INVESTIGATOR'S REPORT
Fran Ridge, Investigator

CASE: THE HAWESVILLE ENCOUNTER; HAWESVILLE, KENTUCKY; AUGUST 22, 1987



On 26 August 1987, as a result of my article in the MT.VERNON DEMOCRAT on UFOs and our local unit, I received a phone call from a young lady from our town of Mt.Vernon, Indiana. I knew both her and her father, who was a local police officer, and she told me about the sighting by her brother-in-law's wife, Maryland. Maryland lived in Lewisport, Kentucky, and it had all the earmarks of a classic close encounter.

The sighting had occurred four days earlier, on August 22nd, and she had observed an object for about 3-5 minutes. The locale of the sighting was Hancock County, Hawesville, Kentucky., described as rural with fields and hills. The sky was clear.

She had left her parents home in Hawesville and was headed to Lewisport, alone, traveling west on U.S. 60 at about 11:00 pm. She first noticed some bright red and blue lights to her right (north). She thought it was an airplane or lights from an industrial plant. As she approached the object she noticed brilliant gold, blue and red lights on what seemed to be on the sides of the object, and and it gave off a white glow beneath the object, which lit up the ground below and surrounding trees. The object hovered over the same location.

As she approached this, she became very shaky and her knees were so weak that she could not apply pressure to the gas pedal. She watched the object for a few minutes, then finally got her legs to move and left as fast asshe could. She had a terrible feeling of being alone and lost.

The object had observed in the NW near the ground, estimated at 15-20' up. It was was stationary, but was closest to her as she drove by it. With the help of her husband they estimated the distance as 50 yards.




Witness' drawing


The drawing she made was very good, rather than the usual examples. It graphically illustrates the brilliant gold, blue and red lights on a metallic object. A white glow was described as lighting up the ground, but is not shown.

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Illustration by our staff artist, Robert Taylor.



Based on the information in the report, our Indiana Group  staff artist was able to render more of the details. The dome, however, was not reported and is the only thing which is not accurate here.

At the time I was State Director for Indiana MUFON, also known as The Indiana Group. Since the report came to me, and I knew the person who informed me of it, I personally investigated it.  It was natural for the this lady friend to inform me about it and she convinced the witness that it was safe for her to report what had happened to her. At first, it wasn't a UFO incident. The 31-year-old witness first thought the lighted object was an industrial plant. What happened when she passed the object , however, frightened her. And when she discovered that there was no such plant there, she knew she had seen a UFO. This is what Dr. J. Allen Hynek had referred to as "escalation of hypothesis". A good witness automatically runs through a mental list of normal, possible explanations. Then when all fails they are left with the indisputable fact that the object was "something else".

As in all bonified UAP incidents, the object was there for a reason, and the incident has one of the traits that is common in abduction cases, including temporary paralysis. I call this the stalking phase. The object appeared solid, was relatively large, and described as large as a house. The witness' estimation of 3-5 minutes is a very long time, I believe and is not unusual under the circumstances. The area the object was in was a flat field and she noticed  the lights for a while prior to and after passing the point in the road of closest proximity.  At normal speed on this highway she would have driven at least three miles, a mile and a half before the CE and the same distance after. It is possible, but I think the estimate here is probably more than the actual. I never asked her about missing time, so I don't know if anything else might have occurred.

It is too bad that we did not have a MADAR in service at that time as we do now at Corydon, Indiana, which is only 40 miles NE of Hawesville. The only MADAR site anywhere in 1987 was Mt. Vernon, Indiana, 70 miles to the east of Hawesville, and there were no MADAR events in 1987..

As per my set protocols I submitted the full report to MUFON HQ, DDI Dan Wright, Robert Boyd of CUFOS and Willy Smith of the UNICAT Project listed this in his MAYBECAT file. The Berliner evaluation by Dan Wright of MUFON was Strangeness 4; Credibility 1: Night CE of the First Kind/Single Average Witness.. TheSpeiser rating was S4, P4:  Strange, does not conform to known principles/Credible and sound.

END OF REPORT