John continued watching the sky to the east, and soon began to see objects appear. He went next door to alert the pair, who quickly returned to the back yard. A few seconds later, a huge fireball was seen falling at a 45 degree angle, south, toward Lake Monroe. The object was white with a bit of orange and had a fairly long tail from their perspective. The odd thing about it was how slow the object was falling. In fact, John and his companions had time to drive south of his house to get a better observation point, where they watched as the object stopped short of the ground.

At that point, it turned into a white disk shape, and began to emanate various colors, before it simply disappeared. The actor friend was ecstatic, that he had actually witnessed a UFO event.

Now the story widens. When John began to relate the sighting to me, we discovered that it was the same object I had been witness to outside my home, fifteen miles north of their position. What I saw had an orange cast. It was big and round, with a relatively short tail (five times the diameter of the object). It descended slowly (for a meteor) and at an angle. It was just too big to be a typical meteor. I thus far, have not reported this sighting to anyone. Your questions and concerns strike at the heart of the matter.

Logically, I would expect a meteor hitting the ground in Hoosier National Forest to leave some sort of calling card, i.e., fire, dust, tree damage or something! You likely know more about sonic booms than I do, but my guess is that any object entering our atmosphere in excess of the speed of sound, would create a sonic boom. That is, providing the object is operating totally in our time-space. The turbulence you mentioned could suggest at least some physical interaction at that point in time. I don't recall air turbulence as an aspect of a Close Encounter being mentioned. Elsewhere, however, I consider it a logical probability. I need to look into that further.

The green ring you describe may be some sort of plasma field surrounding the object as a result of ionization of atmospheric gases (speculation, of course.) And, isn't it curious how this stuff is never reported by the media? A control tower operator at Indy (Indianapolis Airport) once told John, "Yes, we see stuff on radar down that way, all the time!" (unidentifieds) We don't worry about it unless it looks like they're going to run into somebody." (Being a pilot, don't you find that comforting?)

Ed, we really need to get together on this. This is a big one! There's a ton of questions John and I have concerning this sighting. One of our biggest concerns is finding out, as close as possible, where this object would have hit the ground. We would like to do a ground search of the area to look for anything anomalous. We're developing a theory about the area in question. I'll explain further when we meet.

We would like to show you video tapes of objects seen in that area. This may help you to identify anomalous objects when you're up in your plane in the evening.

Ed, you could probably go to the IU (Indiana University) astronomy department and ask for their interpretation of what the object was. They'll tell you it was a meteorite, bolide, space junk, or some such nonsense. You won't be satisfied with their answers, because it just won't fit with what you saw. We can tell you about a lot of strange things we've seen out there at night. For instance, shooting stars that fall straight down, then stop short of the tree line, then move horizontally. There's more......so much more.

P.S.: Yes, I'd say this was your first sighting, but it won't be your last. I'll bet good money on that!

Later on,

Lynn Taylor, Association for Aerial Anomaly Research and Cataloging (AAARC)