SAUCERGIRL, UFO, AND HEAT RAY POINT TO HOT SUMMER IN HASKALIA
Webster: Ezra Steele has a bone to pick with an intruder on his property. The intruder is about four foot, seven inches with brown hair, green eyes, and wears a blue taffeta dress. She is usually found late at night in one of Steele's overgrown pastures blowing dandelions, singing songs, and calling out in a strange vocabulary for her "friend." Ordinarily, a simple case of trespassing were it not for the other intruder to whom she is calling. The girl's "friend" is approximately 20ft. in diameter, radiates a rainbow of colors, and occasionally fires a beam of light so bright it can be seen for miles, with the nasty side effect of blasting its target into millions of flaming pieces. When the "saucergirl" appears, the small and dangerous UFO is not far behind. Ezra Steele, to say the least, has his hands full.
The Sheriff's Department has been on a constant county wide search for the girl and presumed spacecraft. An exploded barn, two charcoal stubs that were once trees, and an entire farmhouse have been razed to the ground by the saucer's "heat ray". When examined by county authorities, all that is usually found is carbon and "small amounts of radiation."
But what is small to the Sheriff's posse apparently cuts a wider swath with the Army, which has now taken over the investigation. General Teague referred to the move as a formality in his recent press briefing. "Probably arson," he explained, "I don't believe in the heat ray crap. But we have to investigate it anyway, just to be sure."
But be sure of what? That's a question Ezra Steele and other residents of Haskalia would like to know as they prepare for the summer. "I'm not a superstitious man myself," expounds the sixty year old native Iowan, "I'm a very common sense sort of guy. I've farmed here my whole life, raised a family here, and I have to tell you I never seen anything like this before. It started a few months ago. There was still snow on the ground. One of my sons saw this young girl playing out on some unused pasture I own. He saw her dancing with just that little blue dress on. Thirty below with the wind chill. Well, he got me and we started to approach her and out of nowhere this thing appeared. Big. Glowing. Like a million colors. Looked exactly like one of them flying saucers you see in the movies. It just hung there in the air not ten feet away from the girl. She didn't pay any attention, just kept dancing, while that thing started humming real loud. Then we noticed a smell, like from a television when it burns out a tube. The lights started to flicker real fast and then out of nowhere there was a blinding flash. It knocked me and my son to the ground! We couldn't see for a few minutes, but we heard an explosion. When our eyes cleared, we saw something burning in a grove of trees, but the girl and the saucer were gone.
"We took off for the grove, and when we got there, there was nothing but black ash and embers where two fine looking oak trees had stood. I grew up climbing on those trees, now they're gone. Completely. Even the roots. None of the other trees were touched." Max Ciobban from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources says, "It was strange. I came out the next day and took samples for radiation, you know, because it was so odd the way the damage was evidenced. I didn't want to take any chances. This was anything but arson. If it was arson, I wouldn't have had a reading at all, but it was there. My equipment has been confiscated for 'evaluation and repair' and I'm being called a liar by the Army, but I know what I saw."
Steele and his son are not the only witnesses. Neville Hodges and his wife were taking a midnight stroll when they came upon the girl in a clearing not far from Steele's pasture. Again, there was a blinding light and an explosion. "My wife and I got up off the ground and the saucer was gone, so was the girl, and so was our barn!" All that was left of the building was black ash and the deadly clicking of Ciobban's Geiger Counter.
Both farms have been cordoned off by the Army during the ongoing investigation. This has hampered efforts by UFOlogists to conduct their own research on the sightings. UFO expert and Phenomonologist Age Redkern has a theory. "It is not uncommon," says the bookish 30 year old, "for extra-terrestrial life forms to use earthers as sensors. Think of it this way, you arrive on a planet and want to investigate, for whatever reasons. In order to tie into it in a physical sense, you need a sort of combination seeing eye and hunting dog. That would give you an awareness of what the people on this planet are feeling and thinking. The little girl, whoever she is, has become a sort of guide. The aliens most likely mind-meld with her, probably during her sleep, and she is held in a trance. In this hypnotic state she is completely unharmed, and no doubt in a sense of euphoria while the aliens use her to check us out."
As for the heat ray explosions? "A show of power to those hapless travelers who stumble upon them. Notice that no human beings have been harmed, and only small amounts of radiation have been found."
Steele isn't happy about any investigations, Alien or Army. "I hope they go back to where they came from. And I hope they take that little girl with them," he said.
As yet, no little girls have been reported missing, nor seem to fit the description, anywhere in the county. "But we'll keep checking." said a spokesperson for the Sheriff's Dept. So will the Army. And so will Steele.
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