner’s first report of flying saucers appearing here came in the edition of April 8, 1950. Three of them were seen flying about two miles west of Smith Mills by farmers W.R. Sowards, his father, S.E. Sowards, and Owen Kellen. They watched the saucers for about 10 minutes.
“They were about the size of a 30-gallon drum and they had slight trails of smoke behind them,” W.R. Sowards said. “We could hear a faint hum as they passed over.”
Jack Hudgions wrote a follow-up story that appeared April 9, in which he confirmed that “Henderson joined the ranks of saucer seeing cities.” He also added one more witness: M.F. Day, a farmer in the Robards area, who had heard only a strange sound and saw spurts of smoke.
“But for all I know,” Day said with a laugh, “they might have been the wild goose going somewhere.”
Another saucer sighting was reported by a Reed-area woman in the July 16, 1950, Gleaner. She had been out picking blackberries when she saw something that was neither an airplane nor a dirigible passing overhead toward the north. She asked that her name not be used.
An outbreak of saucer sightings took place in late July 1952, including four to 12 objects seen on radar screens near the nation’s capital for the second time that week, according to the July 29 Gleaner, as well as three similar UFO sightings in south central Indiana.
The same edition carried a related story about Elmer Chambers of Henderson, who stopped his car near Waverly and watched a UFO for about 20 minutes at 8 a.m. He said it could not have been a jet plane because it turned at right angles at high speed.
“It didn’t turn in a circle like an ordinary airplane,” Chambers said, “but would almost reverse itself.”
The following day Hazel Lee and Edna Cox of North Main Street came forward and said they had seen an eerie group of saucers about 11 p.m. the same day Chambers reported the sighting near Waverly.
“We saw huge, round saucers, yellowish-red in color, traveling close together, going very fast and not making a sound,” Cox said. They came from the south and at first appeared to be shooting stars until they got near enough for details to be deciphered.
The July 30 Gleaner noted that radar—normally not subject to the vagaries of imagination—had for the third time in 10 days “picked up signs of something unknown pacing through pre-dawn black skies” over the nation’s capital. Air Force officials said there was nothing to fear.
As of mid-1952, Air Force officials conceded that there had been about 2,000 reports of flying saucers and that about 400 of them had not yet been satisfactorily explained.
March 1961 also saw a couple of UFO sightings here. The first story appeared in The Gleaner March 8. Several local people reported to police they had seen something strange about 2:30 p.m. the day before. That apparently was the only local instance to make it into the annals of Project Blue Book.
“One witness reported it was about the size of an automobile. Another said it was glowing and would have lit up the whole sky had it been at night.”
The March 10 issue quoted Noyal Stewart and three other workers at Scott Lumber Co. yard on Fifth Street who had seen a glittering unidentified object fall from the sky into the log yard.
Stewart said it “looked about the size of a baseball and glowed like a Christmas tree ornament. It had a little tail of smoke about two feet behind it.” Foreman Earl Rickard went over to where the object apparently landed but could find nothing. Other witnesses were employees Booker Payne, Joe Louis Clark and William Mayfield.
Project Blue Book, which started in 1947 and consisted of an officer, a sergeant and a secretary, closed at the beginning of 1966. It had investigated more than 10,000 sightings during that period; only 646 remained unexplained, mostly because of insufficient information, according to a Gleaner editorial of Aug. 30, 1966.
The Air Force was wanting to contract with a university to continue looking into UFO reports. “Investigating teams are to include at least one physical scientist and a psychologist.
“Who’s seeing things now?” the editorial concluded.
The Gleaner of Nov. 23, 1974, reported several unnamed residents of Countryview and Suburban Acres subdivisions had observed something “shaped like a sphere with part of it revolving” and with “red and green lights.”
“I’m not saying it’s a flying saucer or anything like that but it’s not a plane or a helicopter or a star,” said one resident.
Another sighting was reported by several residents of Ernest Lane in The Gleaner of Aug. 19, 1978. Mr. and Mrs. John Rideout said they saw it across the street in a vacant lot. “It was in the lot that the object seemed to stop and hover over the ground,” she said. “It had both green and red lights that seemed to flash in no set pattern. I really have never seen anything like it.”
Steven Spielberg’s movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” was released in mid-December 1977, and it sparked renewed interest in UFOs. The Gleaner of April 12, 1978, reported on a presentation at Henderson Community College by Stanton T. Friedman, “a nuclear physicist and self-appointed ufologist,” who was convinced crucial evidence was being covered up.
“I think it’s time we lift the laughter curtain” and make a scientific investigation of UFOs, he said.
The same point was made by Burt L. Monroe Jr., chairman of the University of Louisville’s Biology Department. He was the focus of an article sent out by the university’s public relations office, which was published in The Gleaner on May 14, 1978.
“I am a scientist,” he said. “I don’t believe. I study data…. One thing I think is just unquestionable … and that is there is a body of information about a phenomenon that is not explained…. Something is producing UFO reports. People are seeing something that cannot be explained.”
About 85,000 sightings reported internationally had by that point been entered into a computer at the Center for UFO Studies at Northwestern University. Analysis showed that sightings come in waves, both in time and across geography.
“When the 24th falls on a Wednesday, all heck breaks loose,” he said. “There’s no rhyme nor reason to it because our months are artificial.”
That could suggest UFOs are not traveling in space but rather in time or between dimensions. (Perhaps between universes in the multiverse?) But he said too little is known to propose such a hypothesis.
