opinion

Webb: The night police reported UFOs

The woman was driving down Peerless Road just before midnight on Aug. 17, 1978, when something leaped in front of her car.

The shock nearly caused her to careen off the road. And it must have taken a second for her eyes to adjust. Because there, gleaming in the headlights, was a man in a gorilla suit.

“I nearly cracked up when I put that over the air,” dispatcher Don Humston told the Press.

After a second sighting, Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s deputies drove to the scene. They couldn’t find anything.

On most nights, some kind of cosplaying King Kong hurling himself into traffic would be the weirdest thing officers would deal with. But not that Thursday.

By the end of the week, officers themselves were reporting strange sightings they couldn’t explain.

Dispatch fielded at least three reports of unidentified flying objects on Aug. 17. They spanned the city, with the most prominent lighting up the North Side.

A 25-year-old Indiana Vocational Technical College-Southwest student named David Acker was smoking a cigarette when he saw a triangle of red lights creeping across the sky. He lived near the airport, so at first he assumed it was just an airplane.

Then the triangle broke apart.

“One (light) turned to the east, one went west, and one traveled straight ahead,” he told the Press.

A West Sider reported a sighting as well, as did a Chandler police officer. All claimed to see the same thing: red lights that shone green as they departed. Almost as though they had taillights.

But dispatchers wrote off the reports. Tri-State residents were just riled up, they thought. You know, because of what happened in Southern Illinois the night before.

What the police saw

UFO sightings usually play out like this: a scared resident sees something strange and reports it to police, only to have law enforcement disregard the claim or spitball an explanation off the top of their head.

In Southern Illinois on Aug. 16, 1978, the script was flipped.

An Illinois State Trooper, two Carmi police officers, an Edwards County Sheriff’s deputy, a White County jailer and a town marshal all reported seeing a slew of flashing UFOs that loitered in the area from 10:30 p.m. Wednesday until 5 a.m. Thursday.

No Earthly aircraft just hangs in one area for seven hours, Carmi Sgt. Dee Heil noted.

“I’m not a star gazer, but I never noticed anything like this before,” he said.

In Albion, the state police’s Clyde Paris watched through the scope of his rifle as five objects skittered in the blackness, darting vertically and horizontally at high rates of speed.

Meanwhile, back in Carmi, officer Willard Blazier went so far as to fire a spotlight toward one of the crafts. When he did, the craft halted and circled back toward him. He decided not to do it again.

The explanation

Ironically, all the police’s claims were dismissed by a UFO enthusiast.

Allan Hendry was an investigator for the Center for UFO Studies. J. Allen Hynek started the group. He was the man who consulted with Steven Spielberg on “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and helped fuel the extraterrestrial craze that sent eyes toward the sky.

Hendry sent out a press release dismissing the strange crafts as nothing more than stars.

Explanations didn’t come so easy for other sightings in the summer of 1978. No one knew what to make of the red light that squatted over the Kansas City suburbs and shot flares for 45 minutes as dozens watched, according to Francis L. Ridge’s book “Regional Encounters: The FC Files.”

The Air Force certainly didn't weight in. By '78, they'd stopped shipping officers into the Tri-State from Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio after shuttering "Project Blue Book" in 1969.

That was a shame. Had they kept at it, they could have investigated an alleged abduction just a few miles from their backyard.

According to Ridge's book, a woman was driving down Indiana 44 in Union County, Indiana, just before midnight on Aug. 30 when something hovered in front of her car. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't a man in a gorilla suit.

An orange object floated above the road, flanked by four red squares. She stared at them until light blanketed her car.

And that’s the last thing she remembers until she woke up, five miles down the road.

Contact columnist Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com