Case Directory
  Category 1, Distant Encounters 
 
  Preliminary Rating: 5  

                                   
     

A Hynek Classification of Distant Encounter is usually an incident involving an object more than 500 feet from the witness. At night it is classified as a "nocturnal light" (NL) and during the day as a "daylight disc" (DD). The size of the object or the viewing conditions may render the object in greater detail but yet not qualify the sighting as a Close Encounter which is an object within 500'. 

Engineer Reports 10 Shiny Flat Discs
June 24, 1947
Near Joliet, Illinois

Fran Ridge:
June 24, 1947; 10-12 miles east of Joliet, Illinois
1:50 p.m. CST.  Charles Kastl, 60, an employee for 38 years with the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railroad, was walking along a highway to work when he spotted about nine speeding discs in the air.  He described them as a string of flat circular objects "going faster than anything I've ever seen." Kastl said he could see no connecting link between them, but they acted as though the leading disk had a motor in it to power the others because when it flipped, the others would too. When it would right itself, the others would right themselves.They were appeared to be very high (4,000' ???) and heading N-S. (The Cedar Rapids Gazette, June 28, 1947) [UFOE, XII]

Kevin Randle:
Allegedly from the Cedar Rapids Gazette on June 23, 1947, about an engineer who saw a number of disk-shaped objects, has been cited in a number of books including Dick Hall's The UFO Evidence. I have finally chased it down, found that it was an engineer, not from Cedar Rapids, but from Illinois and the article appeared on June 28 (*), or days after Arnold. This article has been deemed important because it is of disk-shaped craft prior to Arnold, but the original story is that the engineer made the sighting on the same day as Arnold but didn't report it until after Arnold. So, the date is wrong, the location is wrong, and it is just another single witness sighting reported in the wake of Arnold.

Detailed reports and documents
articles/470624Disks.pdf (Kevin Randle) *

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