Author's Note: Although updated monthly, this article was originally written
in August of 2002, shortly after a report was produced by the National
Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS) of Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, that
hypothesized that the mysterious black triangles are originating from
the United States Department of Defense. A recent report from NIDS,
published in August of 2004 has now reassessed this hypothesis and
brought once again into question, the source of the large, flying
triangles, with the following observation: "The behavior of these
Triangular aircraft does not conform to previous patterns of covert
deployment of unacknowledged aircraft"
Author's Note: Although updated monthly, this article was originally written in August of 2002, shortly after a report was produced by the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS) of Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, that hypothesized that the mysterious black triangles are originating from the United States Department of Defense. A recent report from NIDS, published in August of 2004 has now reassessed this hypothesis and brought once again into question, the source of the large, flying triangles, with the following observation: "The behavior of these Triangular aircraft does not conform to previous patterns of covert deployment of unacknowledged aircraft" See report at URL: http://www.nidsci.org/articles/8_25trireport.php . As you read the following analysis, bear in mind the context in which it was written in 2002, on the heels of wide publicity for the NIDS DOD hypothesis. D. Barker - 9/7/04The 10 year window for project disclosure often associated with government-funded R & D "Black Projects", has come and gone; yet, the U.S. government remains silent, not only in a blanket refusal to address this sighting, but moreso, in a failure to produce a physical aircraft that can match the flight characteristics of the January 5, 2000 Illinois UFO. That said, each day that now passes only adds to the case that the January 5, 2000 UFO over Illinois was not a military aircraft. And we all know where that leads.A Chinese fortune cookie once read, "Time is precious, but truth is more precious than time"; and so it appropriately goes in the case of the famous Illinois flying triangle sighting, sometimes called the "Illinois police sighting" or the Highland, Illinois UFO.*** Ultimately, it will likely be the passing of time that will one day illuminate the inevitable conclusion, whatever that may be.It�s now been more than twelve years since the sighting of a huge, unidentified triangular-shaped UFO by police officers and civilians in the early morning hours of January 5, 2000, over the state of Illinois. Since that time, the incident has been viewed by many as one of the most substantial UFO sightings in the history of the phenomenon, due almost entirely to the testimonials given by the law enforcement officers involved. Because of this, the sighting has also been targeted for critical and not-so-critical analysis by UFO investigative organizations, as well as the media and has sparked the curiosity of members of the United States government and the military. As a result of my involvement in the production of a documentary that details this UFO sighting, I have had the opportunity to correspond with some of the witnesses over a period of time and stay in touch with developments regarding the sighting. It has given me the opportunity to see how such an event impacts people�s lives, witnesses and non, and gives me cause to stand back and view the entire picture from what I hope to be a humanitarian perspective.April 8, 2004 Addendum: Key case eyewitness, Officer Ed Barton of the Lebanon, Illinois police department died in January, 2004. A memorial can be found at: http://dbarkertv.com/bartonmemorial.htm If clicked, most images in this report will enlarge in a new window. The sighting of an unidentified and unrecognizable aircraft of tremendous size, noted by several witnesses to be approximately the size of a football field, began on January 4, 2000, around 10:30pm over Lake Forest, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The witness was outside his home when he saw a triangular-shaped UFO, �much bigger than a Boeing 747�, heading over him from the northeast. He was stunned by its size, the strange slowness of its movement, the total lack of sound from the object and the light display on the underside, which he approximated to be maybe 500 individual lights spaced evenly across the entire undersurface. In a report given to a UFO investigator from the National Institute of Discovery Science, the witness said, �it was just a very surreal experience�. The UFO moved almost directly over the witness�s home and was headed in a southwesterly direction.An unrecognizable aerial object was next reported seen at approximately 4:00am the next morning, January 5, by a small business owner, Melvern Noll of Highland, Illinois. Mr. Noll told the Highland police department that the object was as big as a two or three story house, with many red lights underneath it (which actually consisted of a circular