August 30, 1970; Vincennes, Indiana
11:30 a.m. A young girl (age 7), saw a
metallic disc in the ENE hovering over Wheatland Road and reported
it to her parents. Her father went outside and saw the object,
too. He re-entered the house to get his 7x50 binoculars, and when
he emerged, the object was closer. It was described as about a
quarter of a mile away, looked like "a garbage can lid with a
piece of watermelon on top" (more like a squared-off "coning
tower") and about 30' in diameter. The man stated in his report he
filed with NICAP that somebody else should have seen it, it was
that low. The object was observed for a minute and a half by three
witnesses, this man his wife and daughter. It departed in a
swooping dive to the NNE.
The report was interesting in itself, three people known to be
reliable in the city had seen a flying saucer in broad
daylight! But there was more to it. UFO sightings in those
days were rare and ocasionally made the news in Vincennes, and
almost always were either misinterpretations of common objects
under unusual sighting conditions, rare barium clouds, or just
unidentified lights in the sky. The latter could have been real
UFOs but there was seldom enough to go on, an usually with only
one witness. The craft observed on August 30th was definitely an
exception. There was an active UFO situation in the area. That is
what made the MADAR detection of an anomaly on September 9th so
important. And the MADAR site, less than a few miles west of the
sighting area, had tracked the geomagnetic disturbance at 4:45
p.m. Whatever was occurring was happening in daylight hours! And
it got even more interesting. On September 22nd, MADAR
picked up another magnetic disturbance at 12:30 p.m., seemingly
indicating some unusual geomagnetic activity while local a daylight
CE incidents had occurred in the area.
Another mystery concerning this sighting turned up many years later
when we learned about Operation Foal Eagle in 2020. In 2003 in South
Korea special satellite tracking teams had picked up a a major
disturbance which was followed by the observation of an object
coming down in a zig-zag maneuver while entering the atmosphere.
Once it settled down and was idling, the burst of energy subsided.
This was evidence which probably explained why MADAR, less than 3
miles away, had not picked up the saucer at Vincennes. The saucer
may have entered the atmosphere at a point beyond the MADAR range,
then moved horizontally in more or less idling mode, to another
location which was east of town where the UFO encounter took place.
And it also suggests that this happened at least twice during the
August 30 -Sept 22 period.