Subj: (another Millstadt story)Immense UFO baffles 4 policemen
Date: 1/19/00 8:19:09 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: hblondel@tampabay.rr.com (New Millennium)

Jan. 18, 2000, 8:46PM

Immense UFO baffles 4 policemen

Yet mystery doesn't excite area in Illinois

By STEPHANIE SIMON
Los Angeles Times

MILLSTADT, Ill. -- It drifted ever so slowly over grain fields and
railroad tracks and modest little houses, silent and stealthy in the
dead of night.

It was immense: As long as a football field. Two stories tall.
Triangular, like an arrowhead. Bright lights winked from its rear. Red
lights shimmered from its belly.

And no one has any idea what in -- or out of -- the world it was.

Four police officers on patrol in four rural towns all saw it. So did at
least one civilian. Each witness independently described the object the
same way. Each was baffled.

Southwestern Illinois, it seems, has a genuine UFO mystery to chew on.

Was the government testing some top-secret, slow-moving, lit-to-the-max
mega-blimp? Was nearby Scott Air Force Base trying a quirky new weapon?
Did four police officers hallucinate simultaneously? Or were
extraterrestrials scoping out the heartland with a 4 a.m. fly-by on Jan.
5?

"It's going to be a long while before we determine what went on that
night," said Colm Kelleher, who studies UFOs at the National Institute
for Discovery Science in Las Vegas.

Folks out here, some 20 miles southeast of St. Louis, don't seem too
taken with the mystery. They tend to be pragmatic sorts; they worry
about their jobs and their farms and the weather, not giant flying
arrowheads. Some think it was an alien craft.

Others nod knowingly: secret military project. Either way, it doesn't
much affect them.

But the sightings have electrified UFO researchers nationwide.

A team of Las Vegas investigators led by a former FBI agent spent
several days interviewing witnesses here. And at the National UFO
Reporting Center in Seattle, Director Peter Davenport calls the case "a
UFOlogist's dream" because the officers make "excellent to
unimpeachable" witnesses.

Based on his interviews so far, Davenport says the UFO "clearly does not
appear to be compatible with any conventional terrestrial aircraft that
we know of."

The catch is "that we know of."

Even big-time UFO buffs have to admit that it's possible the mystery
craft was a top-secret, man-made experiment.

The Stealth bomber, for instance, was test-flown in the Midwest for
eight years before the Pentagon officially unveiled it.

During that time, local UFO societies got dozens of reports of black
delta-shaped ships zooming overhead, said Forest Crawford, an Illinois
UFO researcher.

"If it was up to me, I'd like (this latest sighting) to be a giant alien
craft," Crawford said, "because those are more fun to investigate." He
thinks it most likely, however, will turn out to be some sort of stealth
blimp.

Not that the government is about to 'fess up, if in fact it was
involved.

A spokesman for Scott Air Force Base says personnel there know nothing
about the UFO. (Then again, if it was a classified military project, "I
can't imagine that we would know," Lt. Col. Allan Dahncke said. "If we
did, it wouldn't be so secret.")

The Federal Aviation Administration is similarly clueless: Air traffic
controllers "didn't see anything, didn't hear anything, didn't catch
anything on radar," spokeswoman Liz Cory said.

But those who saw the UFO are sure it was for real.

It floated along about 1,000 feet overhead, emitting a low-level buzz
and following a southwesterly course for 20 minutes or more. Millstadt
police Officer Craig Stevens tried to take a photo but captured just
three bright lights on film.

Excited and sleepless, Stevens has spent days combing the Internet for
clues about the object. (That, and fending off callers who offer to
examine him for alien implants.) He now says he's "almost 98 percent
sure" that the craft was man-made. "There is that slight possibility,
though," he added, "that it may be from elsewhere."

That prospect pushes Davenport to keep on investigating. "Until you have
one of these objects on a laboratory table and are talking to the
occupants, you can't say definitively what it is."