It's probably too soon to rename the area between Waterloo and Millstadt "Roswell East," but either aliens have taken a liking to the area, the folks at Scott Air Force Base have been doing some odd things, or imaginations of respected locals here have been running wild.

It was nearly a month ago the History Channel and its "UFO Hunters" crew visited Millstadt on a fact-finding mission spurred by a former village police officer who reported seeing an unidentified flying object in the early morning skies Jan. 5, 2000.

Officer Craig Stevens, who has since relocated and left the department, described a large, triangular object with three white lights, one red light and a bank of strobing lights officials at nearby Scott Air Force Base could not explain.Charles Metzger, a Waterloo alderman for more than 30 years and a man not known for flights of fantasy, is keeping an open mind about Stevens' alleged sighting and other unexplained skyborne phenomena. That's because Metzger has seen similar objects-one recently and one as a youth.

On Dec. 5, 2007, a woman called the Monroe County Sheriff's Department to report seeing an object she described as shaped like an ice cream cone with flashing red lights hovering near the Baxmeyer Construction office off Martini Road.

"We saw the same thing, but didn't say anything about it. Then we saw in the sheriff's report there'd been a UFO sighting," Metzger said.

Metzger had been out with his wife Rosalie and sister-in-law Sandy Husnik that evening looking at Christmas lights. They saw lights that evening, including three red lights shining down from what he at the time thought might have been a troop plane with its door open, creating an eery black maw.

They, too, were in the area of the Baxmeyer facility when they saw the object.

"It didn't seem to have any lights showing as it left and there was no sound of any kind of engine or air that moved it. We could see it leave, but it looked like a huge plane fuselage leaving without any lights," Metzger said.

Metzger had sent a letter-recollecting the event-to his sister-in-law after she returned to her home in another state. He said he wrote the letter after he saw the newspaper report.

Husnik wrote some recollections in the margins of Metzger's letter. Her recollections of the incident were similar to her brother-in-law's, though she included a small sketch of how she recalled the UFO's form. The sketch shows three red points of light in an ice-cream cone configuration.

"This is the second time I saw something this strange," Metzger said. "When I was about nine or 10 years old, I was lying on the front porch of our farmhouse with my dog when a bright white floodlight came on in the sky and shined down on our neighbor's lake."

"I'm betting there was something there. Whatever it was, didn't want me," Metzger said.