© MUFON imageWitness sketch.
MUFON Case # 16341
WITNESS: Driving home [on County Road 46, hereafter called Hwy 46] from a friend's house [in Hastings] around 9:45 pm, I saw a light that I thought was on a smoke stack.
MCNEFF: There are four smokestacks from the ruins of an old factory just to the north of Hwy 46.
WITNESS: As I got closer, I realized it was above a field, not on a stack. It was really bright! I pulled over on a dirt road to the right [Akron Ave.] and got out of my car to look it at. I then noticed it was about 500 to 1000 feet away and 200 feet off the ground, perfectly silent and rock solid in the sky with no movement at all. It consisted of a bright light with two little blinking lights to either side of it.
MCNEFF: At this point, he was looking west. He later estimated the randomly blinking lights to be about 10 feet apart.
WITNESS: At first I thought it must be a plane landing, but it just sat [hovered] there in the middle of the field for approximately 4 minutes. I then thought I would try and take a picture of it with my phone. As I was reaching for my phone, I got really freaked out thinking I was all alone on this dark road."
MCNEFF: He had an overwhelming feeling that he should get out of there, he said. "This is very unusual for me. I can barely remember getting back in my car, but I was shaking and scared, again unusual." He made a quick U-turn (throwing gravel in the process), drove the 350 feet or so back to Hwy 46 and started west. The southern border of the field along Hwy 46 is a few feet lower than the field and is mostly covered with a thick growth of trees. About 400 feet west of the intersection with Akron Ave. There is a 100 ft. gap in the trees. As the witness drove west, he could see the object to the north through this gap, and could see some kind of shape to it, which he later sketched. At this point the witness was distracted by the object to the extent that he almost drove off the road, but was able to pull back on the pavement, and proceeded on home.
After meeting the MUFON Field Investigator at the location of the sighting, he realized that the object had been 500 feet or less away, because it had to line up with the gap in the trees along Hwy 46.
© MUFON imageWitness sketch.
I met the witness at the site on 4-24-09. I had asked him to park his car in the same place he had parked it on 3-28-09. He parked about 350 feet north of Hwy 46. He showed how after he got out of his car, he stood forward of the driver's door by the engine compartment and was looking straight west at the object, which he now estimates was no more than 500 feet away and 50 to 100 feet off the ground.
I asked him to try to locate the point in the field above which the object was hovering. The field is covered with corn stubble left after harvest of the grain. The east side of the field is covered with a dozen or so rows that run north and south, but the rest of the field is covered with rows that run east and west.
Starting from his car, the witness walked straight west down a corn row, until he reached a point north of the gap in the trees along the highway to the south, and said he thought the object was no closer than that point. I marked it with a flag and he continued on, stopping at a point at which he said he thought the object was no further away than that point, which I marked with another flag.
The average distance from his car to these flags was about 480 feet, which is very close to the 500 feet he estimated after having thought about it since the original sighting. Since this point is directly north of the gap in the trees to the south, his estimate of 500 feet is confirmed. This also means that he was about 350 feet from the object when he continued on west on Hwy 46 at the time of the sighting. This distance is shown to be accurate by the fact that the witness saw the UFO to the north through the gap in the trees along Hwy 46.
Using our Casey Holt Memorial Radalert 50 Nuclear Radiation Monitor, I scanned an area of about 5600 sq.ft. around "ground zero". I also visually scanned the area from ground zero about 100 yards in all directions and saw nothing unusual.
The witness said that during the entire 9 minutes of the sighting, he heard no sound from the object. There was no wind; it was a warm, still night. He did hear a "bumping" sound from his car radio, and he turned it off. This possible electromagnetic interference may be significant.
The witness appeared to be a reliable and accurate observer. The witness made sketches of the object as viewed from the east and from the south. These sketches are obviously of some kind of craft. My conclusion is that this object must be considered to be an unknown aerial vehicle.
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