The first scientific UFO field study by Charles Lear. UFOs were big news in
nineteen seventy three. Besides the Pascogal and coin incidents, there were flaps all
over the United States. One in Piedmont, Missouri got started that year in
late February with UFO reports involving cars stalling and radio interference. These caught the
attention of a physics professor, Harley D. Rutledge, who was chairman of
that department at Southeast Missouri State University at Cape Girardo. Rutledge became fascinated to
the point that he put together an investigation team of scientists, arranged funding,
and ended up spending more than seven years observing unexplained lif lights while collecting data
and photographs. In late nineteen seventy three, he gave a presentation of what
he and the group had gathered up to that point at the fall meeting attended
by John Schusler the mutual ufone network of the Missouri Section of the American Association
of Physics Teachers. Rutledge finally published a book describing the investigation, titled Project
Identification, the First Scientific Field Study of UFO Phenomena. In nineteen eighty one.
According to Rutledge, a citing report by beloved Clearwater High School basketball coach
Reggie Boone and five of his players put Piedmont on the map when it was
picked up by media worldwide. In the March sixth, nineteen seventy three Saint
Louis Globe Democrat, there is an article by Joseph T. Gallagher headlined Shy
but friendly sky visitor haunts Brushy Creek area that tells the story of a shy
but friendly unidentified flying object that follows automobiles that has been spotted by at least
a dozen residents of Piedmont, Missouri. Gallagher explains that the UFO was considered
shy because it took off whenever anyone tried to get close, and friendly because
it lit up the road in front of cars driving at night. The sighting
by Bone and the boys, described here as two assistant team managers and three
players, is said to have been the first and details follow summoned quotes from
Bone. According to Gallagher, Bone was driving the school's driver's edd car on
U S sixty when he and the boys saw a bright shaft of light beaming
down out of the sky. They turned on the Route forty nine near Brushy
Creek, and one of the boys exclaimed, there's that thing we saw back
on Highway sixty. Bone pulled over to the shoulder, and according to him,
they saw an object two hundred yards away that was hovering fifty feet above
the ground. He said it was too dark to determine its shape. Where
some and he described what they could see this way, We all saw four
lights like maybe coming from portholes, red, green, amber, and white.
We figured they were about three or four feet apart, all in a
row. At the beginning of this book, Rutledge describes reports of car engines
stalling, car radios turning off, television signals being interfered with police radio's not
working, and even a radio transmitter being knocked out when mysterious lights were seen.
According to him, there were even reports of flying saucers, of objects
sitting on the ground in fields, and of objects moving under water in Clearwater
Lake. The Clearwater Lake incident is reported in the article by Charles j.
Oswald headlined it came out of a lake in the March twenty third, nineteen
seventy three Saint Louis Globe Democrat. According to Oswald, Gene Coleman, and
Kathy Leech reported that as they were driving across Clearwater Dam, the water glowed
red as an object surfaced and then rose up into the air and took off.
They are said to have told authorities that it turned from red to multi
colored, spinning white, green, red, and amber lights before it disappeared.
Rutledge describes there being a great deal of public excitement and that hundreds of
cars lined the roads in the nightly rituals sky watching. Rather than getting upset,
public officials seemed pleased with the effect it was having on the local economy.
He quotes Mayor Roy Anderson saying we're a resort town and if people come
here, they leave some money here. According to Rutledge, a message was
put up on the Marquee in front of the Wall Trip Motel saying welcome UFO
people on one side and Piedmont is UFO headquarters on the other. This is
the sign. J Ellen Heinek, a former scientific consultant for Project Blue Book
and founder of the Center for UFO Studies, is seen in front of in
a picture taken by his friend Missouri. UFO researcher Ted Phillips Rutlich describes Heineck
as not very impressed after being invited by state Representative Jerry T. Howard.
According to Rutledge, once he decided to go to Piedmont to investigate, he
wisely got colleagues from the physics department involved, as well as an astronomy instructor,
Milton Euelecki, with whom he went for an initial look. He says
that as a courtesy, he wrote a letter to university president Mark Scully informing
him of his intentions. Rutlich says he and Ulecki, along with their wives,
arrived at Piedmont on April sixth, and that very night, equipped with
a Questard telescope set up on a concrete slab on Pile's Mountain, managed to
collect data on five sidings in the sky around them of a light or lights
that appeared and disappeared in different positions. Rutlige tells the reader that after sightings
the following night and the weekend afterward, with more colleagues present, he decided
to come to Piedmont every weekend to initiate a formal investigation, and that the
opportunity for a scientific study was obvious because the flying objects were appearing frequently near
a given place. Rutledge says he put together a team and chose the name
Project Identification for the group because of the second of the studies two major objectives,
which were to measure the physical properties of the lights and or objects in
the sky and to identify their origin. According to him, he sought funding
by writing to three major metropolitan Missouri newspapers and got a response from the editor
of the Saint Louis Clobe Democrat, who agreed to finance the study with the
understanding that while the results would eventually be reported to the scientific community, all
current releases of the group's finding would be through the Globe Democrat exclusively. Rutledge's
account of the group's observations and interactions with the phenomena reads very much like John
Keel's first hand accounts in The Mothman Prophecies and other works, and Ruttledge cites
Keel's Operation Trojan Horse. At the end of chapters eighteen and twenty. He
reports seeing mostly lights, but also at one point a bullet shaped object.
Like Keel, he observed that the lights seemed to respond to the actions of
him in the other group members in ways such as changing direction when observed,
or, in one instance, disappearing the moment Rutledge pressed a microphone switch to
notify a team member of its presence. He labeled such moments as coincidences,
encountered at least eighty and says there were possibly twenty more. One aspect of
the phenomena they encountered were what Rutledge termed pseudo stars. He describes these as
lights that shone with the same brightness as regular stars, but could be recognized
when they were observed in constellations in a position where no stars should have been.
In one instance of a coincidence, on page one O four, he
describes one starting to move the instant he began shooting a fifteen second exposure using
a Pentax camera. Rutledge in the team collected an extensive amount of data,
and he presents much of it in the book in the forms of charts,
graphs, illustrations, and photos. According to him, there were one hundred
and fifty seven total project sightings, the majority of which fifty four were off
white, followed by amber thirty and orange twenty seven. Looking at the period
from April sixth, nineteen seventy three to April sixth, nineteen seventy four,
the majority of the sightings twenty nine or on Thursday nights, which contradicts Skill's
observation that the majority of sightings are on Wednesday nights. At the end of
the book, he makes this conclusion without doubt. Our research has established that
there is a UFO phenomenon, and we have conjectured about the nature of the
intelligence behind the capricious UFOs. I suspect that their game is to gradually create
general acceptance. By repeated appearances. More UFO flaps will occur from location to
location, winning converts more people will believe in UFOs. He closes with this
bit of optimism. 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 we will know their mission.
Over fifty years after the beginning of the flap, on July sixth, two
thousand twenty three, the Missouri General Assembly passed a bill designating Piedmont and Wayne
County as the UFO capitals of Missouri. According to the official website of Missouri
Secretary of State John Ashcroft. The purpose of the bill, according to its
sponsor, Representative Chris Dinkins, was to increase tourism. Rutledge Project identification and
the book are mentioned. Charles Lear is the author of Crashed Saucers and Malevolent
Aliens, available at Amazon dot com.