Text Copyright by Sunell Koerner. All rights reserved.
After
40 years… to tell, or not to tell?
By Sunell Koerner
06.01.07
To tell, or not to tell? That is
the question. 1967 was a hot year for UFO sightings across the
country, yet many who experienced the phenomena were often reluctant
to tell about it. Even today, forty years later, some individuals
herein initially hesitated to use their names as they recalled the
reactions of the past … “People looked at you a little
different.” “Did you fall and bump your head?” “How much
hooch have you been drinking?!”
Nevertheless, the youthful
exuberance of two highly excited high school teenagers from Hill
City, Kansas could not be held back. In this fortieth anniversary
year of his sighting, artist Michael Boss recalls the experience with
nearly as much enthusiasm as the night it happened.
The wide-open night skies of
Northwest Kansas are perfect for astronomy buffs, so the Hill City
High School science club met once a month on a Tuesday evening. The
club sponsor and science teacher, Ralph Scott, had just purchased a
2.4-inch Unitron refracting telescope. Eager to break in that new
scope, Boss, a sophomore, and a friend, junior Jim Tinkler, were
north of the high school watching Saturn as it rose in the east.
What an amazing September night it was; a stargazers dream. Dark and
clear, with a low, setting moon. But the telescope wasn’t
necessary to catch the sight that caught Mike’s eye.
As Jim was peering at Saturn
through the scope, Mike looked up, almost straight overhead, to see
an intensely bright red light. It was stationary, hard-edged with no
haze, and appeared to the naked eye to be about the same size in
diameter as Saturn, maybe even a bit larger. After watching it for a
short period of time, Mike turned to Jim and said, “Jim, look at
that!” Tinkler looked up and exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”
As soon as Jim had seen it, the
light “shut down,” resembling the appearance of a closing camera
aperture. The direction of the closing “diaphragm” was counter
clockwise. There was never any sound that the boys could hear, and
the light did not reappear. It wasn’t long before they ran
screaming back toward the school.
Hearing their story, the teacher,
Mr. Scott, laughed at the boys, not in disbelief, but rather at their
excitement. He also admitted having seen objects himself that he
could not identify.
Today Mike Boss is an accomplished
artist and is very familiar with aviation and space. Many of his
works fall within that genre. Jim Tinkler is no longer with us to
tell his version of the 1967 encounter, but in the early 1980’s
Mike had an opportunity to talk with him about it. Tinkler, who
became a “spook” diver in the Navy, had this to say, “Boss, I
was in on a lot of weird stuff while I was a diver in the Navy, but I
never saw anything like what we did that night at the high school.”
“Mom, Mom, look!”
Betty Striggow, referring to the
fall of 1967, described herself as “kind of timid and shy back
then.” When she first told the story of her encounter, “all the
people made fun of me, and I dropped it pretty fast!” Today
however, she says, “If I ever saw another object, I’d get in my
car and follow it. I’m just very curious.” While she doesn’t
want to believe in UFOs, because she feels that there has to be a
logical explanation to everything, she also realizes that “too many
people have seen things that there has to be something going on
there!”
Betty is the Director of Dawson
Place, a nursing home facility in Hill City, Kansas. A responsible,
respected position. At first she wasn’t sure if she wanted her
name used in this article, but the rational, reasonable side of her
recognizes without a doubt that what she saw was real. “I just
know it was something I’d never seen, and it was something
unusual.”
Living on a farm about eight miles
from Hill City, Betty really enjoyed looking at the sky. She would
often take the kids outside and lie on blankets to view the starry
nights. This particular night Betty’s husband had sent their
9-year old daughter out to shut the chickens up for the night. Betty
knew her daughter was “scared to death of the dark,” so she went
out to stand on the porch to be nearby. A few steps away from the
chicken house, her daughter stopped in her tracks, pointed to the
sky, and hollered, “Mom, Mom, look!”
Her daughter, who was scared of
everything, ran back into the house. Betty stayed to watch. To the
south, she could see “a bright red light just barely coming over
the horizon.” It looked to her like the light was floating. The
light traveled about one-third up from the horizon, hovered for about
a minute, and then went “lickety-split to the east.” She never
heard a sound.
The next night Betty went back
outside to see if she could see a repeat performance. As she was
looking around, she looked over her shoulder to the northwest and
this time she saw an orange light. The light “looked odd.” It
was “bigger and brighter than a star would ever be, and it was
orange.” She said that the light “was kind of wavering a little
bit. Then it just went out… It was just gone!”
These two nights were the only
times Betty ever saw anything unusual in the Kansas skies, and she
often theorized as to what the sightings could have been. She knew
that if conditions were right, moisture in the air would create a
reflection of the distant lights from Hill City. She debated whether
the atmosphere was playing visual tricks on her.
