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.”
Creel said the object then came to within 200 yards of the car, and he stopped the engine so he could listen. He said he heard a whirring noise “like a blender – Like it was straining, when you first put ice in it.” He said it then came over the car as if it was being piloted.
Creel described “the thing” as hovering 20-30 feet above the car as he looked up at it through the car window. He said “I didn’t get out. I wouldn’t.” He described light “coming out from little windows” that in the reporter’s words “apparently changed colors several times, from soft blue to red to green and other colors.” He said the object was 30-40 feet in diameter and didn’t spin, but just hovered for more than a minute.
According to the reporter, as Creel and Luke were watching the object, Highway Patrolman Louis Younger drove up and saw it as well, and later gave the same description of it as Creel had. Creel said, “Then, the thing just took off, northwest, toward Satartia.”
According to the reporter, UFO reports with a similarly described object came from Flora residents, and there were reports of distant “lights from an unidentified craft” from Deputy Charles Bowering, Highway Patrolman Joe Chandler, “and others.”
Creel is described as having “played down the incident” in the week following his sighting, as he and the Sheriff’s Department received “dozens of inquiries.” A department official is said to have described some of the people making the inquiries as “real cranks.” Creel is quoted as saying, “If I had known how much trouble it was going to cause, I wouldn’t have said anything in the first place.” According to the reporter, “moments later” there was a phone call from someone at a radio station wanting to talk to Creel.
Investigators from the Center for UFO Studies (founded and directed by former Project Blue Book Scientific Consultant J. Allen Hynek) looked into the case and there is a report (page 8 of the pdf) titled “Close Encounter in Mississippi” in the April 1977 International UFO Reporter where the case is listed as number 2-3-48.
The report begins with a discussion of how a sighting by credible witnesses, such as a deputy and a constable, not only attracts the attention of the press, but the attention of people who have had their comfortable world-view unsettled and “respond to their insecurity with the defense mechanism of harassment.” The report then goes into the details of “the striking tale told by Deputy Sheriff Ken Creel and Constable James Ray Luke.”
According to the report, on February 9, 1977, Creel and Luke were sitting in their car with the engine off (contrary to the Herald article) and were watching a small stationary light that was low in the west that then rushed towards them in one second. Creel is said to have rolled his window down so he could look up at the object and Luke is said to have rolled his window up and not to have looked. The description provided to the investigators was of “a pale blue dish tapering to a rounded, dark, central underside” with “7-8 white round windows edged with dark circles.” A soft high-pitched noise “like a food blender” is said to have been heard.
The report contains the additional detail that the officers fled the scene in fear after the object hovered over them for about a minute. According to the report, Creel backed up about 100 yards while the object remained in place and then, “In fear, the deputy whirled the car around fast and headed east to Flora, as the constable looked back to watch the saucer rise higher in the sky ‘as if to watch them better.’”
In the section of the report titled “IUR Follow-Up,” investigators are said to have checked with the Jackson Municipal Airport and the Jackson FAA and to have found nothing that could explain the object. The distance of the object from the car as given by Creel is described as “far from confident” as Creel told the press that it was 20-30 feet over the car and gave IUR investigators “a revised estimate of 50-60 feet.” The reporter also questions the size estimate: “Furthermore, it was estimated to be 6 times the size of their car; yet its apparent (angular) size was compared to no more than the diameter of the full moon.”
The report ends with this: “Yet further exploration of this case is unlikely because both men are tired of the public harassment they have received, and have stopped discussing it.”
Three decades later, Creel’s cousin, Michael Creel, told WAPT News that Kenneth was still, in the reporter’s words, “tight-lipped about it.” According to the article headlined “This day in history: Madison County UFO sightings remain unexplained,” posted on February 10, 2023 (the article is an update of a story that aired in 2011), on the WAPT website, a “former deputy who said he saw the UFO,” who requested anonymity and is identified as “Joe,” described the UFO as “approximately 15-18 feet off the ground, blue in color, kind of a metallic blue, portholes around the center of it, shaped like an old spinning top kids used to use.”
According to the article, Creel told WAPT that he made the story up as a joke. “Joe” is said to believe that Creel “clammed up after the ‘feds’ put the heat on him.” He is quoted as saying, “The CIA told him that he didn’t need to talk about it no more. They didn’t want it out. I’m not sure what kind of threats were made.”