My post last week was on UFOs in Missouri (postal abbreviation MO). I mentioned that there was a sign in the UFO Park in Piedmont, Missouri about the 1973 UFO sightings there. The last sentences of that sign read, “Southeast Missouri State University physics professor Dr. Harley Rutledge [1926-2006] investigated with his own team. He issued a public paper in 1973, which he later turned into a book called Project Identification: The First Scientific Field Study of UFO Phenomena (1981).”
This book caught my interest. My wife and I had of course been in Piedmont, the place where the UFOs were sighted. And, on our way to the dark skies of southeastern Missouri we had driven right past the campus of Southeast Missouri State University, located in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River. I wondered what would be in this book, by a physics professor at this state university I had seen, who scientifically investigated UFOs within this region I had traveled.
I found a copy of the book. It was not some self-published thing. No, it was published by Prentice-Hall, Inc., which even in 1981 listed offices in New Jersey (USA), London, Sydney, Toronto, New Delhi, Tokyo, Singapore, and Wellington (New Zealand). Here’s what was on the jacket flaps:
Trying to prove the existence of UFOs is usually an exercise in frustration. By the time a sighting can be investigated, the alleged object is long gone — out of the range of cameras, measuring instruments, and professionally-qualified researchers.
But in 1973, when residents in and around Piedmont, Missouri, began reporting lights in the sky, Dr. Harley Rutledge — head of the Physics Department at a nearby university — decided to subject these reported objects to scientific scrutiny. He put together a team of observers with “college training or equivalent experience in the physical sciences” and a battery of equipment: Questar telescopes (whose magnifying power could be changed without replacing the eyepiece), an electromagnetic frequency analyzer, high-frequency, low-intensity sound detector, and high-quality camera equipment.
The resulting Project Identification has been operating ever since, logging hundreds of hours of observation time. At last, trained experts were able to investigate UFOs while the phenomena were actually in progress and record the data in a scientific, objective manner — enabling Dr. Rutledge to calculate the objects’ actual velocity, distance, and size.
But Project Identification’s data raise more questions than they answer. One night, for example, a single light was observed crossing the sky — yet photos of it show a series of trails. Observation of the unclouded sky often revealed “pseudostars” — stationary lights camouflaged by familiar constellations. Some objects appeared to mimic the appearance of known aircraft; others flagrantly violated the laws of physics. But most unsettling of all were the lights that repeatedly seemed to react to the project members observing them.
Initially a skeptic on the subject of UFOs, Dr. Rutledge here presents a full report on Project Identification’s groundbreaking work and what its findings imply. Fully illustrated with unique photographs, explanatory line drawings and diagrams, this is the only book to provide hard, factual data drawn from direct observation of the UFO enigma.
This sounded promising! A hard-nosed, scientific look at phenomena that were around for a long enough period of time to be rigorously investigated, and it was published by a well-known press. Moreover, the acknowledgments section (the first page of full text of the book), thanked:
- The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, for providing funding for Project Identification,
- Dr. Donald Froemsdorf, dean of the College of Science at Southeast Missouri State, who “accepted the UFO study as a bona fide research topic and supported it”,
- the University Research Council, for three grants,
- Dr. James E. Thomas, professor of physics at Kansas State University at Pittsburgh, who critically examined the entire manuscript, and Dr. Peter Sturrock of Stanford University who advised the author on plasmas.
Promising indeed!
But flipping toward the back of the book to glance at the conclusions, a word caught my eye — “telepathy” (p. 239). Uh-oh. A page further on:
In only two cases is telepathy suggested…. [A]n amber light moved across the sky [and] as soon as we terminated our tests, the light undulated…. [A] pseudostar near Jupiter moved over and went out, as if reacting to my thoughts. A few other cases could have been classified as telepathic reactions rather than, say, clues given by voice or physical movement.
And then, eventually, this (p. 252):
No, UFOs do not behave according to prevailing technology, and the UFO intelligence does not behave as would a human visiting another planet. Surely the UFO intelligence has gathered all the flora and fauna of the earth, has deciphered all the languages, has determined all of man’s technology, and has become cognizant of the world’s religions; in short, they must know all there is to know about man. I believe that the UFO intelligence uses this information to mimic man and his technology.