arrangement), one very bright light at the front like a headlight, and what appeared to be windows, lit up from inside on the sides and the back�. Due to the darkness of the sky at 4:00am, Mr. Noll was unable to see a triangular shape. In his rendition of the object, he drew a rectangular box, which is how the UFO is represented in two accurate television documentaries: �UFO Over Illinois� produced by the Discovery Channel and �The Edge of Reality: Illinois UFO, January 5, 2000�, produced by the author of this article.Officer Ed Barton, with the Lebanon, Illinois Police Department was contacted by the St.Clair County dispatcher, CENCOM, at 4:12am that morning and was told to look for a UFO. Officer Barton thought the dispatcher was joking until it was made clear that the call was serious. Officer Barton then proceeded to look for the UFO and spotted it in the direction of Summerfield, Illinois. He turned on his emergency overhead lights and proceeded south on Rt. 4 and then east on Rt. 50, toward the small town of Summerfield. While Officer Barton traveled eastbound on Illinois Rt. 50, another witness, a resident of Summerfield, observed the object for about 2 minutes at an approximate altitude of 900 feet and 800 feet distance. He reported the object to be at least twice the size of a C-5 cargo plane (222 foot wingspan). The witness said there were bright lights around the perimeter and the shape (triangular) could be likened to a boomerang, very wide. He saw no light at the rear. It moved very slowly (about the speed of a C-5 landing) and he could hear a slight sound; likened to a well-tuned V-8 engine at about 40 feet distance. The object moved westerly (toward Lebanon). Officer Barton drove his squad car toward the UFO and pulled off the road to shut down his engine and overhead emergency lights in an effort to hear a sound from the UFO, which was still approaching him. Officer Barton filed a police report with sketches that described a very large triangular-shaped aircraft. The lighting on board the UFO was remarkable, as it was blinding white, (brighter than typical aircraft landing lights) with a white light at each corner of the craft. On bottom center just past the half way mark, was a red blinking light. The forward white light shot a shaft of light toward the ground, without actually lighting the ground as you expect from a spotlight. The UFO hovered at approximately 1000 feet and no sound could be heard from the object as it approached, hovered, and departed. Before its departure, the object made a stunning flat pivoting turn and then began to move slowly away. View of rear and underside of craft as described by Officer Barton. Officer Barton could see the rear of the object which displayed a full array of white light across the aft side of the craft, with a thin strip of blended, multicolored lights that ran horizontally and centered across the surface. Officer Barton reached into his squad car to radio CENCOM and tell them what he was seeing, and when he emerged from the car, a duration described as 3 to 4 seconds, he saw that the brightly lit UFO had somehow relocated to an area some 6 miles away, near the town of Shiloh, Illinois, without making a sound. Officer Barton�s communications could be monitored on the CENCOM radio channel by any others tuned to that frequency and thus a police officer in Shiloh picked up the chatter. Exactly 51 seconds after Officer Barton informed CENCOM that the object was heading westbound and might be near Shiloh (per CENCOM dispatch computer timecode 4:23:57, attached to the radio transmission recordings), Shiloh police officer David Martin reported that he �saw something� but that he didn�t know what it was. Officer Martin was driving eastbound on Lebanon Avenue in Shiloh when he spotted a triangular-shaped object, with three downward pointing lights. This time the lights were observed to be at the rear of the undersurface. He also noted a red and green blinking light, widely spaced fore of the three white lights. Officer Martin noted that the three white lights projected shafts of light below the craft. He pulled his car off to the side of the road and listened for any sound of engine noise. None could be heard. The object was estimated to be the size of a football field in width. Length could not be determined. Officer Martin told me that he was able to see some detail on the bottom of the aircraft, similar to building blocks, or irregular pieces, like �plumbing�. The bottom did not appear to be a flat surface. One section of the underside appeared to be lower than another section. The irregularity of a naval battleship was used as a reference. Then, as Officer Martin was preparing to exit his vehicle to get a better look, the massive, silent triangle suddenly shot away, �in the blink of an eye�, with �no sound whatsoever� and was reported to be seen an undetermined number of miles westerly, possibly over the Belleville area. Officer Martin filed a police report and sketches. RECONSTRUCTION: The UFO passes Milstadt, Illinois police officer Craig Stevens at approximately 4:28am. (Video Frame from "The Edge of Reality: Illinois UFO, January 5, 2000") The watch on Officer