Saucer-Chaser's Plane Downed By Meteor

     Over Putnam Parallelogram

Fayette: A Waterloo man is dead after his single engine airplane disintegrated over cornfield near Putnam on February 22. The plane, flown by its owner, UFO-hunter Dale Davies, aged 43 of Waterloo, was flying 2500 feet over the notorious area known as the "Putnam Parallelogram" enroute to a lecture in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, when a 200 pound meteor smashed into the aircraft's fuselage. According to Bud Smith, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board team investigating the crash, "It was like shooting a sparrow with a howitzer; wreckage scattered over a five mile area."

     Local police located the meteor in a small crater surrounded by the plane's wreckage and summoned astronomers from Georg von Podebrad College. Dr. Quinton MacAllister who examined the meteor said it is a very common type, composed principally of nickel iron and weighing in at over 200 pounds. GvP scientists estimate the twenty-four inch diameter rock was traveling at twice the speed of sound when it slammed into Davies' plane.

     Asked what he thought the chances of such a fantastic event happening again, Dr. MacAllister smirked, "Astronomical."

     Putnam residents, meanwhile, view the incident as an omen of dire events in the offing. Local UFOlogist and president of the Putnam IUFORN Chapter, Roger Beckler, thinks authorities weren't trying to be too accurate about what happened to Davies.

     "Davies' plane was not struck down by a meteor but by an alien particle acceleration weapon put in geo-synchronous orbit by our government. Government agents bent on discrediting years of sighting by thousands of people in this part of the state that aliens exist trucked that meteor here in the dead of night! Not long ago, a letter written by a once highly influential aero-space expert and smuggled out from a secret Federal detention center in this state came to me. From it, I learned that not only did such a technologically advanced weapon exist but that Dale Davies' plane had been targeted. They knew he couldn't resist flying over the Putnam Parallelogram."

     Among Davies' books are the best selling Night's Spangled Cloak: Strange Lights In The Sky, Vanished: The Putnam Parallelogram, and had been consulting with Albert Bourchard of the Stalk Forest Research Group in New York City on documenting the excavation of a supposed 1882 UFO crash in the Marion County town of Ely (see: Iowa's Roswell: The Wreck Of 1277, July, 1997, vol. 4, Issue #7).