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Monon RR Incident (Kirklin, Indiana, 1958)

BS3

BS3

Abominable Showman
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In the early hours of October 3, 1958 the crew of a Monon RR freight train in rural Indiana reported a group of UFOs - large, elliptical lights, which occasionally varied in colour and brightness - pacing, and occasionally passing over, their train, for over an hour. The usual optical illusions seem to be ruled out by the movement of the objects around and over the train during the sighting but...who knows.

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This is one that, like Levelland the year before, I've always classed as 'puzzling' given its duration and the apparent interaction of the whatever-it-was with the train on which the witnesses were travelling. Though you'll find it in a few compendiums of 1950s cases it didn't get investigated by the Air Force (there is a Blue Book file, but it's mainly clippings or correspondence) or much newspaper publicity. Maybe another one hinting at a yet-to-be-described plasma phenomenon?

There is a reasonable summary of the morning's events on the website of the Monroe County History Center here. The railway line itself is now closed and lifted, but from the account given a couple of locations can be identified: the crossroads called "Wasco" is presumably Owasco, and the train was travelling south through Kirklin.

Problems? I suppose the main one is the usual issue of the case coming through a single investigator (Frank Edwards, in this case) but James McDonald, who rated the case quite highly, was able to reinterview three out of five of the traincrew and couldn't find any issue with their accounts.

1958-era Monon freight train added below, for reference.

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As for proposed explanations - well, there's been pretty much nothing, although the indefatigable Larry Robinson has suggested that it was possibly seagulls following the train.
 
Are there gulls in Indiana? Maybe from the Great Lakes?
Gulls can show up in daylight as brilliant white against dark clouds and change colour or vanish as they circle. I thought I saw two UFOs in daylight once but realised they were gulls.

Would there have been enough light for gulls to show up at 3.20am though. Even in bright moonlight it seems unlikely they would appear as described in the Monroe County History Center report. The moon was about 92% illuminated on the 3rd of October 1958 but I had trouble trying to change the settings in Stellarium so I'm not sure where it would have been in the sky at that location and time.
 
I've seen the 'gulls reflecting streetlamp' effect at night and it's quite convincing at giving the impression of streetlamp-coloured elliptical 'objects'.

The question is it doesn't fit with every aspect of the men's accounts - particularly as they are out in the sticks with few lights around other than those on their train. Here's Cecil Bridge:

"They lit up twice (as described above). First number one would light up, then number two and so on. They did that twice as they went past us traveling in the opposite direction. We noticed, too, that their colour changed. When they first lit up they were bright white but when they slowed down the colour changed to a kind of yellow, then to orange when they went real slow – a kind of dirty orange.”

Ed Robinson:

"Then they swung off away from the tracks and went fast – very fast – to the east. When they picked up speed their light got a lot brighter. They got real bright and white – like stars, but a lot bigger and moving very fast.”

The latter in particular doesn't really match my own observations of seagulls reflecting lights.

I suppose it hinges, as ever, on whether the witnesses' accounts are accurate and whether Frank Edwards 'edited' or improved their accounts in any way.
 
Expanding on the latter point, there's a common issue with old UFO reports, even the better ones, that we're reliant on just one source.

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Here, it's Edwards and the article he wrote for Fate magazine. The full thing can be found in the Blue Book file, available via NICAP.

http://www.nicap.org/docs/581003wasco_docs.pdf

Amongst other things the Fate article suggests the UFOs were also reported by other witnesses at Danville and Kokomo. But frustratingly this isn't an 'investigation' as such, more a relation of what the witnesses said happened, so we don't get any attempt to try to tie these other sightings to times / locations of the railway sightings (particularly as neither Danville nor Kokomo are particularly close to the route of the train).

And nearly all other accounts are simply copying Edwards; you can see this because they have the sighting starting near "Wasco", when it's actually called "Owasco" - clearly an error by Edwards.