Needless to say the rest of the book was not particularly persuasive in its data, photographs (such as below, from a copy available through Archive.org) and analysis.
Rutledge was a professor in his tenth year at his university (and thus tenured). He had served for nine years as department chairman, and for two years as as vice-president and president of the Missouri Academy of Science. He was also a member of the Sigma Pi Sigma physics honor society, according the back cover of the book. He had a Ph.D. in the area of solid state physics (p. 3). All of this and he ended up talking about telepathy and pseudo-omniscience — stuff well beyond the realm of science.
At the same time that I was reading through Rutledge’s book, I happened upon an article by Tessy Jacob, a member of the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit, published in the National Catholic Reporter (Vol. 61, No. 25, September 12-25, 2025, p. 11) about a Eucharistic miracle in India. The article began,
On Nov. 15, 2013, in Vilakkannur, a small village in the southern Indian state of Kerala, something extraordinary occurred during the celebration of the holy Eucharist. The presiding celebrant noticed a black dot on the consecrated host. Moments later, a human face appeared on the host.
The article was not really a report on the Vilakkannur miracle. It was a reflection on the Eucharist. For example, Jacob writes,
The Eucharist is the greatest miracle on Earth, a living memorial of the Last Supper of Jesus. In every celebration, Jesus comes to us in the form of body and blood, offering life to all who receive him in faith. But a deeper question remains: Do I see the face of Christ in the bread I receive? Do I truly experience the real presence of Jesus in every Eucharist I attend?
But, the article also said, “This year, the Vatican officially recognized it [Vilakkannur] as a Eucharistic miracle and granted permission for public veneration of the host.” And, the article included a photograph of the host — a clear photograph, with a face obviously visible.
I strongly suspect that the Vatican did its due diligence in investigating this, and that the photo, and the entire Vilakkannur event, are not simple frauds. In other words, I strongly suspect that the actual evidence for this Eucharistic miracle is a lot more solid than the evidence for the Missouri UFOs. There were lots of witnesses to both. But in the case of Vilakkannur, we have an actual object, a thing we can look at and study. And a decent photograph. Or, many decent photographs.
We also have a framework for thinking about such a miracle. We have two millennia of Church thought regarding miracles. We have belief in a God who became incarnate for love of us and instituted the Eucharist, and who might occasionally act to bolster the faith of people in his Church. This gives us a meaning to Vilakkannur. This also puts Vilakkannur into perspective, for “the Eucharist is the greatest miracle on Earth”; Vilakkannur is pleasantly incidental.
By contrast, telepathic, pseudo-omniscient, laws-of-physics-violating UFO “intelligences” are just a blank slate. In essence, they are demi-gods whose intentions and actions are completely a mystery. Why demi-gods in rural Missouri, anyway?
Rutledge closes his book with,
UFOs will come back to southeast Missouri again…. I plan to be ready with more sophisticated instrumentation, adequate facilities, and sufficient technical help. If we are to learn their secrets, they must be studied scientifically — with instruments. When we understand them on a technical-scientific basis, when most of the world’s inhabitants accept the reality of UFOs, then we will meet them face to face. And then will we know their mission.
Unless of course, they shut us down with telepathy!
At any rate, Rutledge was wrong. No real scientific study ever came about. No technical-scientific understanding was achieved, no secrets learned, nor mission known.
Dr. Harley Rutledge was an accomplished scientist with the demonstrated respect of his peers. He took on a promising project — a real scientific study of lights in the sky that were regularly at hand and seen by many people. Somehow, he was moved by those lights in the sky to start talking about, in essence, the miraculous. He ended up very far from science.
And Prentice-Hall published that. Would they have published a book on a Eucharistic miracle, with a jacket blurb about data recorded in a scientific, objective manner, with language about being the only book to provide hard, factual data drawn from direct observation of a Eucharistic miracle? Maybe so. I did a little searching of the web, however, and found nothing like such a book by a major, non-Catholic publisher.
There is something interesting here about what a miracle is, what hard, factual, scientific evidence is, and what people believe, both about what is miraculous and what is not.
