UFOs over Iowa

In 1967, two state troopers near Norwalk chased a red-orange
spacecraft down a rural highway at 2 am

Something was loose in the Iowa sky during the 1960s and 70s—something bright, silent, and definitely not from any Air Guard training schedule. Iowa papers were printing UFO stories with the same straight face they used for county board meetings. It wasn’t fringe. It was news. And to read those old clippings today is to feel the weird throb of a state trying to keep its sanity while the heavens misbehaved.

 Take 1964, for example—Lisbon and Mount Vernon. The Cedar Rapids Gazette reported locals watching an oval-shaped light that shot across the sky, stopped cold, and hovered like a nervous housefly with a PhD. One man told the paper it “hung there like it was thinking.” Thinking! This was Iowa, where nothing thinks in the sky except clouds and maybe the occasional bird with ambition.

In 1967, two state troopers near Norwalk told the Des Moines Register they’d chased a red-orange craft down a rural road at two in the morning. The thing drifted, dipped, teased them a little, then blasted straight up like it had somewhere better to be—Vegas or Mars. One trooper told the paper, “I’ve never seen anything move like that.” You could practically hear the typewriter keys sweating.

 

In 1976, a family near Rinard said a glowing blue object
followed their pickup truck down a gravel road

Out west, the Sioux City Journal was logging sightings like a court stenographer on amphetamines. Farmers in Woodbury County claimed they saw a saucer skimming soybean fields “without disturbing the leaves.” The Journal printed that detail with no jokes, no commentary—just the calm, eerie confidence of a newspaper that has seen far too much.

 

By the mid-70s, Iowa was cooked. Something was up there, and Iowans were calling the papers in droves.

 

In October 1975, the Ottumwa Courier worked overtime as Wapello County residents phoned in sightings of metallic discs with white lights that hovered “steady as a fencepost.” The sheriff’s office admitted to seeing odd lights themselves—rare honesty for men paid to explain things. The Courier wrote that the phone lines were jammed for nearly an hour. When the law can’t keep up, you know the sky is winning.

 

In 1976, the Fort Dodge Messenger covered a family near Rinard who swore a glowing object followed their pickup right down a gravel road. Neighbors saw it too. Project Blue Book muttered something about the sighting being “under review.” Translation: We don’t know what the hell it was.

 

And finally, Des Moines got its turn. In July 1977, the Register published witness reports of a hovering object with rotating white lights drifting over the east side. One woman compared it to “a balloon glowing like a welder’s torch.” The police and the airport shrugged. The city slept poorly.