Council Bluffs Molten Metal Landing at Big Lake Park

December 1977. Council Bluffs, Iowa. On the north side of the city lies Big Lake Park, where Gilbert's Pond joins Big Lake through a shallow creek. Project Blue Book had been closed for several years.

Saturday, December 17. About 7:45 p.m. Kenny Drake, 17, and his nephew Randy James, 12, were driving to the Richman Gordman store. Then they saw it. A reddish ball, 500 to 600 feet up, "falling straight down" into the park. It disappeared behind the trees. A bluish-white flash followed. Two "arms of fire" shot more than ten feet into the air.

They called the fire department from a store payphone and drove to the park. On a dike beside Gilbert's Pond sat "a glowing orange blob with a bluish crystalline substance in its center." At first it "looked like a great big sparkler." Then it looked like "lava, glowing and bubbling."

They were not alone. Mike and Criss Moore, both 24, reported "a big round thing hovering in the sky below the treetops," with red lights blinking around its perimeter. A middle-aged couple called in a similar sighting and would not give their names.

Assistant Fire Chief Jack Moore, Mike's father, arrived about 15 minutes after the first report, and Identification Officer Dennis Murphy came to photograph the material. Moore said it was running and boiling down the edges of the levee, and its center was too hot to touch. It set a small grass fire. He called it "some kind of metal" that could not be broken or bent. Most accounts put the deposit at 35 to 55 pounds, while Eppley Airfield and Offutt Air Force Base reported nothing unusual.

Jack Coan of Griffin Pipe Products Co. identified carbon steel. At the Ames Laboratory, Frank Kayser ruled out a meteorite, because "one would expect a much higher nickel content." Local officials tried to alert the Air Force. The officers at Offutt weren't interested.

Jacques Vallée included the case in a 1998 paper on ten cases with material samples. In 2022, Garry P. Nolan, Vallée, Sizun Jiang and Larry G. Lemke published a new ion-beam analysis of sample CB_JV-1. The isotope ratios were "consistent with terrestrial values." The metal was also poorly mixed.

Francis Laabs, a metallurgist at the Ames Laboratory, found it "consistent with smelter slag." On Metabunk, users suggested hot slag spilled from a railway car, or thermite made by locals. Nolan reportedly countered that the sample lacks the aluminum oxides thermite would normally leave. Critics pointed out that no witness saw the metal leave a flying object.

In 2024, the Netflix series Investigation Alien aired a confession. Darrell Livengood said he and his friends lit two thermal welding "chargers," and that the residue was "nothing more than phosphorus and powder." In the same episode, George Knapp had samples tested. An explosives chemist said the material "couldn't have come from a thermal welding tool."

Kevin Randle summed up the 1998 findings: "nothing in the samples to suggest an alien technology, though no one could explain where the metal originated." Forum users noted that Close Encounters of the Third Kind had just reached cinemas. Mike Moore says he kept samples. The question Randle raised has never been settled.