News

Space Case

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Even the authorities have been swept up in the wave of interest in the sightings. When Lt. Frank Szewczyk of the Millstadt PD is asked to comment on the publicity, which seems to be building rather than dying down, he blurts, "I'm really pissed at Stevens," emphasizing "pissed." It initially seems that he's angry with his subordinate for dragging the department and the town through the muck of notoriety -- Millstadt was, after all, the department that spurned advances by the East Coast media -- but appearances deceive: "I'm really pissed at Stevens," he repeats, deadpan, "for not calling me that morning and waking me up."

Whereas the tabloids and radio talk shows played up the story, emphasizing the more lurid elements -- the monstrous craft hovering motionless over the puny awestruck earthlings below as if scrutinizing them -- John Velier lived up to his promise to employ sound judgment and empirical data in trying to arrive at a plausible explanation. By the end of January, two theories had been advanced on the NIDS Web site: the B-2 and Aereon hypotheses.

The first theory assumes the presence of a B-2 Spirit bomber that night. The general outline of the B-2 fits the arrowhead or triangular shape reported by most witnesses, and the wingspan of the aircraft is 172 feet, more than half "the size of a football field." The speed of a B-2 varies greatly, and with its flaps down it can fly quite slowly. Further, the B-2 has three lights that are retracted when the plane is put into stealth mode. The bug in this theory is that Whiteman Air Force Base, 200 miles west of St. Louis, is the only B-2 base in the country. A check of the flight records at the 509th Wing at Whiteman AFB by NIDS researchers indicates that no B-2s were flying at the time of the sightings.

The Aereon hypothesis was spawned when Craig Stevens verified that the craft he observed bore a resemblance to a picture found on the Internet. The picture was an artist's impression of a "stealth blimp" published in the September 1999 issue of Popular Mechanics. (In fact, Stevens made a sketch of what he saw that very day, a sketch that, coincidentally, looks like the stealth blimp, though at the time he had no idea such a thing existed.) The stealth blimp -- actually a revolutionary hybrid of a conventional airplane and a lighter-than-air dirigible (and the subject of John McPhee's 1973 book The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed) -- was tested, flown and patented by the Aereon Corp. of Princeton, N.J., in 1970. That prototype was but 26 feet long, though at the time the company envisioned 800-foot Aereons, floating freighters, for use in both the military and civilian sectors.

The Aereon craft could fit the collective descriptions of the UFO: its configuration, low altitude, slow speed (though Barton's testimony that it accelerated fairly rapidly belies this) and lack of noise. The only problem is that an Aereon spokesperson, questioned by NIDS, "stated emphatically and repeatedly that no craft of such size was ever built, at least at Aereon." In the mid-1990s, says the report, Aereon obtained seed money from the military to develop a stealth-blimp-type craft that would contain three 50-foot radar antennae. Funding fell through, but the patent, with drawings, is still out there. Informed of the characteristics of the Illinois UFO, the Aereon spokesperson said, "If a large Aereon-type craft is flying, then it represents a stolen patent by persons unknown."

Although the craft was near Scott Air Force Base -- practically invaded the airspace there -- officials deny any knowledge of a UFO near the base. Lt. Col. Allan Dahncke, 375th Airlift Wing public-affairs director, said in the Base News, "The (air-control) tower was closed at the time of the sighting and no aircraft were in the air." The base no longer has radar facilities on the field, adds Dahnke, but relies on the FAA radar approach system at Lambert Airport. Lambert reported that the object did not show up on its radar. That the object did not present itself on a radar screen doesn't mean squat to Kathy Floyd and Mel Noll. "Heck, they're probably smarter than we are and they used radar evasion," Floyd says. Who "they" are, she is not saying.

ALL THE PUBLICITY CERTAINLY DID NOT help the witnesses put the incident to rest -- that is, those who want it put to rest. Of the seven witnesses, Noll and Barton seem the most receptive to discussing what happened, but all of them will talk, likely because it was such an amazing episode, way out of the realm of the probable. UFOlogists say it is not unusual for folks who witness something that they can't explain, something ostensibly otherworldly, to have their imaginations ignited in the days following the incident. None of the witnesses has been obsessively building Devil's Tower replicas out of mashed potatoes, as Richard Dreyfuss did in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but all say the experience has changed their lives in some way -- from perceiving a divine causality to feeling physical aftereffects to simply pondering the meaning of it all.

Dave Martin, 28, is possibly the least impressed by the mysterious incident. "It was different," he concedes. "But when it happened, you know, it didn't really hit on me because I'm not into that stuff -- the military aircraft, the 'other world' or the stars. I'm more of a sports jock. It's not my thing to start reading into it and looking for some deeper meaning. They asked me, 'Did I follow it?' No, I didn't. I just went on with my business. I didn't think nothing big of it at the time."

Over time, however, such an experience can cause even a sports jock to start mulling things: "Like I told these interviewers, I know it was no plane, no helicopter, nothing like that. I doubt that it was a military aircraft, though I'm not that familiar with all the military aircraft out there. Until someone tells us for sure, 100 percent, what it was, I'll always wonder about it. Meantime, I've caught myself several times just looking up at the sky."

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