A full warning, in this episode we're talking about the Mike
Foss UFO encounters. That's correct, the Mike Foss
UFO encounters. This first article comes to us
from ufoevidence.org. Pretty good site over there.
I think it really does a good job of laying out the facts.
Title says repeated repeat sightings in South Dakota date
November 27th 1976 Location Millbank, South Dakota, US And
then it says police radio dispatcher witnesses a large
somewhat egg shaped object, blue at its base but flashing multi
colored lights mostly red higher up and having two protruding
legs. Rantana object returns again on
three separate occasions. Type of case report Standard
case it says height classification ND and special
feature characteristics E dash MFX police source William H
Moore says. APRO Bulletin, Volume 25 #5
November 1976 by William M Moore, Field investigator.
These guys really organize your stuff.
In spite of the fact that he apparently possesses numerous
valuable talents, not the least of which is a gift for
architectural design, a severe physical problem has forced 27
year old Mike Foss of rural Millbank, South Dakota to forgo
a promising career in favor of a less strenuous part time job as
a radio dispatcher for the local Millbank Police Department.
Following a recent divorce, Mike has made his home with his
parents, Mr. and Missus Norman Foss, who live on a farm several
miles South and a bit West of the city itself.
Although the farmhouse has apparently been in Mr. and
Missus Foss's family for years, the Foss's themselves have only
occupied the dwelling since June.
Norman Foss is retired 19 year veteran of the South Dakota
Highway Patrol. At about 6:30 PM Central
Standard Time on the evening of November 27th, 1976, Mike Foss
left a local auto Body Shop in Millbank intending to return
home by car. The weather was clear and crisp
temperature near 0. Travelling S on Hwy. 77 out of
Millbank, he suddenly noticed a tremendously bright brilliant
orange light, perhaps better described as a light without a
source, off to the West or the right of him.
Almost immediately ruling out the moon, he continued to watch
the object for a few moments until turning to proceed
westward towards his parents farm on a gravel County Road.
Now realizing that whatever was responsible for the light was
hanging over a field alongside the road, Fost stopped for a
better look. No, he did not leave the car,
nor did he notice any peculiar effects on the car's electrical
system or engine. At first thinking he might be
witnessing a helicopter, he was not immediately apprehensive
about it. However, he soon realized that
whatever it was he was observing was clearly not of any sort of
helicopter he was familiar with. Now somewhat frightened, Foss
floored the foot feed and headed for home about a mile and a half
away as fast as possible. Believing he had left the object
in the field behind him, he intended to pick up his parents
and return to the spot to show them what he had seen.
Accordingly, he began blowing his car's horn as soon as he
approached the driveway and arriving at the house, jumped
out of the car and ran into the house, yelling to his mother and
father to come quick. They did.
Returning back outside with his father, Mike realized that
whatever he had left behind in that field was now perched a few
feet in the air, neatly between the hog house and the barn,
about 100 feet from where they were standing.
For the next 20 to 25 minutes the three Fosses watched as a
large, somewhat egg shaped object blew at its base, but
flashing multi colored lights, mostly red higher up and having
two protruding legs or antenna, as it first hovered between the
hoghouse and the barn and then drifted or appeared to drift
slowly straight from them and off to the southwest,
diminishing its size and intensity until it finally
disappeared in the distance. The changing colored lights on
the body of the object were described as being somewhat like
a collar wheel used to light up the Christmas trees in different
colors, except that the colors did not change rapidly but seem
to melt into one another. Orange, white, blue, red and
green were noted. Mike Foss concept of the object
appears in this drawing of it labeled Figure B.
Other significant events in this encounter are as follows.
The distance between the barn and the hog house on the Foss
farm is about 60 feet. The barn is located almost due
West of the house and the hog house is situated somewhat to
the southwest. All three witnesses agreed that
when the object was at its closest, it took up fully half
the space between these two structures, perhaps 30 feet.
Mike Foss is original estimate was that it was about 40 feet
wide. Its height above the ground was
described as above the hog house, which is about 15 feet
high, but lower than the peak of the barn, which is maybe 35 to
40 feet high. Just before Mike Foss arrived
home from his encounter with the object in the field, Mr. Foss
had been watching television in the living room.
According to Mr. Foss, just prior to Mike's rushing into the
house, the television began to act up by rolling vertically.
He said that the set had a tendency to do this when a high
wind blew the antenna wires around the roof, and he
remembers thinking that a wind must have suddenly come up.
The channel involved was channel 10.