Logically, the more she thinks
about it though, the more she realizes that what she saw was not a
reflection. While she doesn’t understand for sure what it was, it
didn’t scare her. She also knows that she was not the only one to
see the orange lights of the second night. Another neighbor reported
seeing the same thing, as did people in Norton, Kansas, some thirty
miles to the north. And today Betty has no problem talking about her
curious encounters of the past.
The Cadillac of All UFOs
Long-time newspaper veteran Tom
Dreiling is currently the editor of The
Norton Telegram. Tom had
been the editor of another northwest Kansas newspaper, The
Goodland Daily News, for
about two years when local police officers Durl Rouse and Ron Weehunt
woke him up in the early morning hours of March 8, 1967.
In those two short years he had
built up a good reputation in the community and had a very good
rapport with the townspeople, so at first he was a little hesitant to
run the story that unfolded that night. He wondered what people
would think. But after he got out and “whispered this to people
who whispered it to other people,” the calls began to come in from
others who had also seen something very unusual that same night.
What happened would give this small
community worldwide attention. Dreiling says, “It was strange
living in that time.” Newspapers from as far away as Chicago, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and even London were calling to get the
scoop. Newspapers even stated that, “Goodland had the Cadillac of
all UFOs.”
The events also grabbed the
attention of well-known UFO researchers and writers. Early May 1967,
renowned radio host and best-selling author Frank Edwards (1908-1967)
wrote to Dreiling requesting a copy of The
Goodland Daily News.
Edwards died suddenly June 23, 1967 of a heart attack, however, he
did manage to finish the book, “Flying
Saucers – Here and Now!”
before his death and included Dreiling’s account of the Goodland
sighting as well as the reports that had come in from neighboring
Sharon Springs and Atwood, Kansas.
The legendary skeptic of government
explanations regarding UFOs, the University of Arizona physicist Dr.
James E. McDonald, also contacted Dreiling and Rouse. He wrote that
he found Rouse’s story to be “very
interesting.” McDonald requested copies of news clips for his
file, and also sent Dreiling an article from the Tucson
Daily Citizen that
reflected his belief in the incompetence of “official” reports.
He even encouraged Dreiling to “Feel free to use any of the quotes…
The more editors that ask questions about this the better.”
Of course, Dreiling was also
contacted by the National Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena (NICAP) out of Washington, D.C. He was sent a form to fill
out and return to the agency.
Goodland, Kansas is located in the
far northwest edge of the state, just 17 miles from the Colorado
border, and about 48 miles south of the Nebraska state line. In
1967, grain and sugar beets were the mainstays of its thriving
population of around 6000 people. “We’re known as the high
plains area because we’re 4000 feet above sea level,” Dreiling
once said. “But there’s nothing more than an inch high for miles
in any direction.” Once again, the flat terrain and open skies
make for perfect, unobstructed views of the night skies.
The first Dreiling knew of anything
strange happening during that night was when the officers were
knocking on his door. “Come out and see what we see,” they said
eagerly and out of breath. Dreiling, however, did not get the chance
to see everything that had excited the officers so. What he did see
was a cigar-shaped object and a glow of light in the sky, similar to
a large light bulb. And he heard a sort of “fluttering” sound,
but that was it.
In order to do a full, credible
story, Dreiling would have to rely on the officers’ accounts of the
events. He asked them to come to his office the next day to talk
about it. While they were in his office, Dreiling separated the two
officers and asked them to draw a picture of what they each saw. He
said, “Remarkably, the drawings were very similar.”
After careful consideration,
Dreiling finally did decide to run the story in that day’s
newspaper. He broke it with the title, “Yes, Virginia! There are
Unidentified Flying Objects”. Four days later, he ran another
story with similar accounts of sightings from other neighboring
communities. He also printed one of the officers’ drawings in this
same publication.
Both Officers Rouse and Weehunt are
now deceased, so some of the accounts here are taken from The
Goodland Daily News,
supplied by Dreiling, and from another magazine publication of the
time entitled, “Flying
Saucers, UFO Reports”,
which, coincidentally, happens to come from the collection of Michael
Boss.
The excitement in Goodland actually
started much earlier on that Tuesday evening when, around 9:15 p.m.,
Officer Rouse and fellow patrol officer Jack Armstrong were
dispatched with a report of a woman from Sharon Springs, thirty miles
to the south. She had apparently witnessed a UFO along Highway 27,
about halfway between the two cities.
It was around 9:30 p.m. when Rouse
spotted the object. As Armstrong joined him, they watched as the UFO
headed rapidly due north. Suddenly and abruptly, almost
imperceptibly, the object turned and headed east. Moving to a new
vantage point on the east edge of town, they watched as it moved east
and then appeared to hover over another community, Edson, about 9
miles away. Occasionally it would move side to side, and sometimes
up and down.
The two officers had been watching
the object off and on from a distance for over an hour when it was
time for Armstrong to be relieved by Officer Weehunt. Rouse and
Weehunt were in for quite a night!
