by Author, Charles Lear
UFOs were big news in 1973. Besides the Pascagoula and the Coyne 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 Girardeau. 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 lights while collecting data and photographs. In late 1973, he gave a presentation of what he and the group had gathered up to that point at the fall meeting (attended by John Schuessler of the Mutual UFO 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 1981.
Rutledge PicAccording to Rutledge, a sighting report by beloved Clearwater High School basketball coach, Reggie Bone, and five of his players put Piedmont “on the map” when it was picked up by media worldwide. In the March 6, 1973, St Louis Globe Democrat, there is an article (page 11 of pdf) 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, Mo.”
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, some in quotes from Bone.
Rutledge Pic 2fAccording to Gallagher, Bone was driving the school’s driver’s ed. car on U.S. 60 when he and the boys saw “a bright shaft of light beaming down out of the sky.” They turned onto route 49 near Brushy Creek, and one of the boys exclaimed “There’s that thing we saw back on Highway 60.” Bone pulled over to the shoulder and according to him, they saw an object 200 yards away that was hovering 50 feet above the ground. He said it was too dark to determine its shape or size, 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 his book, Rutledge describes reports of car engines stalling, car radios turning off, television signals being interfered with, police radios 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 underwater (his italics) in Clearwater Lake.”
The Clearwater Lake incident is reported in the article (page 9 of pdf) by Charles J. Oswald headlined “It came out of a lake” in the March 23, 1973, St Louis Globe Democrat. According to Oswald, Jean Coleman and Cathy Leach 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 a nightly ritual of 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 Waltrip Motel saying “Welcome UFO People” on one side and “Piedmont is UFO Headquarters” on the other. This is the sign J. Allen Hynek (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. Rutledge describes Hynek 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 Ueleke, 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.
Rutledge says he and Ueleke, along with their wives, arrived at Piedmont on April 6, and that very night, equipped with a Questar telescope set up on a concrete slab on Pyle’s Mountain, managed to collect data on five sightings in the sky around them of a light or lights that appeared and disappeared in different positions.
Rutledge 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 study’s 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 St. Louis Globe 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 findings 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 Rutledge cites Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse at the end of Chapters 18 and 20. He reports seeing mostly lights, but also a bullet-shaped object and one point. Like Keel, he observed that the lights seemed to respond to the actions of him and 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” and counted at least 80 and says there were possibly 20 more.
One aspect of the phenomena they encountered were what Rutledge termed “pseudostars.” 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 star should have been. In one instance of a coincidence on page 104, he describes one starting to move “the instant” he began shooting a fifteen second exposure using a Pentax camera.
Rutledge and 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 157 total project sightings, the majority of which (54) were off-white, followed by amber (30), and orange (27). Looking at the period from April 6, 1973, to April 6, 1974, the majority of the sightings (29) were on Thursday nights, which contradicts Keel’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 will we know their mission.
Over fifty years after the beginning of the flap, 0n July 6, 2023, 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, Rep. Chris Dinkins, was “to increase tourism.” Rutledge, Project Identification, and the book are mentioned.
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