Was He Really Joe King?

 

There are times when I find sightings that seem to fit into a pattern and are considered to be important. I was working on a book that dealt with the 1973 sightings, using a variety sources. The A.P.R.O. Bulletin published a sighting report in the March/April issue that began on page three. It said:

At about 4:30 p.m. on the 22^nd of March, 1973, Mr. Ron Miller and Joe King were enroute from Southeast Missouri State University, east of Patterson in Wayne County on Missouri State Highway 34. They observed a metallic-looking object which appeared to reflect the sunlight. They stopped the car to get a better look, glanced away for a second and when they looked back the object was gone.

I was providing the context for the wave of UFO sightings in 1973 and this short case added to the long list of reports from a specific area. In the rough draft of my book, I wrote:

The A.P.R.O. Bulletin published another sighting made by Ron Miller and Joe King. They were described as college students who said they had seen a metallic object that was reflecting sunlight. The stopped to get a better look but the object had vanished.

I was preparing the second draft, reviewing the cases when I spotted something that made me wonder if this sighting wasn’t a hoax. Give a look at the information provided by Coral Lorenzen in her report in the Bulletin and my short write up see if you can find the problem.

Jim and Coral Lorenzen, the leaders of APRO.

I decided that I wasn’t interested in a case with a witness named Joe King… joking. Yes, I did find a long list of people with that name including an actor born in 1883, a famous singer and the son of Stephen King who writes under the pen name Joe Hill. I do wonder why parents would do this to a kid, but I digress.

The trouble here is that we’re dealing with UFO sightings and there are dozens of cases in which young men of high school and college age engage in pranks and tricks and jokes. There simply isn’t enough information in the case to use it even if the name is real. Given that, I mention this because we need to be alert about this sort of information when investing UFO sightings. There is no way, in the world today, for me to verify the validity of the report. Had I been the original investigator, I would have asked for some sort of identification to make sure that I wasn’t been pranked by Joe King.

Given the few details of the sighting and the name of one of the witnesses, I took the sighting out of the book. All it had added was one more UFO sighting in the Piedmont area in 1973 and there are literally dozens of others. Many of those sightings can be found in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin.