Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

376 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
Democrat, Little Rock, AR, January 23, 1988; Gazette, Texarkana, TX,
January 23 & 24, 1988; BEE, Dequeen, AR, January 28, 1988; Northwest
Arkansas Times, Fayetteville, AR, February 4—8 and March 27, 1988;
McCurtain County Gazette, Idabel, OK, April 10, 1988.
The magnitude and extent of the incidents that began to be reported on
January 19, 1988, from Little River County in Arkansas were on a scale
that went beyond any other UFO phenomena that occurred in 1988. The
incidents clustered around the towns of Foreman and Ashdown in southwest
Arkansas, near the Texas border. A few sporadic sightings had
occurred in previous months, including a low-altitude sighting of a UFO
as large as a football field in November, 1987, but the witnesses did not
dare speak out for fear of ridicule. The local population tends to be quite
conservative, and the first witnesses to go public after a UFO chased three
women in a car at terrifyingly close range on January 19, 1988, were subjected
to persistent harassment and ostracism, until hundreds of citizens
began seeing the phenomena simultaneously and its reality became undeniable.
A typical report described
... a ball of light that was as big as a hay wagon at first, but which got
smaller when as many as 100 people gathered to look at it. The object
changed color from red to green to blue. It was first seen near ground
level, then flew high into the sky. It got under the moon and it looked just
like a star up there until everyone went away, then it came back down.
When it was up off the ground, lights were flashing, and you had to see
it to believe it.
Witnesses included a professional astronomer, an Air Force veteran
with 1,800 hours of flying time who had been a navigator on a B-52, a science
teacher who had been selected as a finalist for the NASA "teacher in
space" program, and a design engineer familiar with propulsion systems.
Photos were taken that neither the Arkansas Sky Observatory, NORAD
[North American Air Defense Command] or NASA were able to give
plausible explanations for. However, Clay Sherrod, the Director of the
Arkansas Sky Observatory, succeeded in insulting everyone's intelligence
by maintaining that the extremely mobile metallic objects with multicolored
flashing lights being perceived simultaneously by whole crowds of
people, hovering at low altitude then suddenly rising straight up at incredible
speed, performing maneuvers such as no known aircraft can perform,
were either misidentifications of the planet Venus or moonlight reflecting
off the bellies of white snow geese flying overhead.
Although newspaper coverage of the incidents ceased on March 27, the
incidents continued to occur for approximately one full year well into
1989, without even being mentioned in the local press. They were consid-