Bizarre Lights Over Iowa!

File: UFO329

10-12-89 EXLINE, Iowa Carol Drake says she was skeptical about Unidentified Flying objects until she spotted bright reddish lights in the early evening sky. "I wish somebody would give me a logical explanation so people would stop teasing me," Mrs. Drake, 48, a farmer near Exline, said Thursday.

The Iowa sighting coincided with two other reports of unidentified lights to the UFO Reporting Center in Seattle. "We'd reports from Lexington, Ky., and Topeka, Kan., about a group of lights at very high altitude," said Robert Gribble, director of the center. "We don't have any explanation. Everybody's looking at the sky after the Soviet report."

The Soviet news agency Tass reported this week that citizens there saw aliens with tiny heads and large bodies. "Usually I just get a chuckle when I hear reports about UFO," Mrs. Drake said by telephone. "I've been getting a chuckle out of the Russian story. The little kid in me wants to believe there are such things, but I think it's not sensible. "I did not see any people nine to 12 feet tall, or whatever the Russians saw." Mrs. Drake was one of many people who saw the lights early Wednesday evening near Exline, 60 miles southeast of Des Moines and only a few miles north of the Missouri border. She said a visitor to her house saw the same thing as did her daughter, who lives several miles away.

"I got her on the phone and said, `Would you run outside and see if you can see any flying saucers, or whatever it is.' She was gone for quite a while and then came back and said, `That's bizarre.'" Mrs. Drake said the two lights changed colors, first reddish and then changing to mostly yellow, and were like bright headlights in the distance. It wasn't bright enough to create light on the ground, however, and it wasn't too bright to look at, she said. She said the lights neither blinked nor made any sound and they were far above the horizon, thus ruling out lights on farm machinery. She said she could see transcontinental jets in the night sky but that their blinking lights were minuscule compared to the unidentified lights. The lights moved independently of each other, she said, and frightened her when they moved directly over her house. "I'm sure there's a logical explanation for it," she said.

Although the lights appeared to be high in the sky, the source was apparently close to her farm, she said, since she reported the lights to be east of her house at the same time her daughter several miles away saw them to the north. Mrs. Drake said she was alone at the time but that a visitor, John Heubner of Fairfield, stopped by and saw the same thing. Heubner's wife, Pat Heubner, said her husband called her Wednesday night and was breathless. "He was so excited. Now I believe in UFOs, but I don't think he did until now," Mrs. Heubner said. Heubner could not be reached for comment.

Another person who saw the lights was David Foster of rural Exline. "There were two lights in the sky, then they separated and one went off," he told radio station KBIZ in Ottumwa. He said the lights were too high in the sky to be mistaken for farm machinery. The Appanoose County sheriff's office in Centerville said nobody but the media called about the mysterious lights.