The article below was published in the daily newspaper Sunday American, Chicago, Illinois, USA, on September 25, 1966.
|
Four persons early yesterday saw a brilliant, unidentified object in the sky over Lake Michigan, north.
Policemen in northwest shoreline suburbs saw it around 4:30 a.m.
Airline pilots reported to the control tower at O'Hare Airport that they saw a brilliant light at an estimated 4,000-foot altitude some 100 miles east-northeast of Chicago.
A rash of similar sightings elsewhere in the Midwest coincided with hundreds in the East, where a spokesman for NASA offered this possible explanation:
"A rocket was launched at 4:13 a.m. Chicago time at Wallops Island, Va.; the rocket released a 'dust' cloud for observing and measuring electrical fields and wind motion, and the discharge, between 310 and 570 miles aloft, caught the rays of the rising sun and reflected them."
A Chicago weather bureau meteorologist suggested that the sky was exceptionally clear and that it was "quite possible that a light from beyond the horizon could have figured in an atmospheric trick aided by the mirror effect of the lake." He said no meteors fell in the area at that time.
Policemen Al Largo and Clyde Fazenbaker of Kenilworth were driving in the suburb when they saw the object at 4:20 a.m. Largo described it as "a huge ball, black in the center and surrounded by a white smoke."
