Nebraska UFOs: Is There Anybody Out There?It’s an age-old question about extraterrestrial life. But for these Nebraska |
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ARE WE ALONE? It’s a question as old as humanity. To many, it remains unanswered. To others, the question has already been answered – based on experiences they claim to have had.
When we asked UFO Field Researcher Dale Bacon if he knew of any credible Nebraska UFO sightings, he aptly replied, “Hmmm . . . credible UFO sightings. Is that an oxymoron?” Point taken, Dale, but to the hundreds, maybe thousands of Nebraskans who claim to have witnessed strange, unidentifiable “things” in the Nebraska sky, they believe . . . that they saw something.
Bacon knows that. He has investigated a handful of more recent encounters, many of which are “credible,” he said. Others, though, may simply have been misidentification.
The national UFO reporting center in Seattle has 279 reports listed for Nebraska, including 16 in 2008 and 15 in 2009, but rumors of strange aerial phenomenon in the Cornhusker sky is nothing new.
A passage in Mari Sandoz’s Love Song to the Plains reads, “Back in the hard times of 1857-58 there were stories of a flying serpent that hovered over a Missouri River steamboat slowing for a landing. It was like a great undulating serpent, in and out of the lowering clouds, breathing fire; it seemed, with lighted streaks around the sides.”
Sandoz also recounts a folk song attributed to 1860s railroad workers:
“Twas a dark night in Sixty-six
When we was layin’ steel
We seen a flyin’ engine come
Without no wing or wheel.
It came a-roarin’ in the sky,
With lights along the side…
And scales like a serpent’s hide.”
Strange newspaper reports were the norm at the time and became more inventive by the day. The same could be said of the quick-witted remarks of readers. Sandoz tells of one man’s politically motivated explanation of the phenomenon. “Finally a Grand Islander claimed he took a ride in the airship, which was not supernatural at all but was built up in the sandhills and run by the wind collected from following (William Jennings) Bryan in the great campaign.”
In 1884, the sky belonged to the clouds, birds and stars. So, when a metallic object crashed to Earth near Benkelman on June 6 of that year, it would have been a shock to the cowboys who witnessed it. The Nebraska State Journal reported that ranchman John W. Ellis and several of his hands were rounding up cattle when they heard a roaring sound overhead. They looked up just before “a blazing meteor of immense size” struck the ground and slid into a draw.
Investigating, the horsemen saw metallic fragments – cogs and gears strewn about, each one glowing and surrounded by a radius of charred grass. The 60-foot long, 12-foot radius cylindrical object scoured the ground, leaving molten sand in an area 20-by-80 feet. One of the cowboys, Alf Williamson, peered over the draw’s rim. He was blinded in seconds; his hair singed and face blistered. By evening, many visitors came to view the object, but its light, said by many to be as bright as the sun, remained too intense to bear.
With the fragments still glowing two days later, a brief but heavy rainstorm filled the draw with a violent torrent of water. As the rain subsided, several witnesses, including an Omaha Bee reporter, observed that the craft, which some called an aerolite, had dissolved “like a spoonful of salt in water.” A greenish jelly-like substance covered the ground and dissipated into nothing before their eyes, a sweet smell filled the air. The next day a newspaper headline read: “The Magical Meteor, It Dissolves Like a Drop of Dew Before the Morning Sun.”