The St. Clair County Police Triangle

Wednesday, 5 January 2000. The Metro East, the Illinois towns across the Mississippi from St. Louis. Shortly after 4:00 a.m., something began to cross the sky from northeast to southwest. Highland. Lebanon. Shiloh. Millstadt. Then Dupo, near the river. Scott Air Force Base sat inside that corridor.

Melvern Noll, 66, had stopped at his business in Highland to check that the pipes hadn't frozen. He saw "a flying house with windows on the top and bottom." Two to three stories high, he said, and the length of a football field, flying low toward the southwest. He called the police.

In Lebanon, Officer Ed Barton found it. A triangle "longer than it was wide." Three white lights and one red light, perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 feet up. The lights pointed downward but didn't light the ground. He drove toward it until it was nearly overhead. Then it "suddenly sped away." On the radio, a Lebanon officer was firm: "It's not the moon, and it's not a star."

A Shiloh officer radioed next. "I see something, but I don't know what the heck it is." Officer David Martin described an extra-wide triangle, 75 to 100 yards across, "floating in this sky over this field." His car windows were open. He heard nothing. Then it moved "in the snap of a finger, the wink of an eye."

Officer Craig Stevens of Millstadt, a former military police officer, watched it pass. An arrowhead, "concaved in the rear," with three lights at the tail and a white strobe sweeping side to side. "This object was above me about 500 feet. And it was huge." He heard only a faint buzz, like a power transformer. His Polaroid came out blurred by the cold, showing just three bright lights. At 5:03 a.m. in Dupo, Officer Matt Jany found it through binoculars, "pretty high."

A Millstadt officer called the hotline of the National Institute for Discovery Science about two hours after the sighting. NIDS interviewed eight witnesses. In July 2002 it proposed a Department of Defense "black program" aircraft, then stepped back from the idea in 2004. MUFON's Illinois director, David Marler, concluded that the timing and terrain fit a single tracked object. Darryl Barker obtained the county dispatch tapes through a FOIA request.

Scott AFB's answers did not line up. A spokeswoman said the only calls came from the media. The control tower was reportedly closed. Police were told there was "nothing on their radar." No official military investigation followed.

The FAA told Riverfront Times reporter William Stage it was an advertising blimp. In 2014 Brian Dunning of Skeptoid agreed. The route, the pace, the lights and the quiet all fit. "I couldn't find a single significant difference between the St. Clair object and an advertising blimp in transit." Yet no flight record has surfaced, and a blimp cannot explain the jumps of miles in seconds. Philip Klass suggested Venus, though he admitted he never interviewed the witnesses.

Discovery Channel aired UFO Over Illinois in November 2000. Barker's The Edge of Reality followed in 2001, with four officers on camera. In 2005 Sufjan Stevens opened his album Illinois with "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois." Today a "Confirmed UFO Sighting" marker stands outside Norm's Bargain Barn in Shiloh. The officers' question remains open.