Joe Simonton's Space Pancakes, Eagle River, Wisconsin

Eagle River is a small town in Vilas County, in the Wisconsin Northwoods. In 1961 Joe Simonton lived on a farm four miles out. He was 60, a plumber and chicken farmer. By some accounts he had also been a professional boxer and a deputy sheriff.

Tuesday, April 18, 1961. At about 11:00 a.m., Simonton was eating a late breakfast. Then came a noise, like knobby tires on wet pavement. Outside, an object "came straight down from the air, just like an elevator." It hovered about a foot above his driveway.

It looked like two bowls, one inverted over the other, with exhaust pipes along one edge, about 30 feet across, silvery and "brighter than chrome." A hatch opened "just like the trunk of your car." Inside were three men, about 5 feet tall, dark haired and clean shaven. They wore dark knit clothing with turtleneck tops and helmet-like caps. None of them spoke.

One held up a silver jug with two handles and gestured for water. Simonton filled it. When he came back, one of the men was cooking on a flameless grill. Simonton gestured that he would like some and was handed small, hot, greasy cakes about 3 inches across, dotted with holes. He ate one: "If that was their food, God help 'em... it tasted like a piece of cardboard."

After about five minutes the craft rose some 20 feet. It tilted at 45 degrees and shot off to the south. "Within two to three seconds it was out of sight." Its wake tossed the tops of nearby pine trees.

Simonton gave pancakes to Vilas County Judge Frank W. Carter, a NICAP member; Carter mailed one to NICAP on April 21. NICAP secretary Richard Hall was wary of the story's "ludicrous nature", and the group declined to get involved. Another cake went through the Air Force to the Food and Drug Laboratory of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. APRO called it "one of the most controversial cases we have ever investigated." Meanwhile insurance agent Savino Borgo told the Milwaukee Sentinel he had seen a metallic disc rise diagonally near Highway 70.

April 26. J. Allen Hynek arrived for Project Blue Book with Major Robert Friend. Hynek found Simonton sincere. "There is no doubt that Mr. Simonton felt that his contact was a real experience."

The laboratory found fat, starch, buckwheat hulls, wheat bran and soybean hulls. Its verdict was "an ordinary pancake made predominantly of buckwheat", "of terrestrial origin." The Blue Book record card went further. Simonton, it said, "suffered a hallucination followed by delusion."

Sceptics point to a dream, a hallucination while he cooked his own pancakes, or invention; no clear motive has been established. Simonton gained nothing and often wished he had never come forward. Jacques Vallée saw something older. In Passport to Magonia (1969) he set the cakes' reported lack of salt beside the Celtic belief that "the Gentry never taste anything salt." Vallée also tied the buckwheat to a Breton legend of cave-dwelling "fions" who gave a poor woman buckwheat cakes.

Hynek's own view shifted. He revisited the case with Vallée in The Edge of Reality (1975), and in 1978 said he gave it "more credence now." Simonton appeared on BBC1 in 1968. In 2023 a pancake fragment was reported to be held by the National Museum of the United States Air Force. The Center for UFO Studies keeps the case files, alongside Jerome Clark's article "The Pancakes of Eagle River."