Piedmont, Missouri UFO Flap

Piedmont is a small town of about 2,000 residents in Wayne County, Missouri. Clearwater Lake, a reservoir on the Black River, lies about 6 miles away. Project Blue Book had closed in 1969.

Wednesday, February 21, 1973. Night. Reggie Bone, basketball coach at Clearwater High School, did not believe in UFOs. He and five of his players were heading home along Route 60 after a tournament in Dexter. In the tree line they saw a rotation of lights. Red, green, amber and white.

Further on, one of the boys spotted a light. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, near Brushy Creek, they stopped. The object was hovering about 200 yards away, some fifty feet up off the ground. "The lights were red, green, amber and white. And flashing," Bone told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "The lights were four or five feet apart." It was too dark to make out any size or shape. After about ten minutes it rose silently at an angle and disappeared over a ridge.

About thirty minutes later, Edith Boatwright at Mill Spring described something 30 feet long with a light-colored body and a quiet whooshing sound. Farmer Earl Turnbough saw a silent dome shape with an antenna on top. Carl Laxton watched a barrel-like object with protrusions tilt from vertical to horizontal, then move straight up. Photography teacher Maude Jefferies captured a reddish-yellow glowing ball in a 10-minute exposure.

March 21, 9 p.m. Jean Coleman and Cathy Leach saw a red flash on Clearwater Lake and got out of the car. A blinking red, white and yellow light rose out of the lake. "It was quiet, there was no sound and ... it had no shape." More than 500 sightings were reported within a month. The Daily American Republic wrote that "half the town had reported seeing something odd."

Local police, sheriffs and newspapers took the calls. Then, in April 1973, Dr Harley D. Rutledge began fieldwork. He chaired the physics department at Southeast Missouri State University and said he went in as a skeptic. "I didn't like the way the Piedmonters were being treated by the media, and I was disturbed that some of the people there were truly frightened."

With a $2,000 grant from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, his Project Identification took telescopes, cameras and spectrum analysers into the field. His team logged one light that seemed to climb vertically at about one mile per second. Rutledge published Project Identification in 1981 and presented his work at a MUFON Symposium in 1986.

Some debunkers blamed airplanes, satellites and helicopters. Others proposed aircraft warning lights, or lens flare in the Jefferies photo, which she rejected. Her selling prints for $25 each raised questions. Rutledge noted that "No navigation lights, no position lights, and no flashing strobe lights were seen." He also dismissed the weather and optical explanations associated with Donald Menzel. Yet he conceded that many UFOs could be explained as normal aircraft or atmospheric conditions. On extraterrestrials he said: "I don't have the facts to prove that." No hoax finding or confession has ever surfaced.

Rep. Chris Dinkins introduced HB 1261. The designation passed inside SB 139, and Gov. Mike Parson signed it in July 2023. Since August 28, 2023, Piedmont and Wayne County have been the "UFO Capitals of Missouri." A park with a 16-foot UFO and a 6-foot alien statue opened in June 2024. "People would come from miles and miles away ... to try to catch a glimpse," Dinkins said.