Bob White's Falling Object and the Recovered Metal Artifact, I-70 near Grand Junction

Bob White was a former musician, actor and movie stuntman. In 1985 he was a passenger on a night drive west from Denver to Las Vegas. A woman was at the wheel. In his 1998 sworn statement she is named only as "Jan". White said he was "honor bound" to protect her identity. She never told her own story. Everything known about that night comes from White.

It was between 2 and 3 a.m. Somewhere off Interstate 70, between Grand Junction, Colorado, and Cisco, Utah. His companion woke him to point out a light in the distance. He thought little of it and went back to sleep.

She woke him again. This time the lights were blinding.

"[The light] was about the size of a full harvest moon," White said under oath. "When we were a few hundred yards from it… It was huge, the size of a very big barn." He switched off the ignition and let the car coast closer. His companion turned on the headlights.

Then it moved. "This light went up in the sky as fast as my eyes could follow it." It joined a pair of blue, tubular lights. "The mother ship," White later guessed. Together they zipped eastward through the Colorado sky and disappeared.

But something stayed behind. A second bright orange light fell from the object. White said he found a groove in the ground about 18 inches deep and 9 inches wide. The object inside was still glowing. They waited for it to cool before putting it in the car.

It was a teardrop of metal about 7.5 inches long, with a coarse scaled surface like "a petrified pine cone". In September 2000 White and Larry Cekander opened the Museum of the Unexplained in Reeds Spring, Missouri, where it sat in a locked case under 24-hour video watch. White claimed Los Alamos called it the "unknown object" 19 times. He reportedly spent $200,000 on analyses and advertised it for $10 million. He passed four polygraph tests, including one by a Grand Junction police polygrapher in 2004.

On August 23, 1996, New Mexico Tech examined a small sample for the National Institute for Discovery Science. The verdict was plain. An aluminum-silicon alloy, a match for die-casting "360 alloy", poorly cast. "There are no anomalies in the results of this analysis." A NIDS scientist called the metallurgy "pretty mundane". Supporters pointed instead to a 1999 strontium reading from the Scripps Institution, which they compared to Martian meteorites.

In 2011 Pat Linse and Ean Harrison, a retired steel-foundry quality-control supervisor, offered an earthly answer. "The object in question is made of accreted grinding residue," Harrison wrote, formed "in a manner similar to a common stalagmite" on foundry grinders. George Wingfield also doubted the tale, noting that the location shifted between tellings. John Greenewald of The Black Vault took the other side, comparing the piece to photographs in a US Army file labelled "Flying Saucers from Denmark". The debris, he said, "looked identical".

White's story was dramatised in a History Channel UFO Hunters special and featured on Unsolved Mysteries, Jane Goldman Investigates and Coast to Coast AM. He promoted the artifact until 2009. The argument over what fell on that dark stretch of road has never been settled.