After the object left the area, the television was normal again.
Mr. Foss also states that upon first going outside with Mike to
watch the object, he could hear the sound of what he thought was
traffic on the main highway about two miles east of the
farm. He felt that some heavy trucks
must have been passing by. He also noticed a jet passing
overhead going West and says that he could clearly hear the
aircraft and could see its white wing lights.
He noticed no other sounds. All three witnesses recalled
that the yard was lit up very brightly, much too bright to
have been caused by the Moon. Mike and Mr. Foss remembered
seeing the Moon in an entirely different part of the sky.
Note that the Moon was approaching first quarter on the
night of the 27th and would have been riding fairly high in the
South at 7:00 PM. Also with regard to the yard
being LED up, Mr. Foss recalls that his Mercury vapor yard
light located near the barn was definitely on.
Mike assumed that it was on, but did not notice.
Mr. Foss did not recall. In any event, this is
interesting in that the light is operated by a photo cell which
turns it on automatically or off depending on the light
conditions outside. Missus Boss, who did not venture
outside, states that after a few moments the two men came in to
get a pair of opera glasses to observe the object better.
While they were looking for the glasses, she continued to watch
the device from the kitchen window, which faces West and
affords a good view of the area in question.
She says that at this point the object began to drift away from
its original position, moving away from the house at 180°
toward the southwest. Then, appearing to have stopped
once again, it began to emit laterally, one at a time, what
appeared to be red balls of some sort.
These seem to be without substance, were emitted from the
sides of the object, but not at the same time, and travelled or
floated about about four of the parent objects diameters from
the main body. One ball, having reached this
distance from the object, exploded noiselessly into
nothing, at which point another ball emitted from the opposite
side of the device, replicated the performance.
By the time the men managed to find the opera glasses and
return a matter of perhaps 2 minutes, this phenomena had
ceased and the object had begun to recede again slowly to the
southwest. Although all witnesses agreed
that the object had two protrusions or legs, Mr. Foss
referred to them as struts. Only Mike Foss noticed white
lights on the tips of them. Mr. Foss clearly remembered the
tips of the stretch as being dark, almost as if the ends
didn't quite touch one another. About 10 miles southwest of the
Foss House is a low range of hills averaging about 1000 feet
higher than the flat plain on which the area surrounding
Millbank is situated. This range of hills is visible
in the distance when looking South or southwest of the house.
It is significant to note that all three witnesses observed
that before the object's final disappearance in the distance,
it was below this line of hills and intermingled with some farm
lights which can be seen off in the distance.
Mike Fox related that he was not particularly afraid of the
object after his initial encounter with it, because he
said that he felt that anyone who could produce a thing like
that could have harmed him easily the first time if it had
hostile intent. He also stated that since his
first sighting, he had experienced a strange recurrent
dream in which he is alone on a hilltop on a strange planet with
a purple sky, watching a number of strange craft maneuvering in
the distance. Some are silver and some are
black, and there seems to be a war going on.
In addition, he said he clearly felt that the object would
return it did three times, and that it will return again.
He was unable to explain why he felt that way.
Immediately after losing sight of the object, Mike suggested to
his father that they both take a piece of paper and go into
separate rooms to sketch what they had seen while it was still
fresh in their memory. When they got together again to
compare the sketches, they were strikingly similar.
True to Mike's prediction, the strange object returned again on
three separate occasions between the initial sighting on November
27th and its most recent appearance at about 8:00 PM
Saturday evening, December 11th. On two of these occasions it was
sighted only at an extreme distance as a bright orange
light maneuvering off to the southwest of the house.
Because of this distance factor, no positive identification could
be made. On the 3rd occasion, the
sighting was strikingly similar to the first.
Again, the object positioned itself between the barn and the
hog house. Again the weather was clear and
cold, and as before, it remained in the area 20 to 25 minutes,
following the same pattern of slowly receding to the
southwest. On this occasion, Mike's
automatic police radio band scanner was on in the living
room. At the appearance of the object,
Mike noticed that the scanner had locked onto frequency 7 and
was emitting burst of static. Frequency 7 is a VHF frequency
approximately 140 megahertz used by the Minnesota Highway Patrol.
This time, Mike Foss called Millbank Police and asked that a
car be dispatched. Police Chief Ben Amsten
personally came out, but by the time he arrived, the object was
only a bright light in the distance.
