By Bob Weaver
"It was making maneuvers over the two Sycamores, going up and down,
end over end, right to left...very rapidly. It
was cigar-shaped, rounded on each end," recalled 92-year-old Bernard
McDonald of Mt. Zion. McDonald, a
former Calhoun teacher and farmer, who was 43 when the sighting occurred,
and is still blessed with a razor sharp
memory. Fifty years after the event, he sat down with Hur Herald and detailed the
story he has told to his family and neighbors over
the years. "I haven't seen anything like it since," he said.
McDonald was on his farm just south of the Mt. Zion
Church. He and Penny Burrows had just made the first cutting of hay,
unloading the hay wagon in mid-morning,
pulling it outside the barn. "We were hot and tired and just sat
down on the wagon to talk. We looked to the south
over Slabcamp, three miles or so away, or it could have been much
further," he recalled. "It was making
split-second maneuvers." Within seconds the object came directly
toward the McDonald Barn which had a fresh
coat of aluminum paint on the roof. "It went down behind the barn and
I went around to see it. I could hear this soft,
very finely tuned sound like the valves in a car engine. You had to be
pretty close to hear it." The object then
disappeared over the nearby brink of the hill and Mac followed it. "It
was halfway down the hill (maybe 150' to
200') and took off following a cow trail around to a gas well which
had also just been painted aluminum. It stopped
over the well head and hovered for a few seconds." It was here that he
got a good look at the object, which was
about 20 feet long and maybe four feet in diameter. It then took off
at a high speed, back toward its original
position, generally toward the Sand Ridge section. When Mac
returned to the hay wagon, Penny Burrows was
gone. Later in the day, Penny went to Kelly's Store to tell his
version of the sighting, still frightened. McDonald
remembers the grayish brown object as not having any other
distinguishing features. He said he would always
remember it's rapid speed, changing positions and quickly making right
and left angle turns. "I have thought about
it many times over the years, the power it would have taken to
maneuver it. It seemed like it was controlled by
magnets, " he concluded. Bob Burrows, Penny's son, said his father
often spoke of the event saying, "That flying
saucer, I wish I knew what it was." (NOTE: We tape recorded the interview with Mr. McDonald in the 1990s, and gave the tape to his family. We have a few more first
person accounts of Calhoun UFO's and
strange events which we will be publishing, nearly all from the
1950's-1997. |