Twin Falls saucer hoax

Summer 1947. Kenneth Arnold's sighting on June 24 had set off a national wave of flying disc reports. Idaho's Magic Valley had its share. On July 1 a forest ranger and a companion reported eight to ten discs in a V-formation over Galena Summit. "It wasn't anything like an airplane," said witness Walter Nicholson. Around July 4, about 60 picnickers at Twin Falls reported 35 discs, changing shape. It was the largest number reported anywhere in the country at the time.

Then, on July 8, came the announcement from Roswell, New Mexico. A disc had been recovered.

In the small hours of Friday, July 11, residents of Twin Falls heard a thud at about 2:30 a.m. They put it down to a truck.

At 8:20 a.m., Mrs. Fred Easterbrook found it in the yard of her neighbors, the T. H. Thompson residence. A crashed flying saucer with glistening sides of silver and gold. Two narrow strips of turf on the Thompson lawn were torn up, apparently from when the disc had crashed.

It measured 30½ inches across. It looked like two band cymbals put together. A metal dome sat on one side. On the other rose a Plexiglas dome about 14 inches high. The Deseret News described what lay within: "Inside the plastic dome are three silver painted radio tubes with wires attached to what appears to be an electro-magnetic coil on the outside." Stove bolts held it together. It looked machine made.

Twin Falls police took the disc into custody. An FBI agent inspected it and notified the Butte, Montana field office. There, Special Agent in Charge Guy Banister reported the find to the Army at Fort Douglas, Utah. A party of two lieutenant colonels, two first lieutenants and one civilian came to examine it, and officials "clamped down a lid of secrecy pending the outcome of further investigation." The disc was taken to Salt Lake City. As the Lewiston Daily Tribune put it, the FBI, army intelligence and local police "spent a dizzy day trying to figure out their gadget."

Assistant Police Chief L. D. McCracken was tipped that one of the boys knew something about the case. By evening four boys, aged 15 to 16, admitted it was "all a joke." They had spent two days building it from radio tubes, wires, an old phonograph and discarded electrical parts. Their names were withheld. There was no court action. One detail never settled. A Salt Lake City paper quoted officials saying the boys planted the disc in the yard of Mrs Thompson at 10:30pm Thursday night, hours before the thud.

On July 12 newspapers nationwide ran an Army photo of a captain holding the disc. It has been called the "coup de grâce" of the 1947 coverage. After it, press accounts rapidly fell off. Despite worldwide coverage, the case does not appear in the Project Blue Book files. Neither does Roswell.

Decades later, Banister returned to the story. In the late 1960s, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison accused him, by then dead, of involvement in the JFK assassination. Writers Kenn Thomas, Nick Redfern and Peter Levenda later wove Twin Falls and the Maury Island case, both touched by Banister, into UFO and JFK conspiracy theories. Kevin D. Randle revisited the case in Crash: When UFOs Fall From the Sky.