Craig Stevens� wrist read 4:28am when he spotted a triangular UFO moving very slowly past him near the Millstadt village park, where he was parked, looking for the object. Officer Stevens was, like other police officers that morning, tuned to CENCOM and at 4:39:27 Stevens reported to the dispatcher that he saw the object. She asked if he was kidding. �It�s huge�, Stevens replied. The UFO passed to his left and he also observed a red blinking light on the underside of the craft. POLICE REPORT SKETCH, Officer Stevens; Millstadt, Illinois Police Department Stevens described the UFO as having an arrowhead shape with a concave rear that sported a horizontally moving, strobing light (to visualize this, liken it to the effect seen on the front of the car in the television series �KnightRider�). The entire aft surface of the object consisted of a bank of white light, similar to the description by both Noll and Barton. POLICE REPORT SKETCH, Officer Stevens; Millstadt, Illinois Police Department Inverted image to clarify area of white light across rear of craft. Perhaps because Officer Stevens reported that the object was only about 500 feet off the ground, he was able to hear a faint buzzing sound from the object, which he described to be similar to the buzz of a power transformer on a utility pole. Also, Stevens noted that the texture of the craft could be compared to the 3-dimensional blockiness of a naval battleship (reinforcing Officer Martin�s observation). Before the UFO moved away from Stevens at a leisurely pace, he also noted an effect which could possibly be an optical stealth technology. Stevens told me that he saw what appeared to be the stars in the sky above the craft, projected on its underside. P-1: Unretouched scan of original Polaroid photo taken by Officer Stevens. Finally, Stevens attempted to take a Polaroid photograph of the UFO as it departed, making a slow, banking turn toward St. Louis. The temperature was cold that morning, the camera was in the trunk, and the image, whether a result of cold temperature or simple insufficient exposure, revealed only four smears of light, blurred by camera motion while the camera shutter remained open. The triangular object disappeared over the trees. P-2: Enhanced image of Polaroid. CLICK for larger image. P-3: Enlarged area from image P-2. CLICK image to enlarge. P-4: Enlarged, enhanced area of Polaroid photo. CLICK for larger image. DUPO, ILLINOIS Officer Matt Jany of the Dupo Police Department was on patrol that morning and he could also hear the radio chatter about the UFO. Jany started to look for the object from Interstate 255 as he was traveling northbound, and pulled over. Soon visited by a fellow officer, they joked about the conversation that had been broadcast over CENCOM. The other officer departed and Jany drove up the road only to shortly see a brightly lit object at a distance, to his east. Officer Jany estimated the UFO to be at an altitude somewhere between where small private aircraft and commercial jetliners fly as they approach St. Louis International Airport, (aka Lambert Field). Officer Jany noted that the lights on board the object were brighter than typical aircraft lights, and that at one point he saw a large, red light glowing on the underside, accompanied by white lights which were �sort of flashing� around the object�s perimeter. Because the object was a good distance from him, thus rather small, he used binoculars to view it. At that distance, the red light he reported on the underside must have been very large, and not the smaller, single blinking red light that was observed by Officers Barton and Stevens. When St. Louis International Airport (Lambert Field) called Jany and asked if he could still see the object, he replied in the affirmative. St. Louis Air Traffic Control then informed Jany that there were no visible aircraft on their radar in Jany�s area. Officer Jany communicated his sighting to Milstadt Officer Stevens at approximately 5:03am. CENTERVILLE/EAST ST. LOUIS, ILLINOIS Later that morning, at 6:50am, it was dawn and light was just beginning to break. A school teacher, Stephen Winnacott, was on his way to work from Centerville, Illinois and noticed a strange stationary object in the sky. It was huge, triangular, had 2 very bright white lights and many other smaller lights around it. Mr. Winnacott was driving west on Lake Drive overpass (going over Interstate 255) and did not stop his car to view the object, but the image remained with him as he recounted his sighting to the St. Louis Riverfront Times and also to the Discovery Channel for their program �UFO Over Illinois�. No other reports of the strange, gigantic, silent UFO emerged from that morning of January 5, 2000�until recently. O'FALLON, ILLINOIS PHOTO RECONSTRUCTION of Detective Lopinot's view of UFO as it moves silently to the southwest (to the right in photo). Five lights in sky near Shell gasoline station are estimated to be larger than wingspan of a 747 jetliner. On July 22, 2002, I interviewed Detective Mark Lopinot of the O�Fallon, Illinois police department. I had heard from one of the other officers that a policeman in O�Fallon had also seen the object. Detective