Strangers From The Skies - Brad Steiger-pages

Page 37 of 128

Page 37 of 128
Strangers From The Skies - Brad Steiger-pages

Page Content (OCR)

On August 4th, a 23-year-old high school English teacher in Sioux City, lowa told authorities: "Anyone who would say this is a star would be out of his mind." At least half a dozen persons called Sioux City police, the U.S. weather station, and news media to report that they had seen "things in the sky" between 9:30 and 10:45 P.M. Most of the callers said that the objects were bright red and moved with a great burst of speed. The teacher, who wished to remain unidentified, told authorities that he and his wife had spotted a bright, yellowish light that zig-zagged slightly and moved at an extremely high rate of speed. He was certain that it wasn't an airplane because he had turned off his engine and got out of the car to "try to listen to some kind of engine sounds. There weren't any." The object was "wedge-shaped," according to the teacher, and had been witnessed by several other persons in the area. Mrs. Ray LeFebvere of Sioux City said that she had seen a red light along with two or three smaller lights moving very fast in the sky. "It wasn't a star and it wasn't an airplane," Mrs. LeFebvere insisted. Newspapers as well as private citizens continued to be offended by the Air Force's official disclaimers of the increasingly frequent sightings. The Richmond, Virginia News-Leader editorialized: "Project Bluebook officials, the Air Force people who are supposed to identify mysterious objects in the sky, are seeing stars again. An Air Force spokesman said that glowing aerial objects reported over a four-state Western area were astronomical in nature. The planet Jupiter and the stars Betelguese, Rigel, Aldebaran and Capella, were said by the Pentagon spokesman to be the likely objects sighted. "This finding sent surprised professional astronomers back to their charts, only to confirm their original beliefs: At the time the Air Force reported the stars visible from the United States, they were in fact visible only from the other side of the world ..." The News-Leader concluded in a tone of righteous indignation that such clumsy and feeble attempts by the Air Force to "dismiss the reported sightings under the rationale as exhibited by Project Blue book won't solve the mystery," but, they maintained, would "serve only to heighten the suspicion that there's something out there the Air Force doesn't want us to know about."