Now in this case McDonald did interview three of the witnesses - this is one of the good things about McDonald's work, that he always went back and spoke to the actual witnesses where possible, even years later. Unfortunately I can't see that these interviews have ever been published, though his papers seem to include a file on the incident so I suppose the notes are in there.
 
A bit more information that Edwards did not record:

Weather records for Indianapolis show that it was dry but 'mostly cloudy' at 3am, becoming 'partly cloudy' by an hour later, so there might not have been much in the way of moonlight. The wind was from the northeast and very light (3mph).
 
I did wonder whether there was any military facility in the area and the lights were searchlights on the clouds but the sighting is supposed to have lasted 70 minutes and the train was in motion.
 
Erinaceus said:
I did wonder whether there was any military facility in the area and the lights were searchlights on the clouds but the sighting is supposed to have lasted 70 minutes and the train was in motion.
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I did think about that and the closest was what is now called Grissom Joint Air Reseve Base, and was then Bunker Hill AFB. This isn't too far to the east of the sighting area (25-30 miles or thereabouts)

To me the only thing that might be able to replicate what was seen would perhaps be lights (by which I mean large spotlights of some sort) attached to a helicopter. 1958 era helicopters were extremely noisy, however - quite apart from the question of why the Air Force would do this.
 
BS3 said:
I did think about that and the closest was what is now called Grissom Joint Air Reseve Base, and was then Bunker Hill AFB. This isn't too far to the east of the sighting area (25-30 miles or thereabouts)

To me the only thing that might be able to replicate what was seen would perhaps be lights (by which I mean large spotlights of some sort) attached to a helicopter. 1958 era helicopters were extremely noisy, however - quite apart from the question of why the Air Force would do this.
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'Indiana State Police' - [Aircraft continued to be utilized throughout the 1950’s as the Aviation Section continued to grow and helicopters were introduced into the air fleet.]
 
Paul_Exeter said:
With credible and consistent multi-witness testimonies that "they" were seemingly under intelligent control
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The most interesting bit of that is the conductor's assertion that shining a powerful torch beam at the lights caused them to jump out of the beam and then scatter: "They acted like they didn’t care for that light at all". To me this seems almost like the behaviour of living organisms as much as anything, whether birds or something else.

There is something about the description of the lights that does remind me of other sightings of the period - the fluorescent-type appearance, the "fuzzy" edges to the lights, the colour apparently changing with motion. I've no clue as to what all of this might mean though.
 
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The sighting area, via Google Maps (scale at bottom). As you can see it's all empty, mostly flat farming country even now.

I've put a marker on the site of Owasco; the line, or these days its former route, then proceeds SSE, a bit to the East of present day route 421, as far as Frankfort. It was at this point Robinson thought he could see the objects as "sparks or lights" settled on the ground about a mile up the line while they shunted. Finally the line heads rather more directly SE to Kirklin, where the objects disappeared.

It would have been useful if Edwards had tried to establish at exactly what points on this map the various phases of the event (eg the objects crossing the train; the torch beam etc) happened, but never mind.

One of the more interesting aspects of this report is that the train route, in theory, gives an indication that for once the reported duration of the sighting is probably accurate.
 
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Having said that, you'd think such a dramatic auroral display would have been noticed elsewhere?

One thing it would have been good to establish is whether there was actual cloud cover. As I mentioned a couple of posts back, the weather records from Indianapolis suggest there was a fair bit of cloud cover, but the type of cloud / levels / thickness etc isn't immediately apparent.
 
I don't suppose many people were out at that time of day and if there was cloud cover the chances of seeing anything would be lessened. Sunrise at Kirklin was at 8.07am on October 8th so the sky would have been dark enough to see the aurora.
 
It was October 3rd (confirmed by NICAP) - the date on that drawing is wrong
 
Ah yes, I took the date from the one place it was wrong!
I suppose the lights evading the flashlight beam could have just been misinterpreted flickerings of the aurora, if that's what it was, but the behaviour described overall sounds like something more was happening.
 
Having checked it doesn't seem as if there are any meteor showers that would have peaked on or around that date either.
 
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