ROSWELL AND PIEDMONT SHARE FAME FROM UFOs

UFOs were everywhere during the summer of 1947.

They were reported in Roswell, N.M., where the 50th anniversary of the famous "Roswell incident" -- the alleged crash of a UFO and recovery of alien bodies -- is being observed beginning Tuesday with a festival called UFO Encounter '97, and in Washington state. There, pilot Kenneth Arnold told reporters he'd seen objects in the air between Mount Rainier and Mount Adams that acted like saucers skipping across a lake.

The flying saucer was born.

That was June 24. The next day, nine objects were seen over Kansas City, and over the next two weeks sightings were reported in New York state, Colorado, Oklahoma and New Mexico.

On July 7, 1947, the Southeast Missourian reported the sighting of a "flying saucer" over Cape Girardeau.

"The `saucer,' which appeared to be about 6 or 8 inches in diameter, was seen high in the air over West Broadway, near the intersection of Lacy Street, headed for the northeast," the report read.

The unnamed observer said the UFO was above the treetops and could be seen only for a space of 6 feet, then disappeared completely.

"The disc gave off an appearance similar to that of the reflection off an aluminum pan," the newspaper reported.

That dusk sighting may have been the sole report of a UFO locally until 1973, the year the town of Piedmont entered UFO lore. In February that year, Clearwater High School basketball coach Reggie Bone and his team saw some strange lights while driving south of town.

Soon the police chief, high school teachers and many other people in Piedmont had seen something similar.

"There's no doubt there's something up there," Police Chief Gene Beardon told the newspaper. "We just don't know what it is."

By the end of that summer, the citizens of Piedmont who hadn't had a UFO experience were in the minority.

One of those was Kim Gibson, now a reporter at the Wayne County Journal Banner in Piedmont. She was only 10 or 11 then but recalls those days. "I can remember everyone being real excited about it. People were going where the reports were and waiting for hours."

Gibson went out looking with her parents once, but they didn't see anything.

Kathy Keith, then a few years married, did see something. "They were lights in the sky. I don't know what they were. They acted very weird," she says.

Keith and her girlfriends often went to a location known as Dump Hill. The city dump site offers a good view of the countryside and sky.

She also saw several lights along a strip of highway in an area called Brushy Creek. "They were just lights in the sky. There was no pattern. They would go parallel with you for awhile, then take off."

Traffic in the town of 2,000 was heavy that summer, Keith said. "We had all kinds of sightseers."

People weren't afraid of the lights themselves, she said, but added, "You picked and chose who you talked to. Some people thought the rest of us were crazy."

Iona Wallis went to the city dump to look for the lights but she's not saying whether she saw any lights. "We THOUGHT we did. I'm not going to say for sure."

Since then, people in Piedmont haven't seen anything like those lights Wallis might or might not have seen in 1973. "They don't say anything about it if they do," she says.

Dr. Harley Rutledge, then chairman of the physics department at Southeast Missouri State University, undertook an investigation of the Piedmont lights. Dubbed Project Identification, the research attempted to make a scientific analysis of the sightings. The findings were published in a book, "Project Identification: The First Scientific Field Study of UFO Phenomena."

Now retired, Rutledge has made 174 UFO sightings himself. He accepts the existence of UFOs and thinks something the government wanted to hide happened at Roswell. "I have to believe," he says.

Rutledge finds laughable the Air Force's recent contention the "bodies" found at Roswell were dummies used in parachute tests.

"I don't think anybody believes that," he said.

Folks in Piedmont sound glad Roswell is getting some of the attention they got in 1973.

"It was kind of an exciting time," Keith said, "but I wouldn't want to go through it again."