The Florida Scoutmaster Case: Sonny DesVergers and the Palmetto Scrub Encounter

August 1952. America was in the middle of a flying saucer wave. A month earlier came the Washington, D.C. radar sightings. In Palm Beach County, Florida, a 30 year old hardware-store clerk and former Marine named Sonny DesVergers led Boy Scout Troop 33.

August 19, around 9:45 at night. DesVergers was driving three scouts home along Military Trail, inland from West Palm Beach. There was no moon. From the corner of his eye he caught "fuzzy lights like the cabin windows of an airliner." A plane down, he thought. He took a machete and two flashlights into the palmettos and told the boys to get help if he did not come back.

In the clearing he noticed a nauseating smell. He felt watched. Then came "oven-like heat coming from above." He looked up. A circular, dull black object hung over him, about 30 feet in diameter, with a convex dome on top and a phosphorescent glow along the bottom edge. He heard a noise like metal against metal, "like a hatch opening."

A small ball of red fire drifted toward him. It became a red mist and engulfed him. He passed out. When he came to, he was standing by a tree. His eyes burned. There were lights in the distance.

From the car, the scouts saw lights, though their stories differed. Bobby Ruffing, 12, described a "reddish white ball of fire like a Roman candle" coming down toward his scoutmaster. He saw him "stiffen up and fall." Chuck Stevens remembered a "big glowing white light" with six reddish lights in a circle around it. David Rowan spoke of "bright red lights like railroad flares." Deputies found DesVergers coming out of the woods. Deputy Sheriff Mott N. Partin told the press: "The grass was scorched and blistered and the place had a burned smell."

Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt of Project Blue Book travelled from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and interviewed DesVergers on August 22. Hair on his forearms and in his nostrils was singed. His cap had three small burn holes. The FBI laboratory found the pattern "not uniform as would be expected" from a single flash of flame. Grass from beneath the spot where the object hovered went to Battelle Memorial Institute. The roots were degenerated, apparently by heat. The verdict: "No logical explanation is possible for this alteration."

Other findings cut the other way. Investigators could see into the thicket from the road "Only by standing on the car." Ruppelt's memo recorded no burned foliage and no sign of flares. A flare study added that a flare would have started a fire in the dry grass.

Then came the background checks. DesVergers had an "Other Than Honorable" discharge from the Marines for being AWOL and car theft. He told invented war stories. He hired a press agent and told the AP he could "make a little money out of this." Over the next year the tale grew, from a creature inside the craft to a fight with three humanoids in greyish clothing. Investigators suspected he had singed his arm hair with his own cigarette lighter.

Ruppelt called it "the best hoax in UFO history." Yet he conceded that no one had proven DesVergers was lying in this instance. In 1997 Karl T. Pflock left the case unresolved, quoting Jerome Clark: perhaps "the ufologist's worst nightmare: a real experience which happened to an unreliable individual." In 2019 the story became "The Scoutmaster," an episode of History's Project Blue Book drama. The charred roots never found their logical explanation.