The Levelland UFO Case (1957): The Object That Stalled Cars in Texas

Shortly before 11 p.m. on November 2, 1957, two farm workers driving near Levelland, in the Texas panhandle, called the sheriff to say a glowing, torpedo-shaped object had passed low over their truck, killing the engine and lights until it moved away. Over the next two and a half hours Sheriff Weir Clem's office took more than a dozen similar calls from drivers on roads around the town: a huge egg- or football-shaped object, brilliantly lit, sitting on or just above the road, engines stalling and headlights dying as it approached, both returning when it left.

Clem and his deputies drove out and reported a large glowing object themselves. The sightings came from separate locations by people who had not talked to one another, four days after Sputnik 2 put a living dog in orbit and the country was looking up.

Project Blue Book sent a single sergeant, who spent a day in Levelland and interviewed a handful of witnesses. The Air Force explanation was ball lightning or "wet weather" electrical phenomena, aided by a report of thunderstorms in the area. Witnesses disputed the weather: it had been misty, not stormy. Ball lightning is rare, brief, and small; the Levelland object was described as large, persistent, and repeatedly in the same place over several hours.

J. Allen Hynek, Blue Book's scientific consultant, later called the Levelland investigation an embarrassment: an inadequate inquiry that reached its conclusion before the interviews were done. He counted the case, along with a cluster of similar engine-stalling reports the same week from White Sands and elsewhere, among the ones that turned him from skeptic to advocate of serious study. The "electromagnetic effects" category in UFO research, objects that interfere with vehicles, begins here.

Levelland is a strong multiple-witness case with a physical effect, engine failure, that is hard to attribute to imagination, and a weak official explanation. It is also a case investigated so lightly at the time that it can never be resolved now. The best skeptical reading remains that a rare electrical phenomenon coincided with a public primed by Sputnik; the best believer reading is that a machine did what the drivers said it did. Blue Book's file leaves both open.