UFOs keep getting shot down. Here are strange sightings from Evansville over the years

EVANSVILLE – Fighter pilots can barely go 24 hours these days without shooting down an unidentified flying object.

Ever since the U.S. Air Force downed a so-called Chinese spy balloon that meandered over Evansville during its cross-country trip earlier this month, President Joe Biden and other officials have issued multiple orders to shoot down other crafts that have encroached U.S. and Canadian air space.

The military shot down an object floating over Alaska on Friday. A day later, the North American Aerospace Defense Command dropped another craft over Canada’s Yukon Territory. That was followed by a similar incident in Northern Michigan on Sunday.

As of Monday morning, there hadn’t been any official explanations as to what the crafts might be. But any talk of “unidentified flying objects” naturally sparks thoughts of visitors from other planets, even if it's highly unlikely any of the crafts came from the far reaches of space.

In that spirit, here are just a few of the many UFO sightings to hit the Evansville area over the years.

More:The History Channel will cover an infamous Tri-State UFO encounter | Webb

An EPD officer reports strange lights

The latest high-profile sighting came two years ago on Feb. 1, 2021, when an EPD officer spotted a string of blinking white lights over the city’s South Side.

Officer Trendon D’mechi and his partner were parked at the intersection of Governor Street and Sweetser Avenue when they saw a parade of shimmering dots flash across the night sky. D’mechi quickly took out his phone and shot some quick video.

“My partner and I definitely felt uneasy after seeing the lights,” D’mechi told the Courier & Press in a Facebook message the next day.

They thought the little pearls, whatever they were, were hovering over the state line in Kentucky, so they bolted down to Marina Pointe to get a better look. By the time they arrived, the lights were gone.

“I was surprised that we didn't receive (any) calls,” he said. “Or if we did they weren't dispatched, since there would be nothing we could do about them.”

The mass reaction didn’t come until later, when EPD uploaded D’mechi’s video to its Facebook page. Several commenters wondered if the lights were Blackhawk helicopters or satellites. D’mechi himself hypothesized drones. But a spokeswoman for Evansville Regional Airport told the Courier & Press there weren’t any special aircraft over the city that evening.

The lights minorly resembled Space X Starlink satellites, but the ones over Evansville behaved differently.

In the end, no one determined for sure what D’mechi saw that night.

More:Evansville-area man once had a chilling close encounter with a UFO | Webb

UFOs across town – and a fake Bigfoot

Area law enforcement officers saw some weird things in the summer of 1978 as well. And it started with a homemade Bigfoot.

A resident was driving down Peerless Road just before midnight on Aug. 17 of that year when something terrifying – and bizarre – leaped into the glare of their headlights. According to the driver, they stared right into the eyes of a man in a gorilla suit.

The night only got weirder from there.

Dispatchers fielded three reports of UFOs that evening. The most colorful came on the North Side, where a 25-year-old Indiana Vocational Technical College-Southwest who lived near the airport was smoking a cigarette when he saw a triangle of red lights creeping across the sky.

At first, he assumed it was just an airplane. Then the triangle broke apart.

A West Sider reported a sighting around the same time, as did a Chandler police officer. All claimed to see the same thing: red lights that shone green as they departed. Almost as though they had taillights.

Dispatchers ultimately wrote off the reports. The public was just riled up, they said, since Southern Illinois residents had reported a rash of sightings the day before. They didn’t have an explanation for those, though.

The first ‘flying saucer’ sightings in Evansville

We may be in the midst of a UFO watershed right now. But it’s nothing compared to 1947.

That's the year an obsession with UFOs gripped the nation and never really let go. That summer brought the discovery of the supposed UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico – the mother of all alien stories – and an infamous sighting in Idaho that ushered the phrase "flying saucers" into the popular lexicon.

Right on schedule, people in Evansville started seeing saucers, too.

On July 8 of that year, about two weeks after the kerfuffle in Idaho, three pepole were sunbathing on the roof of the old Downtown Evansville YMCA around 1:30 when they saw what the Courier described as a “big red disk.”

“It was thought the disk might have been a weather balloon sent up by the weather bureau,” the Courier reported. But no balloon had been released that day.

Another sighting came a couple hours later. A man calling himself Bill Dorr called the Courier and told a reporter he’d been flying in a small plane with a man named Frank Long when six saucers – each about 15 feet long – swarmed their aircraft. He told the paper were ambling at about 10,000 feet near the airport when the “invasion” occurred.

Trouble was, the newspaper never could track down Bill Dorr again. And the only man in the phone book named Frank Long just laughed when a reporter called to relay the story.

“I’m quite sure if I did see any saucers today, there was a cup of coffee with them,” he said.

The latest reports

The National UFO Reporting Center fielded seven sightings from Evansville last year alone. They ranged from a “shimmery/metallic object (moving) at a high rate of speed” to a “very large orange sphere.”

And if the last few days are any indication, more strange incidents on are on the way.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: UFOs: Here are some strange sightings from Evansville over the years