On Saturday, April 15, 1995, around 8 PM, Oliver Puppel of Newell, South Dakota, was traveling south on Highway 79 to Sturgis, South Dakota. He was going to meet a friend in Sturgis, which is about 22 miles south of Newell. The sun had gone down but it wasn't totally dark.
About three miles south of Newell, Oliver glanced to the left or east and saw what he initially thought was a building. The first thing that came to his mind was a grain elevator. It was about one half mile in distance from him. He knew there had never been a grain elevator there before. It was sitting on or was very close to the ground when Oliver first sighted the object. He only saw a faint outline of the shape.
The lights were what caught his attention. He saw five banks of lights up and down this object, three rows of lights in each bank. He was so close he could see the spacing in between the lights in each separate row. The banks of lights were evenly spaced on the object, the upper and lower banks were green, the second bank down and fourth bank down were blue and the middle bank was red. From the way the lights were oscillating, it gave Oliver the sense that the craft was cylinder shaped. He also feels that the lights were attached to the outside of the object, they were not built in.
Oliver estimates the object's width easily at 60 feet and at least twice that, 120 feet, in height. He described it as being huge.
Shortly after Oliver spotted the object, he pulled off to the side of the road, stopped and picked up his car phone to call his grandmother. Just as he was stopping, the object rose approximately 100 feet into the air, traveled slightly to the south and stopped straight across from his car door. It stayed straight up and down as it was moving. At this time it was still a half mile or closer to him. He called his grandmother and stayed on the car phone with her during the sighting, approximately 15 minutes according to the timer on his phone.
Oliver said there was no sound or vibration from the object, no exhaust, no flames, no smell. Shortly before the craft left, it moved closer to Oliver and stopped again. He stated that he was getting frightened at this point but stayed on the phone with his grandmother. He said he was also excited at the same time.
The green and blue lights at this time were not oscillating, they were steady. As it was sitting there, all of a sudden the green and blue lights shut off. The red one in the middle stayed on a few more seconds. The row in the middle of the three row bank was oscillating in a clockwise direction. Oliver said it appeared that there was only one light in this middle row that was oscillating; it would disappear for a second when it was, he assumed, in the back of the craft. The red light started to "decay," turning orange, then yellow as it was going around. After about 30 seconds the light turned bright yellow and stopped. He could still see the other banks of lights even though they were not on at this time.
The craft started going back, straight away from him, the yellow light getting smaller and smaller, disappearing into a low cloud on the horizon as a pin prick of yellow light. This took 10 seconds or less. A split second after it disappeared, he saw a brilliant burst of yellowish light within the cloud.
Oliver said that during his sighting, several people drove by but did not stop. He doesn't know how they could have not seen this object.
After the object was gone, Oliver continued on his way to Sturgis. When he arrived and stepped out of his car, his legs were rubbery. He could hardly walk, as he was very shaken. He said his eyes were also watering. But he was also so excited by this sighting that he went out the same night and bought film and put his camera in his car.
Original file name: .CNI - SD Sighting 6.12
This file was converted with TextToHTML - (c) Logic n.v.