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Date: July 14, 1987
Location: Waunakee
County: Dane
Source: Madison, WI Capital Times July 14, 1987
Details of Incident:
UFO sightings puzzle cops in Waunakee
When police officers Kevin Plendl and Scott McElroy went to the home of
a Waunakee woman who reported seeing red and blue lights in the sky early
this morning, they were sure they'd be able to explain it quite
easily.
When they arrived shortly before 2 a.m. it seemed as if things
were going to be even easier. The lights "weren't there when we got
there," Plendl said in a telephone interview today.
The woman, who lives
on Division Street in Waunakee, told the officers she had watched the
lights for about an hour before notifying authorities. The two Waunakee
officers were not convinced.
The officers, however, began watching the
spot where the woman had sighted the object and after a moment saw what
Plendl described as a one-half to one-quarter moon shaped object with red
and blue lights. "It went from not being there," Plendl explained, and
then, before his eyes, simply "popped into" the sky.
Plendl said the
object was very bright at times, but periodically dulled. It also shifted
in the sky from north to south, the officer said.
"I'm not sure what we
were looking at," Plendl said, but he and McElroy watched it for 15 to 20
minutes before agreeing to move their vantage point to River Road, about
three miles east of the village.
As Plendl looked at the object through a
pair of binoculars he "saw something come flying off it. It went at a
tremendous speed."
The Waunakee officer said he followed the piece that
broke off the object with the binoculars but eventually lost sight of
it.
When he and McElroy left the area, the original object they had seen
in the sky remained.
Authorities are investigating the possibility the
light might have come from a burner on a hot-air balloon.
Sheriff's
Department dispatcher Kent Kruger said Dave Bier of Morrisonville saw a red
and blue hot-air balloon land in the same vicinity about 6:30
a.m.
However, Bier said he was not able to talk with the balloonists or
to get the license plate number of their pickup vehicle before they packed
up and left.
Plendl said the incident left him "surprised and
speechless...I don't know if there is a logical explanation for it or not,
but we didn't have one."
UFOs were sighted Jan. 16 when a Belleville
police officer and a civilian ride-along spotted a strange bright light in
the sky west of Belleville. The object was described as being a clump of
red, blue and white lights.
On that occasion, the lights were also
spotted by a Dane County deputy, as well as two Green County officers.
Source: Madison, WI Wisconsin State Journal, July 15, 1987
Officers sure they weren't 'seeing things'
This village, which bills itself as "The only Waunakee in the world,"
may have to broaden its claim a bit after the strange goings-on here early
Tuesday morning.
How about "the only Waunakee in the universe?"
Two
Waunakee police officers, Scott McElroy, 21, and Kevin Plendl, 22, say they
saw something they can't explain in the sky over the village about 2 a.m.
Tuesday - a round object four or five times brighter than the northern star
with flashing red and blue lights.
"What they saw, they saw," said Police
Chief Frank Balistreri. "They're very good officers, very
reliable."
Whatever it was the officers saw, it has made them minor
celebrities in Waunakee. Tuesday afternoon, they faced a room full of
television cameras and microphones to tell their story.
McElroy and
Plendl responded to a call from Waunakee resident Thea Hefty at 1:52 a.m.
Tuesday. McElroy said Hefty told them she had been watching a strange,
bright object in the sky and called the police to look at it, too. "She
wanted to prove she hadn't been seeing things," Plendl said.
At first,
Plendl and McElroy were skeptical because they saw nothing in the sky where
Hefty pointed.
"Then, out of the blue, there it was," McElroy said. "It
was a glowing object, about four or five times brighter than the northern
star with red and blue flashing lights."
Plendl said the officers at
first thought the object was a reflection from the clouds. But they waited
for the clouds to move and when they did, the object was still there.
"It
was moving north to south," Plendl said. "We could tell because we lined
it up with an object on the house. It was standing still at times. Then it
would go south. Then it would go north. Sometimes it just
hovered."
After watching it for 15 or 20 minutes, the officers drove into
the country toward the object to get a better look. From River Road, south
of Waunakee, they watched it through binoculars. As they were watching,
Plendl said, a most curious thing happened. Something bright and
egg-shaped broke away from the main object and flew away at an extremely
high speed. Plendl followed the flight of the egg-shaped object for a few
seconds but eventually lost it because of its high speed.
"I was
stunned," Plendl said.
The officers contacted the Dane County Sheriff's
Department which contacted a radar tracking station in northern Illinois
that monitors such sightings. The tracking station reported nothing
unusual on its monitors, the officers said.
There were reports of a red
and blue hot air balloon landing in the same area about 6:30 a.m. But
Plendl and McElroy don't think what they saw was a balloon because it was
too bright and hovered in one spot too long.
Marian Anderson, a Madison
woman who monitors such sightings for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO
Studies in Chicago, said an investigator for the organization will probably
probe deeper into the sighting.
Earlier this year, investigators for the
center, a private organization that studies and compiles data on UFO
sightings, looked into a series of strange sightings in Belleville.
Location: Stoughton
Source: Stoughton, WI Courier Hub, July 16, 1987
Was UFO sighted in Stoughton?
She's not going to characterize it one way or the other, but a Stoughton resident may
have seen the same thing police officers from Waunakee called a UFO early
Tuesday morning.
The woman, who refused to be identified, but who is an
usually reliable source, said she saw an object in the sky northwest of
Stoughton at about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday.
She said that the object she saw
had bright white lights in the front and flashing blue and red lights in
the rear.
Police officers in the town of Waunakee reported seeing similar
object at about the same time. At press time the apparent UFO was not
believed to be a plane or a balloon.
UFOs were sighted near Belleville
last January by a Dane County Sheriff's officer and others.
Many of the
characteristics of the object the Stoughton resident saw were similar to
the UFO sighted by the Waunakee officers.
Among the
similarities:
-
The object "moved to the south real slow, and then moved off to the north in a big circle," the woman said.
-
The lights in both sightings were said to be flashing blue and red.
-
The sightings occurred at approximately the same time.
While the woman didn't want
to go on the record, she did talk about what she saw.
She said that she
doesn't know why she happened to look at this particular object in the sky,
"but for some reason it caught my attention."
"At first I thought it was
just a plane or a helicopter circling around, looking for somebody," she
said.
But, although she never got a clear look at it, after about five
minutes of watching it slowly circle to the northwest of Stoughton, it
became clear it was not an airplane.
"I shut the car off that I was in,
but I didn't hear any sound (coming from the lights)," she said. "And it
was longer than an airplane."
She said that the lights were "quite" a
distance from her, so she didn't get a clear look at the fuselage of th
object.
"After about five minutes it moved off to the north again, and I
lost it in the trees," she said.
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