Big Lake UFO sighting marks 46th anniversary in Council Bluffs

A red object falling out of the sky, a blue-white flash of light, something thin and round hovering above the treetops — these are some of the reports surrounding a decades-old Council Bluffs mystery that remains unsolved today.

On Dec. 17, 1977, reports of an object crashing to the ground in Big Lake Park led to questions from area residents. Sunday marks the 46-year anniversary of the strange incident, for which no certain explanation has ever been found.

Eleven independent witnesses confirmed the sighting, as well as the Council Bluffs police and fire departments.

The first reports of the sighting came from three teenagers who were on their way to the Richman Gordman store on North 16th Street, who say they saw a reddish object 500 to 600 feet in the air, falling straight down.

“It disappeared behind the trees of Big Lake Park, followed by a flash of bluish-white light and two ‘arms of fire’ shooting over 10 feet in the air, suggesting an impact,” Richard Warner wrote in an article on the mysterious UFO for the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County.

A young couple reported a “big round thin hovering in the sky below the treetops,” according to the society, while a third couple reported “a bright red object rocketing to the ground at Big Lake.”

Assistant Fire Chief Jack Moore was called to the scene by one of the couples, according to a Dec. 18, 1977 article from the Nonpareil. At the park, he found a 4-foot by 6-foot grassy area covered with a molten metal substance that was running and boiling down the edges of the levee near Gilbert’s Pond.

“I really don’t know what it is,” Moore told the Nonpareil. “The center of it was way too hot to touch” and the grass beneath the mass was burned.

Checks with Eppley Airfield and Offutt Air Force Base offered no leads. Offutt officials “didn’t seem terribly interested,” Moore said.

The Nonpareil’s longtime astronomy expert Bob Allen visited the scene on Dec. 18, 1977. When taking a look at the scene, he said it couldn’t have been a meteor, as there was no cratering where the metal landed.

That wasn’t the only sign that contributed to Allen’s assessment.

“The molten state of the material, if it did indeed fall from the sky, goes against the physics of a meteorite when it strikes the earth,” he wrote in his Star Gazing column in the Dec. 19, 1977, issue of Nonpareil.

Moore and Allen both harvested pieces of the mass, which were sent to a metallurgist for testing. After an analysis done by the local Griffin Pipe Products Company and review by Iowa State University, the metal was found to be a high-carbon steel that was common in manufacturing. At the time, two area foundries could produce that type of molten metal.

So it wasn’t a meteor, it was metal. But how did it get to Big Lake? The answer to that question is what remains unclear today.

While these stories are often the result of overproductive imaginations, what makes this incident unique is its very credible witnesses, Warner told the Nonpareil.

“There’s really only two possibilities — somebody either brought it there on the ground or something fell out of the sky,” he said.

When the first witnesses arrived on scene, minute after the impact, a small foreign car filled with four teenagers stopped and asked if they had seen something fall out of the sky, too.

One theory is that the teenagers dumped the metal, shooting off a flare to create the illusion of something falling to earth in some sort of elaborate prank.

“I’m at an impasse,” Warner said. “How would you transport something that hot?”

Rail cars would be able to transport molten metal. At the time, North Western tracks sat on one side of the park and Illinois Central rail ran the other, so the idea of an accidental dump from the railroads wouldn’t be impossible, Warner said.

«But, it would’ve been closer to the tracks and some sort of incident would’ve been reported,» Warner said.

In an interview with the Nonpareil, Warner said one man has even so much as admitted that he was involved in the hoax. He told Warner he and a buddy borrowed a thermite welder from Union Pacific to melt down manhole covers to impress some girls — though it did not.

“There’s a bunch of things that are concerning to me,” Warner said. “One, why would someone wait 45 years to admit this, and second, I wanted to confirm this was even possible.”

Warner believes there is more to the story, and he isn’t ready to rule the mystery solved just yet. He hopes to further interview his source at a later date.

Still, credible sources swear they saw something fall from the sky.

The UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico, has accumulated information on nine other incidents similar to the one in Council Bluffs.

Allen also raises doubt about the origin of the metal.

«I have checked with the only two foundry’s in Council Bluffs which have the expertise to produce molten metal in large volume,» Allen wrote in an article for the UFO Examiner shortly after the incident. «They both admit it would be possible to transport molten metal to the spot and dump it, but the ‘why’ seems to indicate the logistics of transporting the molten metal would be prohibitive.»

«After a thorough investigation of the impact area, I feel the object which fell there was a piece of debris from space and not a meteoric impact,» Allen wrote.