At 2:15 a.m., both Weehunt and
Rouse spotted the UFO, each from a different vantage point. Rouse
was waiting for a train to cross the tracks, but Weehunt was free to
pursue. He began “frogging her out” at 85-90 miles per hour.
The object suddenly put on a burst of speed and Weehunt lost sight of
it.
Just as Weehunt was answering back
to Rouse’s radio call, the UFO came out of nowhere, heading
directly toward him. It was traveling so low that Weehunt pulled his
car off into the shallow ditch on the side of the highway to avoid a
collision. Weehunt got out of his car and knelt beside it as the
object passed overhead. Flying at a height of about 400 feet, it
left no vapor trail or sign of exhaust. Both officers agreed that it
sounded similar to a vacuum cleaner.
They watched as the UFO headed west
for about six miles, traveling at an estimated speed of 100-125 mph.
Again, it made an abrupt turn and headed straight back toward
Goodland. Now the officers felt it was time to get the newspaper
editor out of bed. Officer Rouse radioed the dispatcher and told
him, “Call Dreiling. Tell him I’ll come by and pick him up.”
It didn’t take long to stir up
Dreiling. The editor and the officers were able to watch the object
“glide” for a short while before it picked up speed and then
vanished over the horizon in the distant sky.
Reports from all over the area came
in from people who had seen a flying oval craft that night. The
description, as detailed by Officer Rouse, was that of a
torpedo-shaped object, about 50-60 feet in length. A shaft rose from
the center some 4-5 feet high, with braces or wires running down to
the front and the back of the craft. It appeared to be about 15 feet
high from the bottom of the object to the red light on top of the
shaft. There was a small blue light in front, then a big white light
followed by a solid area, then another white compartment, a red
compartment and an orange one. In the middle was a white lighted
window or compartment, followed by a blue one, then amber, then blue,
then red. From there on it was solid. The rear end was
funnel-shaped, with a red light in the center.
Dreiling spent 24 years at the
Goodland Daily News and saw many things during his tenure there, but
nothing quite compares to those late hours of that one night in March
of 1967.
Foo Foo’s Fright
Phyllis Robinson’s story takes us
back a bit earlier, to the summer of 1957. She was clicking along,
rollin’ down old Highway 40 in eastern Colorado heading toward
Kansas. She was driving her 1955 Pontiac with the windows rolled
down and the radio blaring.
Nineteen years old, blonde and
carefree, Phyllis had a heavy foot, so she liked driving under the
cover of darkness. Besides, it was cooler at night during the
summertime. She made frequent trips back and forth between her home
in Denver and the horses she loved to ride at her father’s place
near LaCrosse in western Kansas.
The road was dark, with virtually
no traffic. Suddenly, up ahead to the east, she noticed a bright
light. At first she didn’t think much about it because it was so
far away. Then it kept getting closer and closer. Finally, it was
right in front of her, practically on top of her hood.
Then it happened. “The car
stopped. The motor stopped. My watch stopped. The radio stopped.
Everything went ‘p-kewhh’… just stopped!”
“I don’t know what it was
doing, or what it was looking for. It just sat there.”
The UFO was wider than the two-lane
highway, and she could see a portion of it from the driver’s side
window as well as the “rear “of the craft ahead and above the
car.
Phyllis really wasn’t afraid, but
she didn’t get out of her car. She laughed, “I just sat there
like a dumb blonde looking at all the lights! I remember it made me
mad because it turned my radio off!”
“It was big, really big. It had
this thing on the bottom with lights all the way around it… and it
was going around and around and around, with all these flashing
lights.” The lights moved in a counter-clockwise motion, were very
bright and lit up quite a bit of the surrounding area.
Because her watch stopped, she
doesn’t have a good reference for time. But it seemed to her to be
quite a while. “It just stopped there, up in the air, hovering …
I couldn’t figure out why it was staying there so long.”
“Then it raised up, and just
went!” The object had headed back east and quickly vanished. She
didn’t hear a sound, coming or going.
Phyllis didn’t quite know what to
think about it all, but her lights came back on, the radio came back
on, and she was able to once again start her car and head right back
down the highway.
And she didn’t tell anybody about
it for a long, long, long time. Not even her dad. She’d heard
stories about other people telling about what they’d seen. “People
made so much fun of them… saying they were nuts!” She also
didn’t want her dad to worry about her taking the long trip and
driving at night.
Today, Phyllis, affectionately
dubbed “Foo Foo” by her grandchildren, lives in Hill City,
Kansas, and looks at it as just something that happened in the past.
“I don’t know what it was, why it was, it was just there!”
The one thing that the people here
all share is, the more they tell their own story, the more they hear
about others who have experienced similar encounters. And while they
still don’t have answers to what they saw, the more they hear these
other stories, the more they believe in their own.
Sunell Koerner is a free-lance
writer, graphic designer, commercial and corporate video producer and entrepreneur.