The Mongo UFO Investigation

By David Bain

 

 

Amish UFOs? Aliens at the flea market? Top secret military experiments in clandestine compounds under the general store? Men in black tromping through the fish and wildlife preserve?

 

And all this – or something very like it – in a town called Mongo? It sounds like a comedy by Mel Brooks – who did indeed feature a muscle-bound, dimwit villain named Mongo in Blazing Saddles, his Western farce.

 

But then again, Mongo is also the name of the far-flung planet ruled by Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon....

A cool cosmic coincidence? A preternatural pun by a celestial comic?

Or was the Mongo UFO simply a misidentified blimp?

 

Under any circumstances, tucked into the northeastern corner of the state, LaGrange County, Indiana, and Mongo, one of its easternmost towns, with their copious bean and corn fields, are the antithesis to Roswell’s dusty desert environs – nary a natural cactus to be seen amongst the fecund foliage – but they hold a surprisingly prominent rank in U.F.O. enthusiasts’ pantheon of holy places.

 

So why isn’t LaGrange County more prominent on the supernatural map? There may be a clue in the fact that, translated from the French, “LaGrange” means, literally, “the farm.” There are only 30,000 people in the entire county, most of them somehow connected to agriculture. Not exactly the first stop on your next scheduled vacation.

 

In fact, most outsiders drive through the county without even knowing it – if they stop at all, it’s at the Fazoli’s at the rest stop at mile marker 108 along the Indiana Toll Road. To the average toll road motorist, the county is simply more blank green fields and forest as the toll road stretches mind-numbingly toward Illinois, most of its length just a mile or so south of the Michigan border. Those who actually know they’re visiting the county are bargain hunters, usually within driving distance, descending upon the town of Shipshewana, which features one of the country’s larges flea markets. The Shipshewana tourists are sometimes tempted to drive the back roads of the rural area, exploring the country’s third-largest Amish settlement. But once you get past the country kitsch, the county’s main draw is to local, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio hunters, fishermen – and perhaps aliens or the pilots of covert experimental military aircraft.

 

The attraction? LaGrange County’s vast rural miles of … well, vast rural miles and miles.

 

***

 

Wednesday, August 31st, 1994, shortly after 8:30 p.m. The smell of wood smoke, grass and pine. A campfire crackles under a clear, moonless sky which has begun to fill with stars. Illuminated in its orange glow are six men, all age 45 and up, among them a retired state trooper, a firefighter and two employees of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.  The group has three dogs with them; worn out from the day’s adventures, the dogs are curled up and dozing at their feet in the warmth of the fire. One of the men has brought along a camera and is recording the fun around the campfire, taking numerous photos of his rowdy friends during the day along with copious nature shots.

 

The men have spent the day canoeing and wandering the endless acres of the Pigeon River Fish and Wildlife Preserve, in which one can travel for miles and hear little but catbirds mewling in the trees. Every now and then the sound of an airplane might interrupt the crickets and the sound of the wind through the swampy reeds, but even that’s rare. If you’re in the right area, the rushing waters of the chain of dams which run through the preserve can be heard.

 

One of the men points off toward the southwest, through the stand of firs, maple, oak and sumac. “Is that where the moon should be tonight?”

 

The brilliant white glow is close to the horizon, visible only through the leaves and needles and limbs of the trees.

One of the men, who later wishes to identify himself only as JK, says, “That can’t be the moon … we’re in the new phase.”

He speaks the truth: the night will be lit only by the stars; there will be no moon tonight.

 

The men rise from their seats, taking interest now. They peer through the trees, through the limbs and thick foliage which is swaying with the slight, warm summer night breeze, trying to make out the source of the false moonglow.

 

“Is that a meteor?” asks one camper.

 

“Damn bright for a meteor,” says another.

 

They watch for a brief moment, no more than a single minute. The only sounds are crickets chirruping and the camper’s own mumbled questions as to the nature of the lightsource.

 

Then the light does the last thing the group expects it to.

It moves.

And it moves in the last direction they would expect – straight up, appearing to grow slightly.

 

“That’s no meteor.”

 

The glowing oblong thing starts to float up toward the skyline just over tops of the trees, its light casting straight luminescent beams, twisting in long shadows around the maze of tree limbs as it rises.

 

The object rises up over the treetops. As the Frisbee-shaped entity – it is clearly disc-shaped – now moves forward toward the group, over an open area and a campground road, there is still no sound emanating from it, no electric hum, no engine purr, nothing. The silence fills the group’s ears louder than any whirling helicopter blades might. The dozing dogs do not react in any way during the event. The grass beneath the craft – for all but one of the group will, after the event, believe it was a craft – is still; it shows no indication of an aeronautical object above it.

 

The disc tilts slightly now, dipping at a shallow angle and moving forward directly toward the men.

