Carl Petrick is a sky-watcher.
The East Moline resident and Moline native is a retired longtime zookeeper at Niabi Zoo. He studies his surroundings with scientific attention. Science is his religion, Petrick said. The 66-year-old just wants to figure it all out.
“Moving things,” in particular, are fascinating to him. He’s an avid bird-watcher. Birds’ camouflaging abilities, their ability to fly into the wind, their speed — it’s all impressive to Petrick.
“People are smart, but we can’t do some of the things they do,” he said.
Petrick is willing to go to great lengths to identify birds he spots in local parks — once, he chased a bird 50 yards just to get answers after he glimpsed it through a bush. Eventually, he tracked it down.
But there’s one flyer that got away. It’s nagged at him for more than 50 years.
Petrick is one of several Quad-Citians who reported seeing UFOs over several days in early March 1967. At the time, Petrick was a 9-year-old student at Sacred Heart Catholic School, now Seton Catholic, in Moline.
The record of this local UFO phenomenon, which stretched across multiple counties in western Illinois, is part of Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force investigation of UFOs in the 1950s and 1960s, a time of heightened concern due to the Cold War.
Nuns, sheriff’s deputies, elementary students and more reported seeing something in the sky that spring.
The story is still vivid in Petrick’s head.
If he stares long enough at a wall, he can close his eyes and see it like it was yesterday.
It’s not an airplane
Petrick saw it between 2 and 3 p.m., as he went back inside for class, he said. The weather was chilly but clear.
“I looked up and I saw something in the distance,” Petrick said.
To his naked eye, the object in the western sky looked like a spot or a small silvery thing. He estimated its height to be like that of airplanes when they emit contrails as they fly over.
As Petrick watched the object, Bill Fisher, a Moline police officer, came around the corner. The officer had binoculars or a movie camera with him. Fisher looked at the object then handed the instrument he carried to Petrick.
“What do you think it is?” the police officer asked the boy.
With the instrument’s assistance, Petrick saw a silver, cigar-shaped object with what Petrick described as three long windows along the side. Those windows were powder blue, like the jersey shade of the St. Louis Cardinals.
The thing was not moving and Petrick estimated its length to be between 20 and 40 feet.
Petrick told Fisher the thing was not an airplane, then the police officer said he had to go.
“That’s the last I saw of him,” Petrick said.
That day, Fisher recorded the object with a portable 8mm movie camera. He and his recording would be a central part of the Air Force’s investigation.
After Fisher left, Petrick watched the object for about 10 more minutes before returning to class, he said. About 30 or 45 minutes later, he came back outside.
“It was still there,” Petrick said.
At home a short time later, he observed it again with his father and brother, using a small telescope. The object still had not moved and its appearance remained the same.
Petrick does not know what the object was, but he said he knows what it wasn’t. It was not a bird or a butterfly, he said. It was not an airplane, helicopter or zeppelin.
By the process of elimination, he concluded it was a UFO.
“I don’t know what it is, so obviously and logically, it would be unidentified,” he said. “Just common sense.”
Now decades removed from the event, Petrick said he does not think the object had a human origin.
“It’s not from here,” he said. “Maybe it’s just observing us like we observe.”
Petrick said he saw the object in the same place in the sky for several days after those initial sightings.
Then, one day, it wasn’t there.
Initially, he thought it might have moved. After a bit more time, he decided it was gone for good.
Duck and cover
At the time of the Quad-Cities sighting, the Cold War was in full swing. The rivalry between America and the Soviet Union even extended into space.
Petrick remembered a childhood game he and his friends played, inspired by the monthly emergency siren tests. When they heard the siren, the children would pretend the Russians were attacking.
People feared a nuclear holocaust, Petrick said. Incidents like the Bay of Pigs had occurred and the conflict in Vietnam was heating up.
“We were so inundated with the Cold War’s ‘Russians are bad, we’re good,’” Petrick said.
He also described an exercise he had to do at school: the duck-and-cover drill.
“If the siren goes off, get under your desk because if a bomb explodes, you’ll be protected,” he said.
