FLYING SAUCER KILLS THREE IN EMMETSBURG?

     The three men were identified as George O'Shea, 52, of Cylinder; Mike Murphy, 37, of Emmetsburg; and Carlos Ramirez , 48, also of Emmetsburg. A fourth man, Joseph Quinlan, 42, survived the incident with minor injuries.

     Emmetsburg Police Sgt. Angelo O'Malley reports that the incident began at approximately 8:15 pm, when a fireball appeared high in the sky south of Emmetsburg. Eyewitness reports indicate that the object, at first thought to be a meteor, streaked across the sky, losing altitude and trailing a fiery tail in its wake.

     Barney McNamara, who was standing outside the Main Street Theater with a line of people waiting to get in to see a movie, was astonished.

     "We all saw it," says McNamara. "It went right overhead, towards the lake. Then it disappeared behind the horizon and there was a bright flash, and right after that a dull 'boom'.

     "Everyone in the crowd started talking at once. Someone said we ought to go look for it. Big Marvin Kelly said it must have come down halfway to Minnesota, but Dan O'Conner said it was a lot closer than that. People started going to their cars and heading north, to where the thing looked like it hit."

     By that time, DNR Ranger Mike Dooley called the Volunteer Fire Department from his observation tower with the report of grass fires two miles north of Five Island Lake. Shortly thereafter, fire trucks, Police and Palo Alto Sheriff's Deputies, in addition to a sizable group of civilian vehicles were heading north on county road N40.

     The first emergency vehicles on the scene found the impact site a mile and a half east of N40, in a pasture. The impact had started several fires in the dry grass. As it was dark, it was hard at first to find an impact site, despite the illumination provided by the grass fires. But as the firemen and volunteers from town began extinguishing the flames, a large domed shape, glowing with the heat of its entry through the atmosphere, could be discerned.

     "I ordered two of the deputies to shine their car spotlights on the shape," said Emmetsburg Volunteer Fire Chief Woodrow Groghan. "It was about thirty feet long, domed, and slightly cylinder shaped. It was too hot to get close enough to get any really accurate dimensions. But from the lights we could see that it was covered with grey colored clinker, like burnt coal cinders. There wasn't much of a crater. Not what you'd expect."

     Police Sgt. O'Malley arrived on the scene just as firefighters were beginning to douse the fires and put in two calls from his radio; one call to the University of Emmetsburg Astronomy Department, the other to Aerodyne Propulsion Laboratories.

     "The University connected me to a guy in the Astrophysics Section, a visiting Professor from Pacific Tech named Dr. Clayton Forester. He said he'd be right out. Aerodyne was tougher. Their night receptionist told me the staff was off celebrating Marlene Dietrich's birthday, but that they would get a message to them."

     Although Dr. Forester was unavailable for comment, Sgt. O'Malley reconstructed his assessment of the object.

     Says O'Malley, "Dr. Forester was asked if he thought it was a meteorite, and he said that it didn't come down like one. He said that it looked like it hit and skidded sideways, but couldn't understand why it didn't leave much of an impact crater. He said that the meteor was either extremely light, which was unheard of, or that it was hollow somehow. He said that if it were heavy it would have left a tremendous crater."

     After about forty-five minutes, the fires were extinguished. But to be on the safe side, Fire Chief Groghan asked Palo Alto County Deputy Sheriff Harry Callahan if he could post some men to keep an eye on things until morning. Deputy Callahan volunteered O'Shea, Murphy, Ramirez and Quinlan to stay on site.

     "O'Shea, who owned the Hardware Heinz in town, had his camper and cellphone with him," said Groghan. "We got 'em a couple cases of beer from the EZ-Mart, and they said they'd keep an eye on it. Dr. Forester told 'em not to get too close to it, and Callahan told 'em he'd send a couple deputies out around midnight to check on things."

     The crowd soon dispersed, leaving the four men to watch for further outbreaks of fire.

     Mr. Joseph Quinlan, interviewed from his room at the University of Emmetsburg Hospitals and Clinics where he is recovering from burns, recounts what happened next.

     "It was probably around 10:30 PM. We were all sittin' in George's RV, drinkin' beer and watchin' George's portable TV. Every now and then, we'd go out to take a leak, y'know, pissin' on the spots that were still glowin'. Mike thought we should all go up and piss on the meteor, but it was still too hot to get close to do anything like that!"

     The four men continued to enjoy their beer and conversation, when, about 1:30 PM, after the deputies had checked in, Quinlan convinced the others to take another look at the object.

     "It had cooled down quite a bit by then. Murph went and urinated on it, which hissed and turned into steam, so it was still hot.

     "Murph said, 'It ain't gonna start no more fires', and George says, 'We might as well go on home', so we turned and started headin' for our cars, except for Carlos, who went a little closer, shining his flashlight on the meteor. Suddenly, he starts yellin' 'Hey! Hey! It's moving!'"

     The other three men ran back to where Mr. Ramirez was standing. At first they laughed at him, and told him that he'd drank too much, and did he also see pink elephants in tutus. But then the men heard a metallic scraping sound, and the hiss of escaping air coming from the object. Although somewhat taken aback by this development, the men, taking courage from the proximity of each other, walked closer to the object.

     There, in the beam of Carlos Ramirez's flashlight, the four men saw a circular portion of the object, perhaps two feet in diameter, unscrewing and rising from the top of the object. As it did, chunks of the ash clinker covering it fell to the ground.

