This article was published in the daily newspaper Burnett County Sentinel, Grantsburg, Wisconsin, USA, on Tuesday, December 23, 2003.
By Chet Newman
Ted Wistrom and Heather Berrard believe it was something out of the ordinary they saw hovering over Burnett County fields recently. What it was exactly, they can't say.
GRANTSBURG — "It went right alongside the highway all the way from Highway 48 down to the Bible Camp. Then it crossed over the highway in front of us and lowered down toward the field and hovered there about 50 or a hundred feet above the ground.”
Ted Wistrom is crystal clear about what he and Heather Berrard saw as they were traveling south on Highway 87 from Grantsburg at about 5 p.m. last Wednesday. They vow the aircraft, no more than 20 feet wide or long, was moving down the west side of the road at about 30 miles an hour.
The craft was not nearly large enough to carry people, says Wistrom, but he also says it was dark, so exact size was hard to tell.
Checks with officials in law enforcement and the Department of Natural Resources uncovered nothing to explain what the couple saw.
Wistrom says he knows they weren't the only ones to see it. He says the car in front of them slowed down, too, as did two others behind them. Wistrom said he had planned to turn east on Highway O, but continued south on 87 to continue watching the aircraft.
He says it wasn't very high in the air. He could see what looked like propulsion units, sort of like tubes, protruding out of the bottom of the craft that were "tilted toward the ground, like that's what was holding it up."
It made no sound, he says.
There were four rectangular lights on what appeared to be the back of the craft, he said. They spanned the entire rear, with the lights immediately adjacent to each other, with each one being maybe two or two and a half feet high.
While the craft was moving, the lights were all orange. When it began to hover over a field near the Bible camp, he said the center left light turned blue and the center right one turned white. The white light began to blink as it was hovering, he says, and then the craft disappeared.
Wistrom says he can't give an overall description of the craft, because they only saw the underside and rear.
Wistrom says friends had been telling him of seeing strange air vehicles over the last couple of months, and claim they have seen military-type vehicles at Crex Meadows before the snow came. He laughed off their remarks as "just kooky stuff," he says.
Now, he says, he thinks "they're doing some kind of testing around here."
DNR employees at Crex Meadows say there haven't been any unusual vehicles there.
After the strange vehicle disappeared, Wistrom says he and Berrard headed east when a low-flying airplane flew by at low level. That plane, he said, had a blue-and-white light underneath and red lights on the wingtips, but nothing like the much larger rectangular lights on the strange air vehicle.
