Mississippi thrives as a state tailor made to cultivate folklore, tall tales with deep woods, dreary swamps, and miles of impenetrable brown water and eerie crossroads as a backdrop. One eerie incident in the night sky over Flora during the late-1970s is one of those, replete with recorded witnesses and a paper trail.
Flashback to February 9, 1977, around 9 p.m., out in rural western Madison County. Sheriff’s Deputy Kenneth Creel and Constable James Ray Luke were in a vehicle together during the incident. They saw what was later described as 20- to 30-feet in diameter and perfectly-round with light coming out of little windows. Creel told local media he initially thought it might be an “airplane flying low.”
According to an article in the Madison County Herald, the only newspaper in the county at the time, Creel says he viewed “the thing” about 200 yards away across a field before it flew right over his car “like it was being piloted.” It then hovered over the two officers between 20- and 30-feet up for about a minute. Luke would later report that he quickly rolled his window up and had trouble looking at the craft directly.
“It looked like an evening star or something,” Creel said at the time. “But it kept getting brighter and bigger.”
The Herald article went on to say that Creel had tried to play down the incident. However, he did not mind mentioning that it was an unnerving experience while “the thing” was hovering above them.
“I didn’t get out, I wouldn’t,” he said.
The Associated Press published an abbreviated version of Creel and Luke’s run-in with the unidentified flying object, a few days later.
A CUFOS report — the center for UFO Studies in Illinois — was filed at the time. A photocopy of the document was obtained from local attorney Pat Frascogna. He has taken a personal interest in UFO sightings since he read about the Rendelsham Forest Case involving Royal Airfare Pilots and U.S. airmen stationed at a nearby airbase in December of 1980 during the height of the Cold War.
“I saw something on one of those UFO shows on the Discovery Channel or something on the Rendelsham Forest sighting and I started doing some research and it led me to contact some of the principals in the report,” Frascogna says.
Frascogna eventually contacted two of the principal witnesses and eventually helped one of them settle a disability matter with the VA.
“I don’t know what they saw but they said they were certain that it wasn’t one of ours and it sure was not one of theirs (meaning the Soviets),” Frascogna says. “And I know for sure that I haven’t seen anything like what they described at an airshow.”
Flashback to the Flora incident.
At the top of his CUFOS document is the name Dr. William Straka, a then-professor of astronomy in the Jackson State Department of Physics. Frascogna believes that Straka was the one who contacted CUFOS at the time of the Flora sighting.
The report cites Ken Creel as the prime witness and labeled the sighting as a CEI for a Close Encounter of the First kind, a designation for UFO sighting that happened less than 500 feet away from the observer.
It lists other observers who saw lights or shapes further in the distance as Highway Patrolmen Woodrow Bennett and Louis Younger, Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Bowering and another man, Joe Chandler. Both the document and the news clipping reported many calls made to the Sheriff’s department and other officials concerning similar sightings. They both note that many of these calls were deemed to come from “cranks.”
The document notes the color of the craft as pale blue, describing it as flat “like a pancake” with a rounded middle and emitting a high pitched tone and a sound like a “food blender.”
“This is interesting because that sounds consistent with reports of other sightings, including my clients in the Rendelsham forest,” Frascogna said.
CUFOS also reports a clear night with no clouds, no radar activity reported from the Jackson Municipal Airport — which Frascogna says could be due to the craft’s low altitude. No planes were logged with the Jackson General Aviation District Office, and no conventional craft were logged for the area with the Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Center.
It also reports an unattributed “emotional reaction” recorded from one of the witnesses as “I sure would like somebody else to have seen this.”
A similar sighting was reported in south Mississippi between the Jayess Community and Brookhaven that was seen by a a tow truck driver.
Frascogna says he remains hesitant to make any calls on what did or did not happen, but he remains fascinated by the possibilities. He has authored a chapter on the Rendelsham Forest case and hosted a conference that brought UFO scholars and skeptics to Jackson a few years back.
“I can’t make the call as to what these people saw, but I do know that it is very convincing when you sit across form these serious men in suits and they say unequivocally that it was a ‘craft of unknown origin,’” Frascogna says. “Without question something happened and I would invite anyone to look into these incidents for themselves.”
Creel had a similar take in 1977.
“I know I’m not crazy…I always said I didn’t believe in this stuff. I don’t know what I saw, but I know I saw something. It’s just hard to describe what happened.”
The question of “Are we alone in the universe?” is a daunting one and people continue to report strange sightings in the night sky. The National UFO Reporting center lists alleged sightings dating back to the early-seventies. Four sighting have already been logged for 2018 in Rosedale, Philadelphia, Gulfport and Olive Branch.
These records might not change minds, but they may be enough to convince even the most-hardened skeptics to broach the question: Are we alone in the universe?
