Since 1947 there have been hundreds of UFO sightings in North Dakota. Some of them seem “too good to be true,” while reports of others appear to have merit.
Approximately 40 years ago, there was a report of a mother and daughter who were abducted by a UFO near Tower City. The news cycle came and went, but the content stuck with people for a long time.
The source is no longer available and my memory isn’t good enough to recall where it originated. But I’ve thought about that report often, especially when I’m traveling along a North Dakota highway in the middle of the night.
Could it be true? Of course it could be. But we’ll never really know, unless of course, we personally know the people who were allegedly abducted.
This report came along roughly 20 years after the famous Betty and Barney Hill abduction in New Hampshire in 1961. It’s also possible that this Tower City incident is a copycat report that waited a long time to be told.
Reader’s Digest had a story in the late 1960s about some UFOs sighted over Bismarck and that two fighter jets were dispatched from Minot Air Force Base to chase them. There was never a follow up report.
A Minot Air Force Base pilot reported a UFO while in flight. That one was reported to the authorities and is near impossible to deny because it was spotted on radar just as the pilot radioed in the phenomenon.
We’ve had previous articles about a Border Patrol agent who saw a UFO at Donnybrook, sketched it out as he watched it and reported it to Minot AFB. I’ve often wondered how believable it would have been had it been a farmer or teenager, but because it was a Border Patrol agent, Project Blue Book was brought in to investigate.
One of the only civilians affiliated with Project Blue Book came to Donnybrook in 1966 and investigated the spot where that UFO allegedly landed. Not only has this man written books, he was a professor of astronomy at Northwestern University in Chicago. He worked at Johns Hopkins Physics Laboratory and he taught at Ohio State University.
So the result of the Donnybrook sighting is still a mystery, even though it was well documented. The why and who have never been revealed.
There have literally been hundreds of sightings over the years. Kulm, Kenmare, Grand Forks, Williston, Hebron, Hannaford, Wilton, Larimore and Cavalier have had sightings. But that’s just it, they were sightings and nothing more was done about them.
If you get down into the weeds with this phenomenon, most of the UFO sightings reported over North Dakota happened near Minot and Grand Forks Air Force bases. Could this be coincidental?
As most of us who have lived here for any length of time know, both Air Force bases had nuclear missiles and there was a vast missile field that stretched from Cavalier all the way out to Cheyenne, Wyo., and half way across Montana.
When a report like this surfaces, we will always hear the obvious; swamp gas, weather balloons, secret military aircraft. Exactly what is swamp gas? I grew up near a swamp and as a young adult lived near one in LaMoure County. I’ve never seen such a thing, nor can I explain it physically.
Those of us who are curious, would prefer to learn the science of it; the physics, the propulsion, the guidance. We probably never will, but those of us in the civilian world don’t really know what is in Project Blue Book. It’s been closed for a number of years and is now buried deep in history.
When we’re on this subject, we must also consider that weird things happen in nature sometimes that aren’t swamp gas. For instance, some of us have seen unusual lights during a meteor shower. What could that be, a satellite, an odd meteor, a UFO a Soviet aircraft? A UFO crashed near Roswell, N.M., in 1947. What don’t we know about that? And then, there are the livestock that get spooked when someone sees a UFO. Some of them end up with weird markings on their bodies.
There were actually a slew of reports in 1947. Mount Ranier, Yakima and Bellingham, Wash., Topeka, Kan., Oklahoma City and Pendleton, Ore. There were numerous sightings in North Dakota that included Grand Forks, Manvel and Woodworth. Grand Forks became a hot spot for sightings in the summer of ’47.
