Thanks for taking my call. I've been listening to your show for years now, and I never thought I'd be the one calling in with a story like this. But here I am, I'm telling you the truth, an old man now, and I figure it's time to tell people what really happened to me back in sixty-one. My name's Jack, and I'm calling from Eagle River, Wisconsin. Same place I've lived my whole life. Same place where this thing happened. Now, I know what you're thinking. You've probably heard about me. The newspapers had a field day with my story. They called me the 'pancake man' and made me out to be some kind of crackpot. But I'm telling you right now, what I'm about to describe happened exactly as I say it did. I was sixty years old at the time, not some kid with an overactive imagination. I was a plumber by trade, ran a small chicken farm on the side, did some auctioneering around town. I even played Santa Claus every Christmas for the Eagle River Chamber of Commerce. I was a respected member of my community, and I had absolutely nothing to gain by making up some wild story about visitors from somewhere else.
It was April eighteenth, nineteen sixty-one. A Tuesday morning. I remember because I'd slept in a little later than usual and was having a late breakfast around eleven o'clock. I was sitting at my kitchen table, just finishing up, when I heard this sound outside. It's hard to describe exactly. Like knobby tires on wet pavement, or maybe like a jet engine throttling down. A kind of whirring, humming noise that didn't sound like anything I'd ever heard before. I got up from the table and went to look out the window. And that's when I saw it. There was this object coming down out of the sky, descending straight down like an elevator. It was silver, but brighter than chrome, the way it caught the morning sunlight. Shaped like two bowls or two plates turned face to face and pressed together at the rims. I could see what looked like exhaust pipes running around the edge, maybe six or seven inches in diameter. The whole thing was about twelve feet high and thirty feet across.
I stepped out onto my porch to get a better look. I'm telling you the truth, the thing came down and stopped just above the ground in my yard, maybe a foot or so off the grass. Simonton was known in town, that detail stuck with me - Elise' It never actually touched down, just hovered there, completely silent now that it had stopped moving. The surface of it was smooth, seamless, like nothing I'd ever seen manufactured. No rivets, no welding marks, nothing. Just this perfect silvery metal that seemed heavier than aluminum but lighter than steel. Then a hatch opened up on the side. I hadn't even seen where the seam was until it opened. The opening was about five feet off the ground, maybe thirty inches wide and six feet tall. And inside, I could see three men. At least, they looked like men. They were about five feet tall, maybe a hundred and twenty-five pounds each. Dark complexions, smooth-shaven, and I remember thinking they looked Italian. That's the best way I can describe them. Like nice-looking Italian fellas, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old. They were all dressed the same. Dark blue or black outfits, like knit uniforms with turtleneck collars. They had these tight-fitting caps on their heads, like helmet-caps made from the same material as their suits. One of them was wearing a black two-piece suit, and I noticed later that another one had a red stripe running down the leg of his trousers.
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