Lopinot was in his squad car driving east on Highway 50 going into O�Fallon and as he passed over Interstate 64, he saw an arrangement of bright, occasionally �twinkling�, amber lights (much brighter than street lights) at an approximate altitude of 200-300 feet, and covered an area larger than the wingspan of a C-5 military cargo plane (222 ft.) or a 747 jetliner (211 ft.). The lights consisted of two rows, three evenly spaced lights in the top row and two evenly spaced lights in the bottom row. Detective Lopinot first thought the lights were five helicopters flying in formation, because they covered such a large expanse of night sky; but he soon realized after he rolled down his window, that the lights were totally silent and appeared to be connected, attached to a single object, as all 5 lights moved in perfect unison. Lopinot also noticed that the lights were moving very slowly, so slow as to constitute a stall for a normal prop or jet aircraft. He wondered if the object might be a blimp, but again, no sound could be heard from any kind of engine typically used on lighter than air vehicles. When Lopinot first saw the lights, he observed that they were to the east, beyond the Convenient Food Mart located near the junction of Highway 50 and State Street. As he continued to slowly drive (10-20mph) east on Highway 50, he observed the lights, still in unison, approaching him, moving in a northwesterly direction. As he reached a Shell gasoline station on Highway 50 in O�Fallon, the massive lighting arrangement had now passed over the Convenient Food Mart, approaching Lopinot and maintaining the fixed pattern. The only sense of perspective Detective Lopinot observed on the UFO was when the two lower lights would fade out at times and then fade back in, as if they were being intermittently blocked from view. The two lower lights appeared to be at a greater distance than the top row, both by slightly less intensity, and also by their fading from view, which elicited some sense of depth to the unseen structure behind the lights, which was possibly at an angle. PHOTO RECONSTRUCTION of Detective Lopinot's view of UFO as it moves silently away from car dealership toward Shiloh. Strange detail of sighting is how 5 lights never change orientation to witness as they move away. As Detective Lopinot�s police car approached the Jack Schmitt Oldsmobile Dealer (still on Highway 50 eastbound), he saw perhaps the strangest detail of the sighting: the 5 lights, now about 500 feet off the ground and just to the right and south of Highway 50 stopped moving toward him and proceeded to make what Lopinot described as a 90 degree turn or change in direction; that is, the 5 lights, still in a perfectly locked formation, moved to Lopinot�s right, which is Southwest on a map of the area. As Lopinot reached the location at which the lights made the 90 degree turn, Lopinot watched the lights moving away from him over a field and then over the tree tops, where they went out of view. One strange detail observed by Lopinot was that as the lights moved south and away from him, they never changed their relationship to him as an observer. Whatever angle Lopinot viewed the lights from, they remained fixed in two rows, three on top and two on bottom. Detective Lopinot�s sighting took place approximately 2 hours before the end of his shift, which places the sighting between 4:00 and 4:30am on January 5, 2000. Lopinot did not note the exact time, nor did he think the object was anything other than �something from Scott� Air Force Base. Hence, he said nothing of the incident until he heard the news the next day about the sighting by other officers in St. Clair County. Detective Lopinot could not discern any shape of an object. The night sky was very dark; however, the area covered by the fixed lights was unmistakably large: estimated to be larger than the wingspan of a Boeing 747 (221 ft.). After further conversation with Detective Lopinot and a look at the surrounding area, we discovered that the lights seen by Lopinot headed in the direction of Shiloh, and toward the open field bordering Lebanon Avenue, where Officer Martin saw the object at 4:23am. Roughly 3 miles separate Lopinot�s sighting location from Officer Martin�s sighting location. It is not possible to make an absolute statement that the lights seen by Detective Lopinot were also the UFO seen by Officer Martin, but the times of the two sightings are reasonably close enough to draw a possible connection. A flight path can be proposed which incorporates Detective Lopinot�s sighting. Detective Lopinot's map of area and UFO position drawn during July 22, 2002 interview. The object has shot away from the Lebanon Officer seconds prior to 4:23:06am; actually arrives over O�Fallon, Highway 50 and is observed by Detective Lopinot for the 45 seconds between Lebanon Officer Barton stating the object is near Scott AFB at 4:23:12am* and Officer Martin actually making visual contact with the UFO in Shiloh at 4:23:57am. This cannot be proven, but this new piece of the puzzle prompts speculation. Of course, there is … truncated (62,754 more characters in archive)
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