Cop UFO Case ReViewed or ReRun

Last Wednesday (9/17/08) I got an email from a friend about an incredible multiwitness UFO event she’d read about on Yahoo news site that disappeared within a half hour of her watching the video news article. The sighting she described amounted to the possibility of yet another strange UFO event involving multiple police officers as witnesses in the same areas of Illinois as the famous Lebanon, Millstadt, Shiloh triangular UFO sightings that occurred back in January of 2000.

UFO story and video immediately retracted this AM

I’m a a night owl, and often on the internet in the wee hours.

This AM early, before I went to bed, I saw a news story in the short list of headlines on the Yahoo! page. It had not been there more than 20 mins or a half hour when I spotted it. It linked to a news video.

The headline read (very close to this) ‘ 5 Police Officers Witness UFO in Southern Illinois’

Did you or anyone you know see this???

I went to the video and watched it three times.

I tried to download it but the download didn’t work.

I paused it in a few places, especially to see the sketch one of the officers had made.

I wish I had made notes, but I assumed (foolishly, I now realize) that the story would be up later today when I got up, with further details.

But when I looked for it, it was gone. Not only gone, but erased, as if it had never happened.

I used every tactic I know, searching on ‘Illinois UFO’ and ‘Lebanon Illinois’ and ‘Lebanon UFO’ and ‘Lebanon Police’, and looked in the news as well as on the web in general.

The search pulled up a story from 2000 from the same area:

www.theblackvault.com/wiki/index.php/Illinois_(1-5-2000)

www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case277.htm

I assume you know about this one. Similar case in several respects: trucker or motorist calls 911, reports UFO at a roadside stop a few minutes later, an officer goes out and sees it, tries to follow it, stops car, hears no engine noise, sees bright white lights on a triangular shape, notes its ability to move very far very fast.

OK; what I remember from the now-disappeared video of earlier today is:

• (1) the story was run by a local TV station (but I do not remember which one). I don’t recall seeing a news anchor.
• (2) the incident happened in Lebanon, Illinois.
• (3) a police dispatcher took the 911 call and said something like “you’re kidding, right?” and  the 911 dispatcher said “no, not kidding”, and the audio of this conversation (either the real audio or a simulation??) was played on the video;
• (4) the police officer who first responded and had the most detailed account was interviewed on video, and: his sketch of the object was shown (it is not the same as sketches seen in the 2000 story linked above) he described his encounter in detail: bright white lights at one end and multicolored lights underneath; when he pulled into the left turn lane on a deserted highway and shut off the engine, the object descended below trees. He heard no engine sound and was astonished at how quickly the object displaced itself to a mile away when he backed up on the highway to get a better look.

I am not clear how the other police figure in. There were two ‘animations’ (labeled as such on the video) of the object in the sky.

The cop I saw interviewed was absolutely not any of the officers pictured in the news articles at the links for the 2000 event. He was pudgy, mid-30s, clean-shaven and shown close up. An actor for the TV story, or… a similar, very new incident?

So… is this some semi-hoax or accidental rerun (with images from a TV story) of an 8-year-old incident that got put up and then pulled? (not that the original is a hoax by any means)

Or is this a new incident in the same area (as these sightings do sometimes cluster, and there is an Air Force base nearby) which was considered too hot to make public?

Hoping you can make some sense of this,
xxxx

Well, before I could spend any time digging into this strange rehashing of a past UFO sighting as new again, my friend got back in touch with me convinced that this was in fact some sort of hoax trying to pass itself off as something new.

Got it! It was a hoax based on the 2000 original

Hi, Miles,

This site (D Barker TV dot com) has a detailed discussion / analysis of the 2000 event and in it there is a trailer for the video “The Edge of Reality”.

In the video, precisely at 01:00, I saw the cop that I saw in the news report on Yahoo early this AM. The scene was different (and he was in civilian clothes in what I saw this AM), but it was the same guy, describing the same encounter. Furthermore, I later spotted the sketch of the craft on the website–same sketch I saw in the Yahoo news article (I have attached it).

So, looks like somebody put together a video from the 2000 data and hoaxed Yahoo.

The original event is a jaw-dropper, though.

xxxx

So, does anybody out there have insights into who put this short-lived rehash video newsbyte of an 8 year old UFO sighting together and managed to get it posted / “aired”, however briefly, on the Yahoo news homepage?

- SMiles Lewis