United States.Eagle River · encounter with occupants and pancakes

At eleven in the morning on April 18, 1961, Joe Simonton, 60, a plumber and part-time chicken farmer, was in the kitchen of his house on the outskirts of Eagle River, in Vilas County, Wisconsin. He lived alone; his wife had worked in Chicago for about two years. According to the report of the 676th Radar Squadron at Antigo, which interviewed him soon afterwards, he heard an intense whining sound, like snow tires on dry pavement or the jet bombers that fly over the house, but much louder, and looking out of the window he saw a huge saucer lowering toward the yard. It shone like chrome, only brighter. He went out the back door and stood ten or fifteen feet from the craft, which in his judgement was not touching the ground, because he found no marks afterwards.

He described a saucer about thirty feet across and twelve feet high at the center, with exhaust pipes five to eight inches wide around the rim. A hatch opened upward like a trunk lid, and in it appeared a man about five feet tall and 120 to 125 pounds, in a black knit cap, a black turtleneck sweater with a white band, tight black trousers with white stripes and features that Simonton called Italian. Inside were two other men dressed alike: one seated with his back to the hatch before a control panel, and another who seemed to be cooking on a flameless grill. The man in the hatch held out a thermos-like container of bright metal, one or two gallons, and made him understand by gestures that he wanted it filled with water. Simonton filled it at the pump in his basement and handed it back; in return he received four warm pancakes. They exchanged a salute, the hatch was closed by hand and the craft took off to the south in a couple of seconds, with a blast that bent a small pine. The whole thing lasted about five minutes.

According to the squadron's report, Simonton told no one until April 20, when he told a person in Eagle River. On April 21, at six in the evening, a complaint was recorded at the Vilas County sheriff's office and two deputies looked over the area: they found no landing traces and one of them tried a pancake, two or three inches across and an eighth of an inch thick, with tiny holes through it, and said it smelled like pumpernickel. The case was carried on television, radio and in the press. The Aerospace Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC) learned of it on April 26 from the Duluth air defense sector and asked the Project consultant, J. Allen Hynek, to go to Eagle River. Hynek and the radar squadron's investigator took samples of the pancakes.

The analyses arrived in May and June. The physics laboratory of the Aeronautical Systems Division (report of May 10) found starch, reducing sugar and salt, no proteins and a hydrogenated oil, and concluded they had been made from a low-protein flour with small quantities of sugar and salt, cooked in hydrogenated oil. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in a letter of June 8, found fat, starch, buckwheat hulls, wheat bran and soybean hulls, and described them as an ordinary pancake made predominantly of buckwheat, of terrestrial origin, with nothing anomalous in the bacteriology or the radioactivity. On June 2 ATIC had summed up the case: Simonton was a balanced man who believed what he said, but the inconsistencies pointed to a hallucination followed by a delusion, and it decided to investigate no further, among other reasons to avoid embarrassing him in a way that might harm his mental health.

The file shows how the Air Force reached its conclusion, and it is more nuanced than the card that closes it. Hynek, who questioned Simonton, did not think he was a liar: he described him as coherent and sincere, insisting on the facts as he told them and refusing embellishments. Even so he recommended not giving the case much weight because there was a single observer, whom the consultant describes as a man who lives alone and is lonely, on ground ripe for suggestion. He also noted that the county judge, a saucer enthusiast and NICAP member, had asked questions and supplied details that Simonton later incorporated 'as gospel'. Hynek himself says the only serious technical flaw in the story is the disappearance in two seconds, and that the rest offends no physical concept. An officer of the radar squadron, by contrast, wrote that the existence of the pancakes rules out a dream or a hallucination, although he found inconsistent the exact measurements Simonton gave of an interior he said he could barely see.

Those two judgements do not entirely contradict each other, and the analysis of the pancakes separates them. That the food was ordinary food does not prove the encounter was a hallucination, only that what Simonton handed over was of terrestrial origin; ATIC, moreover, rested its conclusion on the opinion of a psychologist who was consulted about the case. On the civilian side, NICAP received one of the pancakes through the judge, had it analyzed and acknowledged that the preliminary analysis pointed to a hydrogenated fat; its leadership regretted that the judge had told the press, without consulting it, that NICAP would analyze the pancake and publish the result.

The file also records what does not fit a simple reading. On April 27, about twelve miles east of Eagle River, a 17-year-old told of another sighting (two pie plates together, 40 to 50 feet, north to south), and three more reports reached the sheriff after the event; none provides physical proof. The squadron's investigator noted that Simonton was reliable according to townspeople and that the sheriff's office had no record of false alarms from him, that no collusion with the judge was apparent (although he did not pursue that point) and that Simonton described the interior as bright like chrome to one person and as black wrought iron to him. And the Air Force did not say the same thing about the pancakes everywhere: its public letters of June 6 speak of 'non-hydrogenated fat and milk products', while the laboratory report speaks of hydrogenated oil and no proteins.

Beyond that, the case is an early example of a contact-with-occupants story that leaves nothing but what the witness tells, when the Air Force treats it with the tools of its day. It remains unanswered whether Simonton saw something real that he misread, daydreamed, or invented a story that the local community amplified; the file documents a clear social effect (a bakery put up a 'Spaceship Cakes' sign and a service station one reading 'Spaceships Serviced Here'), but it cannot decide the cause.