Should they find themselves in the hallway, children were supposed to get against the wall and cover themselves as best they could, he said.
The school phased that drill out while he was still a student.
There was also a big emphasis on science in school because of the Cold War. The Russians had their Sputnik satellite. The Americans were after the Moon.
After he saw the object in the sky that day, Petrick said, he considered, then discarded, the possibility that another nation was behind it.
“If it was Russian or Chinese or whatever, you think it would have been attacking the States or would have been doing something to throw us off,” he said. “It just sat there.”
Not just Petrick
Petrick wasn’t the only person in the Quad-Cities who spotted a UFO that week. The local newspapers covered the phenomenon extensively.
James Maifield, of Silvis, reported that he and his wife spotted a “white light” in the sky for several minutes. An anonymous Silvis police dispatcher told the Moline Dispatch she saw a “weird” white light, too.
Gary Bennett, an Augustana College student, told the Times-Democrat he saw an “unfamiliar airborne vehicle” around 9:30 p.m. on March 9.
Arnold Buchmeyer, Helen DeRocker and Leo Schmitz, all of Moline, separately reported to the Times-Democrat that they saw something strange in the sky, too. Schmitz said it was “very white” and “moving northwesterly.”
A Northwestern University astronomer speculated that it was just the planet Venus.
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The weekend after the sightings, pranksters were caught deploying a balloon with a candle that crash-landed in Rock Island. A similar balloon was found near the Monmouth waste disposal plant on Thursday, March 9, pieced together with soda straws.
Jimmie Scott, a 12-year-old from Buffalo, Iowa, told the Times-Democrat he got out of bed around 2 a.m. on March 9 to get a drink of water. He looked into the sky and saw a “bright, white object that looked like a saucer.”
His sketch of the saucer was published on the front pages of the Times-Democrat.
The principal witness, though, was Fisher, the Moline officer who greeted Petrick on the campus of Sacred Heart.
The star witness
After the Quad-Cities area sightings drew the attention of the federal government, Fisher was interviewed at length by the U.S. Air Force, who sent Capt. Edward Orenic and Capt. Anton Kato to investigate.
After their visit, they produced a 94-page report on their methods, avenues of inquiry and conclusions. The report is available online through the U.S. National Archives.
The two captains cast a wide net, the report shows. Their efforts included interviewing witnesses and collecting weather data. They also checked with regional military, airport and National Weather Service officials for aircraft and weather balloon flights as well as for reports of anything strange.
Orenic and Kato took particular interest in Fisher’s account and the footage he took.
The officer told the Air Force that he was initially at Sacred Heart on March 9 to deliver a message to his son, a student there. He arrived around 1:30 p.m.
“At this time, I glanced upward above the treetops and viewed a object that I was not sure of its description or its identity,” he told investigators.
He described the object as “U-shaped — like a pickle,” and said he watched it for “a precious minute and a half.” Soon after, he began shooting footage with his 8mm camera, using a telescopic lens and outdoor film. The footage is also available online in the U.S. National Archives.
Fisher told the Dispatch in 2015 that he kept the camera in storage on his motorcycle, aware that UFO rumors were already swirling in town.
“There were stories all around,” he told the Dispatch. “I was just naturally curious.”
After he arrived on the campus, Fisher says the object then began moving “northwesterly” away from him. It “appeared to have stopped” and hovered, he said, and then it continued its pace until it faded from view.
“Before it faded away here, before it got completely obscure, I did have a definite sighting of a metallic, shiny surface on the side,” he said. “The side that was the broad side to me, was metallic and appeared to be of the same construction like some of our large aircrafts that I’ve seen here.”
As he stood at the school, Fisher asked several kids and a state policeman’s wife about what they saw. The woman told him it “looked shiny and reflected a white light.” Fisher said he didn’t spot any lights or objects connected to the craft. He heard no sound emitted from the object, but the woman reported a hissing or whirring sound.
In the report, captains Orenic and Kato also highlighted the accounts of two sheriff’s deputies, one from Knox County and the other from Henry County.
