Imminent and the Council Bluffs UFO Incident

 

Given what we have learned from Imminent, Lue Elizondo’s UFO book, which, of course, he refers to as his UAP book, there are some developing issues. He comes at the UAP phenomenon from the point of an insider. He is someone who has supposedly had access to those hidden files and investigations that those of us on the outside don’t have. But you have to wonder what those files were and what information did he have because there seems to be problems with what he has written about some of the well-known cases and some that have not received widespread publicity.

As just a single example is a case of recovered debris that might be remnants of some sort of off-world craft. He wrote:

In 1977, on a night close to Christmas, unusual lights were spotted in the skies over Council Bluffs, Iowa. When witnesses ran to where these lights neared the ground, they found not an aircraft but what looked like a small pool of molten metal. Had the craft melted when it hit earth? Had it melted in the air and oozed to the ground? Vallée had obtained materials recovered from this incident. He suspected the multicolored lights seen in the sky by witnesses came from a wobbling craft in distress. When no craft was actually found on the ground, it begged the question: Was the pool of molten metal some sort of by-product of the craft? After some sightings, researchers had recovered a fine metallic fiber on the ground. They called it “angel hair.” I have handled some of this material. It’s a little like steel wool. The working theory is that the exteriors of these aircraft are ablative in nature; that is to say, they are capable of self-sacrificing. When the skin of the craft interacts with the propulsion unit, the craft ablates, or peels off, some of its outer surface, resulting in these fibers. Back in 1977, the Council Bluffs case had undergone an unusually rigorous amount of investigation by local and federal authorities. It was a blue-chip legacy case.

But, like so much of the book, we don’t get many facts about the case. We don’t get names and in fact, we don’t get a date. I don’t know why that is left out. A simple Google search tells us the event happened on December 17, 1977, which is, of course, a “night close to Christmas.”

Here is the rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey used to say. At 7:45 p.m., three people saw what they said was a red object at about 500 to 600 feet above the ground, falling straight down. They lost sight of it when it disappeared behind the trees in the Big Lake State Park in Council Bluffs, Iowa. That was followed by a flash of bluish-white light and what they said were two arms of fire shooting into the air. They believed that something had hit the ground.

Article from the Cedar Rapids
Gazette, December 17, 1977

They drove to the park to investigate and saw a glowing, orange blob with a bluish crystalline substance in its center. It had impacted on a dike that was about sixteen feet from the road. They said it looked like lava running down the dike and it seemed to be cooling. They said it too hot to touch.

They were not alone. A young couple saw what they called a big round thing that seemed to be hovering. They drove to the park and then called the fire department when the saw the glowing blob.

A third couple reported a bright red object falling to the ground at Big Lake. It is interesting that some of the witnesses reported that it was falling, suggesting something out of control.

Fifteen minutes after they had called the fire department, or about 8:00 p.m., Assistance Fire Chief Jack Moore arrived. The molten metal was still glowing and had spread out into a six by four-foot area. It was about three or four inches thick and said by some to have weighed a thousand pounds. Moore described it as “some kind of metal,” and said “you can’t break it and you can’t bend it.” That, of course, suggests that it had cooled enough so that they could now touch it.

Moore called the police and then Eppley Airfield and Offutt Air Force Base. There were no missing aircraft and though the Air Force knew nothing about what had fallen, they denied that there had been an aircraft accident. Moore said that the Air Force officers were not interested in what he was telling them.

Samples of the metal were collected. There was nothing exotic about the metal. It was high carbon steel that wasn’t at all uncommon. It was used in manufacturing. Two foundries in Council Bluffs could have produced the metal, though there is no evidence to suggest that either of them was the source of the material.

There is one other aspect to the story that might be significant. Four teenagers, in what was called a small, foreign car, arrived just after the first group got there. They asked the other witnesses if they had seen the thing fall out of the sky. The teens then drove off.

There was a scientific paper about the case published years later and that is available online. It provides additional information, including the names of some of the witnesses and an in-depth report on the analysis of the metal, including a photograph of two samples. You can access it here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376042121000907 Manuscript_0d3637b7965056e1f5526820849aa561

I suppose the real point here is that Elizondo presented nothing new about this case. In fact, just typing Council Bluffs UFO into a search engine provided a wealth of information, including the scientific paper that resulted from the analysis of the metal.

I’ll have more to say about Elizondo’s book and I am preparing a longer and more comprehensive review of the material found there. I’ll post that as soon as I can.

(Blogger’s note: In a world in which plagiarism is claimed even with the most innocuous failures to properly footnotes, I did read an article written by Dr. Richard Warner who serves on the board of directions of the Historical and Preservation Society of Pottawattamie County, Council Bluffs being in Pottawattamie County. I also used various newspaper reports and the scientific paper mentioned above.)