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W-File: msartjr1.html
Type: Miscellaneous UFO Newspaper Article
Source: Madison, WI Isthmus, May 30, 1986. Written by Jay Rath, author of
The W-Files book.
Friend or UFO?
"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Marvin Cook wrote in
the Capital Times in 1975. "An 'unidentified flying object' was seen
hovering over the capital city."
But it wasn't the first time Madisonians
had seen objects in the sky other than Miss Forward's golden fingers.
There have been at least eight UFO sightings in the Madison area since
1947, and, according to legend, the Indians that lived around the four
lakes saw and met strange "sky-men" long before the white settlers arrived.
Madison is Wisconsin's hot spot for UFO activity.
Nancy Goff, age 13,
landed in the newspapers by being the first to report a Madison UFO. On
the night of July 7, 1947, Goff was sitting on the porch of her home at
1042 Williamson St. Around 10:30, she saw something that looked like "a
plate upside-down."
"I saw a light flash on the ground," she told
reporters. "When I looked in the sky I saw a flying disc. It kept turning
different colors and was moving very fast, but disappeared in a little
while."
That same night, Richard Y. Schulkin, who lived at 719 Mound St.
saw "some sort of gliding missile, of convex shape" flying over south
Madison. Schulkin said the object was traveling rapidly and was heading
south. He thought it was silver-colored, possibly made of aluminum.
In
the same week as these sightings, reports filtered in from Milwaukee,
Janesville, Grafton, Freeport, Ill., and other parts of the country. Even
though "flying saucers" had never been reported as such in the U.S. before
June 25, 1947, people in 39 states thought they had seen UFOs by the time
of the Madison incidents.
After the 1947 saucer flap there were no
recorded reports of UFO activity in the Madison area until 1968, when a
Madison woman and her daughter saw a "white light" hovering over the Hill
Farms area for about five minutes.
Shortly before 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 5,
Elvi Sanchez and her 15-year-old daughter, Gloria, saw a light in the sky
north of their home at 4810 South Hill Drive. They told police that the
light silently passed their house at a high rate of speed, then stopped in
midair about a block away. It stayed there a few minutes, hovering about
50 feet above the ground.
The UFO focused a large beam of light on the
ground, then suddenly disappeared. The women first thought they had seen
an airplane, but then realized that they had heard no engines during the
incident.
Madison's next - and most dramatic - sighting came on Sept. 1,
1970.
It was 10:10 p.m. Denise Fritz and Mike Butler were out in a boat
on Lake Monona when they looked up and saw a "lighted object" heading
toward the water. They initially thought it was a plane in trouble.
"It
looked like it was going to crash," said Fritz. "We joked about flying
saucers, but we still assumed it was a plane." They changed their minds
when they saw the object hover between 50 and 100 feet above some trees
near a boat landing on Winnequah Road.
"It looked like it was an oval,"
said Fritz. "But I couldn't focus on it well enough to make out the whole
shape. I don't know what it was, but I've never seen anything like
it."
Fritz and Butler had stopped their motor, but they could hear no
sound from the object. Suddenly, the object beamed two lights at the boat.
The couple started the motor again and began to leave. The object followed
them. "When we swerved to the left, the lights turned left too," said
Fritz. "When we turned right, the lights turned right. By this time we
were pretty scared."
The UFO was also spotted at the same time that night
by four Monona women who wouldn't give their names to reporters. (One
woman said, "People will think I'm some kind of nut.")
The women were
riding in a car and had almost reached the corner of Bridge Road and
Panther Trail when they saw something in the sky to the northeast. "It
seemed at first that it might be a low-flying plane," one woman said, "but
it had a lot of lights on."
Fritz and Butler, meanwhile, were scrambling
to escape the UFO.
"We went back to the pier as fast as we could, and it
- the lights - followed us," said Fritz. "We didn't even tie up the boat.
We ran right into the house. I was shaking and crying for about two hours,
I was so scared."
Back at the intersection of Bridge and Panther, the
four women got out of their car to get a better look. Like Fritz, they
said they had a hard time focusing their eyes on the object.
"We couldn't
make out a shape," one woman said. "I don't believe in flying saucers or
that sort of thing, but I don't understand this, because whatever this
thing was, it made no sound at all."
The women watched as the object flew
away. For them, the incident was over. For Fritz and Butler, it was
not.
"I have no doubt that it was something not from around here," Fritz
said in a recent interview. "For a long time we didn't go out in the boat
at night. I have chills about it even now."
Probably the most reliable
sighting in the Madison area occurred on the night of May 3, 1975. Among
the six or seven witnesses were two Madison police officers, who waited 10
days before filing a written report of what they thought they had
seen.
The UFO was first spotted by workers at a gas station on Odana Road
near Whitney Way. They watched the oval-shaped object for more than an
hour as it hovered near the WKOW-TV towers on Tokay Boulevard.
"It wasn't
twinkling like a star," said Scott Blanco, a 19-year-old employed at the
station. He and a friend, Carol Wecklem, and at least two other employees
watched the object with police officers Luis Yudice and Steven Cardarella.
The officers later reported that they did "observe the object, which seemed
to gradually gain brightness." In their official report, they stated that
the object's position was due west of the gas station, "at an undetermined
altitude and distance."
Blanco said the officers wanted to follow the UFO
in their squad car, but couldn't because the object disappeared several
times, then reappeared with increased brightness.
Yudice and Cardarella
are still Madison police officers. When asked about the incident,
Cardarella said, "I just didn't know what it was at the time." But he
doesn't think it was reflected light from a helicopter or a weather
balloon.
Madison's most recent recorded sighting occurred on July 31,
1976. Mary A. Tall and her mother, Isabel T. Frast, of 5201 Dorsett Dr.,
said that they saw a very large, bright, fast-moving object in the sky at
around 2:30 a.m.
"My mother saw it first," said Tall. "I didn't believe
her." Tall said the object was too big to be a star. She described it as
blue and cloudlike, and twice as big as the North Star. Beyond that, the
two could offer no other details.
"I wasn't eager to go outside and find
out what that thing was," Tall said.
Last August several sightings of
UFOs were reported in Black Earth, Blue Mounds, Cross Plains and Mount
Horeb. What these objects are, or were, is impossible to guess.
But if
you happen to look into the sky late some night, and see a strange light,
remember that you are not alone - you're in the company of 20 other
Madisonians who believe that they have seen something strange over the
capital city.
(The following is also included as part of the above
article...Cuthbert)The Sky-Man Cometh
"I don't belong here,"
the strange visitor told the Chippewas. "I dropped from above."
We'll
never really know for sure if the Chippewas came in contact with alien
beings, but Indian stories collected in 1930 by Charles E. Brown, then
director of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, may be of special
interest to modern UFO enthusiasts. According to the legends, the Indians
were visited several times by "sky-men" who travelled in strange craft.
Here's an example:
"Some Indians were walking over the plains when they
saw someone sitting on the grass. It was a man. When they approached, he
halted them by raising his hand."
"He said, 'I don't belong here. I
dropped from above.' "
"They wished to take him home with them. He told
them to go home and clean the place where he was to stay. Then he would
return with them. After they had done this they came back for him. He was
a nice-looking man, clean and shining bright. He stayed with them. Every
day at sundown, he watched the sky. In a clear voice he said, 'Something
will come down. I will go up.' He said that he had been running in the
sky. There was an open space, he couldn't stop running, so he dropped
through."
"One day in the afternoon he said, 'Now it's coming.' Everyone
looked up but they could see nothing for a long time. The man who had kept
Sky-man at his home could see better than the others. He saw a bright star
shining way up in the sky. The other Indians didn't see it until it came
near the ground. They had never seen anything nicer in the world."
"Two
men got a hold of it and pulled it down. Sky-man got into it. Then it rose
and he was gone. They had tried to get him to stay but he said that he
must go. He is up there yet. You can see him on clear nights."
Was
Sky-man "clean and shining" because he wore a silvery pressure suit? Is it
possible that the visitor insisted on clean quarters for fear of human
viruses, to which he had no resistance? The story certainly arouses
curiosity, especially when considered in association with an Indian mound a
few miles northeast of Baraboo.
The mound is in the shape of a man - the
only known human-shaped effigy mound in the world. But if the figure is
human, then it is oddly proportioned.
Mounds are rarely realistic
portrayals of living creatures, so the elongated torso of the man-mound can
be forgiven. But what of the two "ears" sticking out from the top of its
head? Could they represent a helmet of some sort?
Since the mound is 214
feet long and measures 48 feet across at the shoulders, it can barely be
appreciated from the ground. Is it possible that the figure is intended to
be viewed from above? An invitation, perhaps, for Sky-man to
return?
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