While vacationing this August in Missouri (postal abbreviation MO, for our non-US readers), where the skies can be very dark, my wife and I happened to drive through the town of Piedmont. In passing through, I noticed the object above in front of a business on the side of the road.
“Huh,” I thought, “someone is really into flying saucers here.” But then we saw this sign.
And of course we had to go check it out.
Indeed, Piedmont has a small UFO-themed city park, complete with little green men and a flying saucer. At that time, someone had seen fit to supply the little green men with some junk food. All the following pictures are from the park.
A sign in the park explains everything. It reads as follows:
Piedmont, Wayne County, UFO Capital of Missouri
To mark the 50th anniversary of alleged unidentified flying object (UFO) sightings in Piedmont, the Missouri General Assembly passed Sb139 designating Piedmont and Wayne County as the UFO Capitals of Missouri. Effective August 28, 2023.
Between February and April 1973, residents of Piedmont and the surrounding area witnessed unexplained activity in the sky. Several hundred calls were made to local police, sheriffs and newspapers. The incidents made local headlines and eventually national news outlets begin reporting the sightings. There was no official government investigation of the sightings (Project Blue Book was discontinued in 1969); however, Southeast Missouri State University physics professor Dr. Harley Rutledge 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).
Once we had our eyes open, we started seeing UFOs everywhere in Piedmont.
My personal favorite is the logo of the local sanitation company. It features a flying saucer “abducting” the trash. Cute.
More on Piedmont and UFOs, from a PBS station in St. Louis, Missouri:
Interestingly, my wife and I saw our own UFO while doing some stargazing in Missouri. One reason we decided to vacation in Missouri is because of those dark skies. According to some light pollution maps, the skies in the area around Piedmont rival, or even excel, the skies over Mt. Graham in Arizona, where the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope is located. The skies in Sam Baker State Park, where we did our stargazing, truly were dark — dark to the horizon, no light domes to be seen anywhere (although the rolling landscape meant that the horizons were somewhat elevated), Milky Way and its dark lanes very obvious. The images below are from www.lightpollutionmap.info, which estimates the sky brightness at both Mt. Graham (arrowed, left) and Sam Baker (right) to be the same.
One evening, we saw what looked like a small dot of brighter light (still fainter than Jupiter) that seemed to have two fans or streamers of fainter light coming off the sides of it. When we first saw this phenomenon, it was about 30° above the eastern horizon. It moved slowly and a little erratically toward the horizon, drifting toward the north, and eventually disappeared into the horizon.
It was fascinating. I have no real idea what it was. One possible explanation is that it was moonlight. The Moon was not up when we were observing, but it would be rising before too long. Possibly this was moonlight reflecting off of some trail of high altitude atmospheric material as the Moon traced its course up toward the horizon. Possibly that atmospheric material was even remnants of a jet contrail or dust from a Perseid meteor. We were there near the peak of that meteor shower, and the direction that the UFO moved was generally parallel to the path that the Perseids were following. In that case, it would certainly be an “Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon” rather than an “Unidentified Flying Object”. Who knows? But when the sky is dark and your eyes are dark-adapted, there’s more to be seen than when you are surrounded by artificial lighting.
That UFO was not the only unusual atmospheric phenomenon that we encountered in Missouri. After we had passed through Piedmont and seen the UFO park, we begin to encounter some rain. At first the rain was light, but then grew heavier, and eventually, even though we were on a large highway, we had to slow to perhaps 35 mph and turn the windshield wipers on “high” — a hard rain. But then, in an instant, with no warning at all, the windshield went white with water. It was as though we had driven into a large waterfall — or indeed, as if somehow the road had disappeared and we had plunged into a lake. We could not even see the hood of the car. There was nothing to be done except come to a halt, and pray that the guy in the pickup truck behind us did the same (he did). I had seen unusual lights in the night sky before, but I had never, ever seen anything like this rain — and I live in a place where we can get some pretty torrential rainfall.
The point being, nature can surprise us. I don’t know what they saw in Missouri in 1973, and I understand the fun factor (and possibly tourism factor) in putting little green men and flying saucers all over your town. But lights in the sky do not simply equate to extraterrestrials anymore than does seemingly paranormal rainfall.