 

The white light coming from the object has appeared solid until now, but as the flying saucer – “It was a flying saucer, just that vivid,” JK said – hovers near the men, the light becomes transparent. It appears to be something like a strobe light on the top of the dome.

 

JK asks his friend with the camera to take pictures. The man fumbles with the camera but starts taking quick frames. The group is standing near a stand of trees and many of the pictures are distorted due to his use of a flash, resulting in leaves in the foreground. Four of the pictures, however, will become what aficionados and photographic experts consider some of the most compelling evidence of UFOs to date.

 

Then it’s as if the object was observing the campers – and suddenly loses interest. A bright red light flashes – once again, like a strobe – on the underside of the disk, and the object rushes off to the south and east, literally almost as fast as lightning. It is off and gone within two seconds.

 

***

           

The campers were not the only witnesses to the Mongo UFO on that final day of August in 1994. In the morning the campers spoke to two hunters who had been driving about a half-mile south of Mongo at approximately the same time as their sighting. The campers saw a bright white object moving at a high rate of speed toward the east.

 

Old newspaper accounts also report that an area family, recorded only as “The Martins,” reported a similar object to 911 at about the same time that night.

 

About fifteen minutes after the campers made their sighting, a family in Hamilton, Indiana, about 20 miles southeast of Mongo, filmed some shaky video of an object in the sky which investigators say appears to be large, bright, less than 100 feet away and pear-shaped.

 

During their follow-up investigation, police learn that The Family Channel had a blimp in the area. JK, who actually saw the blimp the next day, says, however, “There’s no way in hell we saw a blimp.” The Martins have similar feelings about the event, according to police.

 

There are many other arguments against the object being a blimp.

 

First of all is the absence of sound. Blimps require an engine, and the campers would have heard it even at a distance of 2,000 to 3,000 feet on a calm night with the atmospheric conditions of that date, according to investigators.

 

There is also the shape of the object in the campers’ photographs. The photos were taken with a Vivitar fully automatic 35mm camera with a standard lens, not telephoto. The film used was color ASA 400 speed. The photographer was a firefighter and professional photographer who had recently used the camera while fighting large fires out West. “The photos were impressive said Dr. Richard Haynes, one of the principal investigators. “Although the images were small and taken at night, one photo looked very much like the famous Trinidad Island photo.”

 

Investigators from the Indiana chapter of MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) and other organizations compared the images of the unidentified flying object in the photo to images previously determined to be blimps. While there were some similarities, the differences precluded the object being a blimp. Most importantly, investigators determined that a blimp would have to have been about four miles away in order to appear the size it did in the photographs.

 

The investigators also argue that, while the object appears to take the “fried egg” shape of many traditional U.F.O. photographs, a blimp would not have the protuberance at the top. Furthermore, none of the witnesses report – and none of the photographs show – a gondola under the object, one of the hallmarks of blimps. Most blimps also have opaque structural tips at either end – again, the photographs and the witnesses do not provide evidence of any such structures.

 

And then there is the reported speed of the object. Never mind that it appeared to hover in the air at several points, investigators say that when the object did move, it would have been moving at either the maximum speed of a blimp or beyond. This is, of course, not considering the surreal speed with which the U.F.O. was reported to have left the scene.

 

Investigators looked into all published flight records for the area. Other than the possible but highly unlikely blimp, all advertising, commercial, military, and private aircraft were eliminated, as were weather balloon, fixed structure and the possibility of hoax being perpetrated either on the witness or by the witnesses.

 

***

Researchers worked for more than a year looking into this project, and a curious thing occurred in the investigations – the mail between investigators and witnesses or other investigators seemed, at various points, to take an extra long time – up to two weeks for an ordinary envelope – causing Haynes to ask in his final report, “Was our mail really being tampered with, or is this simply the U.S. Postal Service?”

 

***

So is the August 1994 Mongo U.F.O. sighting only an isolated incident?

 

Not according to MUFON’s Indiana chapter, which reports that, as of early April, 2007, the skies over northern central Indiana (a bit to the west of Mongo) had been fairly quiet, but have since broken out with a rash of UFO sightings, at least nine being reported in April and May alone.

 

 And also not according to LaGrange County resident Stan Shatto, a U.F.O. enthusiast and previously the owner of Give Me Space in the town of LaGrange, about eight miles from Mongo, a store specializing in science fiction and fantasy memorabilia.

 

“There’s definitely something going on in LaGrange County,” he said. “There’s no question there’s more than your usual amount of activity around here. The Mongo incident is the one you always hear about, but that’s because it was really reliable witnesses and some pretty good evidence. Ask around. There are other reliable witnesses – I know an ambulance driver who almost crashed because of something he saw while on a run. But who wants to get involved? Who’s willing to report something as nebulous as an unusual light in the sky? Who wants to be known for something they can’t prove they ever really saw?”

 

Reprinted with permission from Withersin Magazine v1i2