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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.