Amsten, however, did notice an orange glow in the vicinity of
the of the Foss farmhouse while proceeding toward it in the
squad car. Also reported to have senior
object, this time in the area of the KMSAD radio tower, about 2
1/2 miles from the Foss house, are Mr. Don Adams, bartender at
the local VFW club, and his wife.
Because of the fact that all sightings were on a clear
evening and all were in a westerly direction, this
investigator continued throughout the interview with
the Fosses, December 22nd to nurture the possibility that
this case might have its origins in a highly exaggerated sighting
of the planet Venus, which is quite prominent in the southwest
sky at that time. Having concluded the bulk of the
interview, I suggested we go outside to view the area and to
check for any abnormal radiation with a Geiger counter which I
had brought along. Immediately upon passing through
the door of the Foss home, which faces directly South one, I
sighted Venus hanging prominently in the southwest.
Look, I said, is that the object you saw?
No, replied Mike. We've been watching that too.
But it's a satellite or a star or something.
That's not what we saw. A similar question to Mr. Missus
Foss upon a return and doors they had remained inside
produced a similar answer. Mr. Foss explained he was
familiar with Venus from having seen it so often while on the
road with the Highway Patrol. My check for abnormal radiation
produced no exceptional results. Only three other items in this
case seem to be worthy of mention.
The first is that on Sunday, December 12th, 1976, one day
after the last sighting of the object and the second close
approached by it, the Faust's 7 year old AKC registered German
Shepherd became I'll. Mr. Faust had obtained the
animal in May of 1973. On the 13th day, the dog was
examined by Doctor Dotney DVM from Milbank, who diagnosed her
problem as an apparent stroke. The animal's veins had collapsed
and the dog was in shock and recommended that the dog be put
to sleep. This was done and the animal was
buried where the Old Owl House had stood.
The burial site was also checked for abnormal radiation, but the
results were negative. The Fauces did not consider that
there might be any connection between the appearance of the
object and the death of the dog. It was also significant to note
that the animal had once undergone an operation for
tumors of some sort. Perhaps more interesting is a
question of the silo. Just as I was leaving the Foss
home, Mr. Foss wondered out loud if his silo couldn't have had
something to do with repeated return and apparent and apparent
curiosity of the object. Upon pursuing this, I discovered
that completely housed within the Foss's barn is a 20 foot
diameter, 30 foot 30 foot high all steel silo made of heavy
pieces of boilerplate riveted together.
He described it as looking like a missile silo and speculated if
the object they had seen was intelligently controlled.
He thought it was and possessed any sort of metal detection
device. It might have been
understandably curious about what sort of structure was
housed in the barn. Silos housed completely within
barns are rare. All steel ones are almost
unique. The final item is that upon
arriving home and going through my file, I discovered a copy of
an old picture I had once obtained from NICAP.
Shown in the photo, reportedly taken from aboard the USS Ramsey
off the coast of California in 1957, is an object which is
strikingly similar to the one described by the Fosses.
Yeah, what a cool sighting. The club back in 1976 out there
in South Dakota. That is really neat.
I want to take a look at this article next here kind of
describing this at the time that it happened.
I found this over at archive.org.
They have newspapers and stuff listed over there.
This paper here is printed, it says Tucson, AZ November 1976.
And then it has an article about this FOS sighting by William H
Moore, says field investigator. And then it has basically the
same article we just read printed into it.
Yeah, what a cool. And you can go there and you can
kind of see that has a diagram where they've printed this out
at and and written it. What I like about this is that
they've really approached this whole thing intelligently.
You compare what we just read. OK, this is an article written
back in 1976. And compare how the
investigator, this William HM Moore, how they treated the
subjects, how they just reported on this, on these three
sightings. Matter of factly, they gave you
some background on the people. So you kind of had an idea, you
felt like you kind of knew him a little bit.
And then he just goes through step by step what happened.
You follow the timeline, he describes the topography of the
place where they're at. This is just classic good
reporting and compare that to what we have today.
In some of these cases where I was able to get through that
article. If you notice that investigative
report that we just read, we got through the whole thing and we
never heard the term conspiracy theory once.
Wasn't that neat? Wasn't that refreshing?
That's the kind of investigating that we used to get where you
just got the facts, the writing. The writing was factual.
I mean everything was just the whole thing read smoothly and
when you got done with the article, you really felt like
you knew what happened. Now compared to that today, when
we have these so-called investigations done by reporters
and that it's just no comparison.
Anyway, I thought that was such a cool sighting come back in
1976. That's one I've never heard of
before, but definitely worth talking about.
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Until next time, this is UFO warning over and out.