The Knox County deputy’s account was that early on March 6, 1967, he saw a flying object.
His account included that it was shaped like an upside-down bowl, the report states. It had a glowing red base and at one point emitted a bright beam of white light.
The deputy from Henry County saw something in the sky late on March 8, the report states.
The deputy’s description included that the object was framed by three lights — one red, one white and one green. Periodically it would emit an intense red light bright enough to obscure the other three lights.
So what’s the verdict?
Orenic and Kato concluded at the end of the report that the sightings most likely involved the mundane.
In Fisher’s case, the object was most likely an air vehicle – a plane or helicopter, the report states. In another part of the report, Orenic and Kato also state it could have been a balloon.
“The description, duration and flight characteristics are similar to that of a balloon,” they wrote. “The 8mm film failed to reveal any information that would dispute this evaluation.”
The captains said the Henry County deputy’s sighting was also likely an aircraft.
The Knox County sighting was probably of a home-made hot air balloon created using a garment bag, similar to the one Rock Island pranksters made the weekend of March 12, and the one recovered in the Monmouth area. The method of making the balloons had been published in a national magazine, the report states.
During that period, two red kites along with batteries and a light bulb were also recovered in the Galesburg area, according to the report.
Nearly all the witnesses Orenic and Kato interviewed appeared extremely reliable but had a “strong desire to see something” or an attitude of “thought I’d never see a saucer,” the report states.
Those attitudes, the extensive news coverage and prank launchings appeared to have caused wide-spread UFO sightings, the captains wrote.
Still looking, still believing
In 2015, the year before Fisher’s death at the age of 81, the Dispatch interviewed him about the incident. They asked how he felt about investigators pointing out his affinity for science fiction and “strong desire to see something” — the report said, for example, that Fisher “watches the sky every chance he gets.”
The former officer told the Dispatch he felt investigators were fishing for statements like that. But Fisher remained “adamant that he saw what he saw,” even years later.
“He doesn’t know what it was, but it most certainly wasn’t a balloon,” the Dispatch wrote. “And several other people saw it and were startled by it, too.”
Petrick also stands by his story. He said he never read the conclusions of the Air Force, but he doesn’t mind skepticism. Like Fisher, he knows what he saw.
“People believe in love,” Petrick said. “Can you prove it? Can you prove it’s there?”
He’s also quick to point out that his interest in the UFO comes from a place of scientific curiosity, not opportunity. It’s the bird that got away.
Petrick jokes about his father, whose experience with the unknown was a little different. Milton Petrick lived in rural New Jersey when Orson Welles’ “War of The Worlds” went over the radio the night before Halloween in 1938. Milton and his buddies saw through the radio play’s facade, but took it as a chance to improve the town.
“They went down with their shotguns and rifles and shot the water tower, called the police and said, ‘Yeah, we just killed a Martian,’” Petrick laughs. “They got their new water tower out of it.”
Petrick, though, isn’t looking for a new water tower. He’s just looking for answers. To this day, the 66-year-old scans the western sky almost daily, longing to see the UFO again. The uncertainty, though, is a sort of gift.
“Everybody has beliefs that they can’t prove,” Petrick said. “Which is actually a good thing, or life would be boring.”
While walking around the grounds of his old elementary school on a recent fall day, Petrick’s voice rattled with a certain giddiness. He shuffled his feet along the sidewalk. Every time he found the perfect spot to recreate the memory, he’d find an even better one a few inches over.
“Now it really hits home,” Petrick said, aligning a triangle between the rightmost spire on the church steeple and the roof of the school.
He lingered in the neighborhood for about a half hour, in awe of the sky. Waiting, perhaps, for an answer to appear. The weather conditions were similar to those in 1967. The sky was clear and a seasonal chill lingered in the air.
For a moment, a plane flew overhead to the north. Petrick estimated it was about the same size as the UFO of 1967. The jet left contrails behind, but they faded after a few minutes.
Petrick kept on looking, raising his hand to his forehead to block out the sun — a salute, of sorts, to the puzzling sky.
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