CHAPTER 7 - 1977, A MADAR YEAR

CHAPTER 7 - 1977, A MADAR YEAR

On April 5th, there was a noteworthy encounter in broad daylight near Deerfield, Illinois. At 2:17 PM in the afternoon, a pilot was northbound, driving on I-94 on a cold, cloudy day. The sky was overcast at 5,000'. He reported that he saw an object coming toward him, first in the distance, then directly above him. He described it as like a silver mushroom, about three times the apparent size of the moon, that moved silently toward distant Chicago, against the wind. The object was in view 60-90 seconds. (Ref.2)

The next case is interesting, but probably not a close encounter. On May the 8th, there was a 30-second observation of a strange craft near Joliet, Illinois. An adult couple driving westbound at 2:00 PM watched a silver "straw hat" the size of the moon, rush eastbound over 1-80. The object made no discernible noise (possibly masked by car) and was flying against the wind. (Ref.3)

Thirty minutes later, near Joliet, another adult couple experienced an object like a silver sphere with a "saturn ring" or "halo" around it. This was eastbound, too, and was in view for about 30 seconds. (Ref.3)

In June we had a sighting about 30 miles to the north-west of us, at Mt. Carmel, Illinois. It started with a distant sighting at 9:00 PM on June 9th. Byron Buchanan describes his encounter with a UFO:

"Me and Scott were coming back from a ball game. Scott had been the pitcher. We were just coming back into Mt. Carmel. We saw a bright light. First we thought it was a falling star, but it was extremely bright. We were waiting for it to burn out, but it didn't. It just kept falling and falling, and before it "hit" the ground, it split in two. So we followed it and kept following it, and when we got out to the place where we thought it hit, there were 4-5 other cars out there. So they had seen what we had seen and, hell, we stayed there about an hour, hour and a half. Everybody (else) took off after about 30-45 minutes."

About 10:00 or 10:30 PM, another object was observed. "One of the objects took off and went over the car, probably 100-300 yards above. The only one that took off was a silver disc and it took off, shooting. That's when I went home and called the sheriff's department and then called the Evansville airport and they gave us your number.

"The next day we went out looking for it. It's hard to estimate where it exactly hit. It glided down like a shooting star. Before it came down (to Earth) it split in two. It didn't hit hard, it glided." When asked about the entry angle, he stated: "Straight down. It took a minute or more to fall to the vicinity of the ground. At first it came down like a shooting star, fast, then it slowed down."

Louis Blevins was the scientist who helped me design the MADAR system, and he told me that he had worked on "Project Saucer" back in the late 40's. He said that evidence indicated UFOs could disrupt the local magnetic field up to a five mile radius. I later learned that an Air Force report had studied a case where a prospector had seen a UFO and watched his compass needle spin. Well, things were about to get spinning!


MADAR Anomaly No. 9

On July 10th, at 1:04 AM, the siren sounded! I jumped out of bed and headed for the room downstairs where the equipment was set up, and hit the audio alarm switch. The siren, now silent, had done its job. While the rest of the county slept, MADAR was recording a 17-pulse disturbance in the local magnetic field. The anomaly lasted 55 seconds. This was the longest disturbance on record at the station at that time and the fluctuations were the most erratic ever recorded by MADAR's event recorder. Background radiation was a normal 16 counts per minute. I had looked outside to see if there was anything in sight, in all directions. Nothing unusual, at least near the facility. MADAR was still recording data at that time. When I was sure the event was over, I reset the sensor, pulled out the data tapes, labeled them and put new ones in the data recorders. There were no calls coming into the Center. I had contacted the police department and spoke with Officer Kermit Steele. He hadn't heard anything, either. I went back to bed.

For days I pondered over what had happened, a little dismayed that I couldn't get what I'd hoped for, for years, a correlation between detections and local sightings. This would be a documented cause and effect relationship, proof UFOs couldn't be all IFOs, and I would also have an "early warning system". I also wanted to be able to grab a camera and run with it, getting a picture to go with the other data. Or, have an independent witness calling in a UFO that was observed at the same time MADAR was picking up an anomaly. Even if I had had a camcorder in those days, it wouldn't have done any good.


MADAR Anomaly No. 10

Two days later the siren sounded again! On July 12th, at 1:48 AM, I jumped out of bed with greater expectations. This was a one-pulse disturbance. On the data tape there was no reading. The first pulse (I call the "phantom pulse") is the one that turns on the system, therefore it is not recorded. Radiation background was 18 cpm, still normal for the area. No calls. No visual sightings from the facility. The police department was alerted, but had heard nothing from callers or cruisers.

At 4:35 AM I was awakened again by the siren, indicating an anomaly was occurring. Two hours and 47 minutes had elapsed and MADAR had recorded another anomaly. This time it was a 5-pulse, 53-second disturbance. Radiation was a normal 16 cpm. I went through all the motions, however probably appearing as a "zombie" to anyone who could have seen me, and went back to bed.

I don't know why. I think the sun was coming up. I didn't record the time. I should have. But sometime within an hour, the smoke alarm started beeping. There was no smoke or noticeable fumes. The batteries were in perfect order and not replaced until six months later! In order for the beeping signal to occur, the batteries must be low. Something caused the voltage to drop or mimic the same effect as low power. Whatever it was, it was an anomaly in itself, because there was nothing wrong with the unit or the batteries.

MADAR Anomaly No 12

Three days later, on July 15th, this time at 10:06 PM, MADAR logged another one. This was a 4-pulse, 4-second disturbance, radiation 13 cpm. Again, it seemed as if it was all a waste of time.

Right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, Ohio, is a little town in Kentucky, called Bellevue. At 10:45 PM that evening, Mrs. Fern Frey (name changed) was lying in bed with her 11-year-old daughter who was asleep. She was shocked to see her bed light up with a bright green glow. Thinking her hone was being burglarized, Mrs. Frey jumped out of bed. (There was a lot of this "jumping out bed" this summer). The glow was coning through one of the two windows in the bedroom. She cautiously peeked through the curtain and watched in bewilderment as the green light retreated, "just like a liquid being drawn up through a straw." In a matter of seconds the light was "siphoned" up into a low hovering object that was shaped like an inverted saucer a couple of hundred feet away. She guessed it was about 30' in diameter and was metallic. The moon's glow reflected on it and she could determine that its visible surface was clearly divided into equal-sized squares. The bottom was in darkness, appearing flat, and it was into this section that the recoiling bean of light was drawn. The object then gracefully lifted and disappeared into a wooded area. (Ref.4)

Then, on a routine visit to the Mt. Vernon Police Department as part of my local PR work, Officer Kermit Steele had advised me that they had picked up transmissions on the police radio from two locations. This had happened right after I called on the 12th? At approximately 2:18 AM, citizens had been reporting UFOs to police at Mt. Vernon, Illinois, 68 miles to the northwest of us? Also, reports were coming in from Hayfield, Kentucky, 85 miles to the southwest! Finally, I had a correlation? Not a local one, but too much to be a coincidence.

That evening a report cane in over the KNI Net (police scanner frequency), somebody had phoned in a report to the Kentucky State Police at Hancock County. They thought they had seen an aircraft "going down". This has happened many times. I immediately contacted the Control Tower at Dress-Regional Airport. No aircraft was ever reported missing or crashed. This was a meteor or a UFO. We'll never know. But things were starting to look very odd.


MADAR Anomaly No 13

This was logged on July 26th. This was in the wee hours, at 2:29 AM, a one- pulse, with radiation a normal 16 cpm. I was now getting enough sleep. The events were getting farther apart.

On July 31st, Normal, Illinois, had a daylight sighting of interest. At 6:30 PM, a university art professor called his wife and secretary to see the silver "stretched cigar", three tines the size of the moon in length. It was observed for three minutes as it flew in a slow straight path from southwest to northeast, with no trail, no wings, no details, no sounds. (Ref.5)


MADAR Anomaly No 14

This was logged on August 1st at 10:11 PM. It was a 4-pulse, 4-second disturbance with a 16 cpm reading. It was starting to get boring.

The final one for the year, was logged on August 15th at 19:14 PM. It was an 17-pulse, 3-minute and 29-second disturbance. MADAR had logged the best and longest APD so far. And the background radiation reading was 39 cpm, a 100% increase? For the record, this was a significant reading?

MADAR had recorded seven events in a little over a month. Something was going on. UFOs were being seen and MADAR was working overtime.

There was another UFO case involving a train sometime in October, possibly the 21st, near Fostoria, Ohio. On this dark morning, the engineer (who we'll call Howard) was sitting in his locomotive cab on the main line track. It was cold and clear. Several box cars had been cut loose to the south of the switch track to the warehouse. The engine was coupled to the rest of the cars which were being moved into position within the warehouse. At about 3:20 AM, he saw what looked to be a shooting star to the west, it curved down out of the northwest. He was facing south and the first box car was blocking his view. The light came down in the field toward Rt. 23 between him and a church. Slowly, at about the speed of a walking man, it came toward him across the field. It was approximately 16' off the ground and stopped on the other side of the tracks between four and five box car lengths away (180-270').

He picked up his radio and called out to his conductor who was about seven or eight car lengths down the track. "Donald...come up to the engine." Donald replied by radio and asked what was happening. Howard answered, "Hey, we got a damned UFO up here." By this tine the UFO had moved to within two car lengths of the track.

The object was "birthday cake" or disc shaped, about 90' in diameter, and 45' high. It was brightly lit, with banks of nine vertical "tubes" separated by a dark void space that reflected no light. Short horizontal tubes ran over the top and bottom of these voids. The bottom of the disc was like ceramic and gray in color, with a trace of lavender.

The disc was slightly tilted and rotating counter clockwise. Both men timed the rotation at 9 rpm.

The object glowed yellow. Electric-like energy sparks ran around the disc in a clockwise direction. These were blue. As the arc touched the center of the tubes, the ends lit up. As the arc touched the ends, the centers lit up.

When the men trained the cab headlight on the UFO it would light up very bright. This happened several times. Testing his engine, a General Motors Model 3900, he increased the output to 1500 amps. The engine worked. The walky talkies worked, also.

Twenty two minutes later, the object started spinning faster and faster and got as bright as it had been earlier when responding to the lightbeam signals. Suddenly, without a sound, it took off up and to the northwest until it looked like a yellow star. That was the last they saw of it. (Ref.6)

On the 12th of December there was a sighting from a commercial aircraft over Tennessee. It occurred at 2:25 PM, therefore a daylight sighting. There were two witnesses for this 5-minute observation recorded by Richard Haines in his computer catalog. (Ref.7)

Around Christmas of that year, perhaps a few days before, a couple had a strange encounter with a UFO near Ft. Mitchell, Kentucky. The lady and her husband were watching TV at about 1:10 AM when suddenly their living room was bathed in an eerie green glow. "It came through the curtain," she said, "flashing three tines."

Both she and her husband jumped up and scurried to the window there to see an egg-shaped object, glowing green, about 50-100' distant in a low hovering position. They both estimated the object to be about 10-15' in diameter. It was encircled by a solid row of green flickering lights which had cast a greenish glow on its entire surface.

The object was in view for about three minutes. It rose slowly, vertically, picked up acceleration, then leveled off and disappeared into the wooded horizon. (Ref.4)

1. Don Worley files.