These stories about flying saucers just don’t seem to go away. People continue to talk about seeing them or evidence of them all over North Dakota.

Numerous people continue to tell me about their experiences with UFOs. They tell me in confidence because they don’t want to be ridiculed. The thing is, these people, many of them in their 70s and 80s, have seen some strange things in the sky, or bizarre evidence that UFOs landed.

I’ve covered this topic from time to time. Several years ago information about UFOs was declassified and as it turned out, a Border Patrol agent at Donnybrook saw a UFO on his way to work and made drawings of it.
Others are farmers and farm wives, who in my opinion, are just as credible as a Border Patrol agent, except that he produced tangible proof of what he saw.

Most others have their memory. But, as psychologists tell us, our brains have a way of remembering trauma, no matter how long ago may have been.

Case in point, I was visiting with an elderly couple just last week and they were telling me they discovered a burn mark in their Mountrail County pasture sometime in 1977 that was perfectly round. And, it had smaller spots, presumably where its “feet” were positioned.

The grass was fried to a crackly crunch inside the circle and the couple told me that nothing, not even the hardiest weeds, grew there for seven years.

Another situation is when a man in his 70s as about to take a bath when he heard his dog growling loudly outside a sliding glass door. He said the dog never growled that way, even if he’d seen a coyote or porcupine.

The man looked out the door to see why the dog was so wound up and he saw a lime-green light in the sky over his house near Hazen. He couldn’t explain it, but he watched it for several minutes and poof, it disappeared.
Still another story comes from an elderly lady who was a child near Kenmare when her family saw a UFO while driving down a gravel road in the 1950s. She said her father took notes of the experience, but tried to keep the children calm.

As she described it, this object was hovering above the road ahead of the car not more than 30 feet and kept pace with their sedan as it drove down the road. And, like in the previous case, after about 5 minutes, the object simply disappeared.
Since the missile fields were established across the northern tier of North Dakota, numerous people, who were teenagers in the late ‘60s and well into the ‘70s, reported going to UFO parties. They gathered outside of town, away from city lights and watched the sky for unusual activity. Weird things were seen but not explained.

There have been some high profile cases coming out of both the Minot and Grand Forks Air Force bases over the years as well. In one of those cases, fighter jets were scrambled from Minot AFB to chase a UFO away from air space over Bismarck.
This case was documented in Reader’s Digest magazine.

And let’s not forget Project Blue Book, an Air Force program that was formed to positively identify unidentified flying objects. Thus, if you don’t believe the elderly people from earlier, here the Air Force has admitted UFOs exist or existed.
These stories keep popping up from time to time. And honestly, I’d like to hear more of them. I will always keep names and exact locations confidential because I think the phenomenon itself is much more relevant than the who and the what.
In connecting these dots, it’s obvious to me that parts of North Dakota have been a hot bed for UFO activity. Maybe not in recent years, but in the past 50 years, oh yes!