by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
When it comes to official responses to UFO reports, police officers are on the front line and often become witnesses themselves. A famous example is the 1994 Trumbull County, Ohio, case. This case started out with calls to the local dispatch office from citizens who reported seeing a UFO and ended up with several officers not only sighting it, but chasing it, and the radio activity was caught on audio tape in the dispatch office. A case that was not as spectacular but has endured in local lore is a 1977 case from Flora, Mississippi.
There is an article in the February 17, 1977, Madison County Herald out of Canton, Mississippi, headlined “UFO Spotted Focuses on Deputy Creel.” According to the reporter, on a previous Thursday evening, Deputy Kenneth Creel and Constable James Luke were driving four miles west of Flora on Smith School Road when they saw what at first seemed to be, in Creel’s words, “an evening star or something” except that it “kept getting brighter and bigger.” Creel said that as a shape emerged he used the car radio to contact the Mississippi Highway Patrol. He told the reporter “I kind of thought it was an airplane flying low, or like it could have been.” Read more →