If you will indulge me in a lengthy story of my past from 1979 and wish to "ride along" as I set the stage for a fairly complicated tale. Trust me there is a conclusion at the end. And some of the setup is somewhat necessary for you to understand my thought process at the time. I have told this story before, and maybe even in this old thread, and if you want to stop reading now, that is OK.
Stage setting: I was dispatching for the Green county Sheriff's Office, a county of about 640 square miles with Lawrence county to the west and Webster county to the east. The GCSO's Headquarters was pretty much in the middle of Springfield Mo, and you need to know that the city of Republic Mo. is to the west around 12 miles from Springfield, and the "tar tanks" are a mile or two west of Republic Mo. The city of Fordland Mo. is over in Webster county about 25 miles to the east of Springfield, and a couple of miles east of Fordland is the location for all of the Television and FM radio towers that serve the city of Springfield, and surrounding community's.
As the dispatcher for that evening shift sometime in the summer of 1979 I had 4 regular cars patrolling the county and our office at that time had only about 110 regular sworn officers, but we could call up hundreds more if need be in the form of many "auxiliary" organization's, not the least of which was several small towns like Republic Police officers and Civil defense volunteers and many many more. All of these people were dispatched and communicated with from the Sheriffs office HQ. They were under the command of the designated Shift Commander for that shift.
But the Dispatch center was the hub for all communications, both telephonic and radio. I cannot remember the exact number of lines we had on the telephone but it was a 20 button key system and the radio consoles were rather large and had dozens of buttons and lights and many radio channels. The selected or main channel was "brought down" to the desk level and was the loudest in volume and the immediate controls were at your fingertips and the other channel were somewhat attenuated in volume and their controls were left up on the console. In other words you could hear and react to all the other channels but your prime focus was the "selected" channel.
This was the evening shift, so night is approaching. I revived a phone call from a female member of the public that said she had seen a twin engine aircraft "with the left engine on fire, crash just to the west a mile or two from the Republic "tar tanks".
OK, this sounded serious, I called the Shift commander for his instructions. He advised to roll all of our cars except the east car to the west and to call out Civil Defense And alert the other Police departments in the western half of the county (they were all sworn deputy's as well as police officers) and start a grid search in the western half of the county. Keep in mind this is nearing the border with Lawrence county.
As the search progressed and units reported in about completing there assigned search grids without success, more and more units were called in by orders of the Shift Commander. I was a very busy boy trying to coordinate the search and calling up by radio and telephone other units to search and getting more and more calls from the public about some kind of aerial event always to the western end of our county. Various of the callers described different things, but it was always some kind of light or fire or aircraft or something. None were as specific as the original caller with the twin engine aircraft with the LEFT engine on fire that crashed a mile or so west of the tar tanks, but everyone saw something and they were all concerned enough to phone it in.
Then I got a call from one of the Television transmitter sites from an engineer at that site (remember east of Fordland, Mo, over in Webster county) that he had seen something go down to the west, maybe an aircraft or something.
Hmmm... This is when I stopped to think, "how in the world could a guy east of Fordland, have seen the same thing as a lady near Republic? That is over 40 miles apart, It would not be likely they would have seen the same thing. My suspicion grew. The shift commander wanted me to contact Lawrence county to see if they could send any units to their eastern border to search for the crash. I called them on the radio. They replied that they were extremely busy searching for a downed aircraft in the WESTERN end of their county. Then I noticed by listening to the fainter radio calls of multiple other counties to our west and even all the way out to Cherokee County Kansas, they were all busy searching for some kind of aerial event.
Our radio towers were rather tall, and I could hear counties well over 100 miles from Springfield at least faintly. I also conferred then with the State Patrol over the secure hotline we had between us, that they too had been getting reports of something to the west. I advised the shift commander of all of this and we concluded together that while this was not a hoax, this was not likely a downed aircraft in the western end of our county either. We secured the searchers.
We did not learn what all those dozens of citizen observers had seen until the next morning when it was reported that a meteor had fallen to earth somewhere in Oklahoma which is well to the west of Greene county Missouri.
Moral to this lengthy story: Citizen observers don't have a clue to what they have witnessed. AND when they don't know what they have seen, they will make up a story to fill in what they don't understand. "A twin engine aircraft with the LEFT engine on fire". It doesn't get more specific than that. And the location of the crash, a "mile or so west of the tar tanks", WOW, that is pretty specific. And just a wrong as it could be. So when someone says I saw this UFO crash just behind Junior Samples barn, Don't you believe a word of it. Eyewitness testimony is the most unreliable of all evidence.
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