     "We didn't know what the hell it was," recounts Mr. Quinlan. "It had us kinda shook up. Then George says 'It's a bomb!' Carlos says, 'Eet don't go off when it hit, maybe it go off now?' And Murph says, 'It's a enemy sneak attack!' But George, who owned the Hardware says, 'Wait a minute. Bombs don't unscrew.' Murph, shouted, 'Let's get outta here', and he starts to take off, but George stops him and says 'Darndest thing I ever saw, the way that's unscrewin'".

     By this time, the four men had retreated to what they assumed was a safer position behind Murphy's 1978 Toyota. Quinlan says that they watched the rotating piece slowly unscrewed itself from the body of the object. Suddenly, with no warning, it toppled off the object and fell to the ground. A red glow now shone from the exposed aperture.

     "This red light was comin' outta the thing. And we started to hear this noise, kinda like a rattlesnake's rattle, only in slow motion, and in spurts. Then this periscope-like thing a flexible metal tube sticks itself outta the hole real slow, and turnin' around, like it's lookin' around."

     The frightened men were paralyzed with burning curiosity.

     "Murph says, 'Whatever it is, there's someone inside it.' We started wonderin' where it came from. George thought they might be from Mars, but I said that there weren't any men on Mars. 'Course, he didn't read the papers or watch CNN; how was he to know? So George said that if there were people inside, we oughta let 'em know that we were friendly. Murph says that's a great idea and we'd be in all the papers. We started talking about how we'd do that, and George says 'We'll wave a white flag at 'em! I got a sugar sack in my car!'."

     O'Shea ran back to his camper, and returned minutes later, with the sugar sack attached to a baseball bat. O'Shea gave Quinlan his cellphone and told him to call the sheriff's office.

     Ramirez was unsure as to how to communicate with whatever was inside the object.

     "He says, 'What are we gonna say to eet?', and Mike says, completely serious, 'Welcome to Iowa!'

     "I dialed 911, and was waitin' for 'em to answer. George an' Carlos an' Murph started walkin' toward the thing, wavin' their flag, and yellin' hello and 'We're friends!' The noise from this thing is gettin' louder and then this thrumming begins, like a guitar. The periscope turns around and like zeroes in, y'know, locks on George and the others. Then the thrumming gets louder and faster, and the next thing I know, this red beam shoots from the periscope. It hit all three of them. They started screamin' and burst into flame. Then the beams start sweeping the field. I turned and started runnin' like hell. About that time, George's RV gets hit and blows up. Carlos' pickup goes next, right in the middle of one of his Freddy Fender tapes that was still playing!"

     Quinlan was blown off his feet when Murphy's Toyota blew up. He rolled into a furrow in the ground as the beam passed overhead, missing him by inches. Still clutching the cellphone, he managed to get through to 911. He was able to let them know what was going on before the phone went dead.

     At the same time as this "heat-ray" was first deployed, according to Dr. Forester it sent out a tremendous electromagnetic pulse, which knocked out almost all electrical power in town, along with all cellular phones. Only the power systems at the University of Emmetsburg and Aerodyne Propulsion Labs, which operate on a different, shielded grid, were immune to the outage caused by the EMP effect.

     While he was hiding, terrified, waiting for help, several vans began to arrive from the direction of town. Quinlan says that he heard orders being shouted in what he thought was German. He watched, fascinated, as a group of men in black combat fatigues, all heavily armed, began to deploy and take cover. Headlights from the vehicles played upon the object, illuminating it.

     "There was this German guy in a trenchcoat givin' orders. He had this real funny lookin' little fella with him. He had a big head, shaped like an upside down pear and these big black eye, kinda like a Jap's eyes. These soldiers, I think they were from Aerodyne, they pulled this big gun thing out of one of the vans and pointed at the whatever it was. Then they fired it, I guess, 'cause this bolt of something, y'know, like in 'Star Wars', shoots out and hits the thing. It just blows up---Boom! Like that. Into a zillion pieces!

     "Then that funny lookin' little guy, he sees me, and says somethin' to the German fella. That's when I blacked out."

     Quinlan's next memories are of waking up in his hospital room. He remembers nothing else.

     The vans and personnel who arrived in the nick of time were from Aerodyne Propulsion, sent to investigate the meteor. Sgt. O'Malley, who arrived shortly thereafter with the Emergency Services personnel, says that the Aerodyne team was under the direct supervision of Dr. Immelman Stahl, Director of Aerodyne Propulsion Labs.

     Sgt. O'Malley does not recall seeing any short men with misshapen heads, nor armed troops dressed in black. There was nothing left of the so-called meteor, and little of the three men except horribly charred remains.

     "They were kinda like steaks that have been left on the grill about five hours too long," says O'Malley. According to O'Malley, Dr. Stahl told him that the meteor had apparently exploded, killing the three men who had gotten too close to the object.

     When contacted at his office and asked to comment on the incident, Dr. Stahl said that "the object exploded due to the unequal cooling of its surface after its entry and rapid transit through our atmosphere. It has been known to happen. Really."

     When asked about the three men, he shrugged. "Perhaps it was spontaneous human combustion." Then, he added, "but of course I do not believe in spontaneous human combustion. It is a ridiculous theory invented to account for clumsy people who have accidents with fire."