Dante Landed-Craft Sighting (Everett Clark), Knox County, Tennessee

November 1957 was a restless month in American skies. Sputnik 2 had gone up on November 3 with the dog Laika aboard, and the Levelland sightings in Texas were in the news. In Dante, a community of farmland in north Knox County, Tennessee, 12-year-old Everett Clark attended Dante School and delivered the Knoxville News-Sentinel. On the morning of Wednesday, November 6, his parents had already left for work at Standard Knitting Mill. He was home alone.

Around 6:30 a.m. Everett let his terrier, Frisky, out. Across the road, in Gilbert Sterchi's cow pasture, about 100 metres from the house, he noticed an object he did not recognise. He was still sleepy. He ignored it.

About 20 minutes later he went out to call the dog. The object was still there. Frisky stood near it, along with several neighbourhood dogs. So did four people. Two men and two women, dressed in ordinary clothing.

They talked among themselves in a language Everett did not know. He compared it to "German soldiers in war movies." One of the men tried several times to catch Frisky, then another dog, but had to give up for fear of being bitten. Then the visitors beckoned the boy to come with them. He refused.

The four walked back into the craft "as if walking through glass." Everett described the object as elongated and round, of no particular color, perhaps even translucent. It took off rather sharply. Straight up. Without a sound.

When his parents came home they found him upset, and his grandmother, speaking to him by phone, said he was hysterical. At school, his classmates mocked him. The Knoxville News-Sentinel sent reporter Carson Brewer and photographer Bill Dye, who took Everett out of Dante School to show them the spot. Brewer wrote that he and Dye "simultaneously noticed an imprint in the field"; it was "in the shape of an egg or a fat cigar," and Brewer paced it at about 24 feet long. Dye photographed the outline, marked with sheets of paper, and Brewer reported that scientists from Oak Ridge came to test the pasture for radioactivity; no results have surfaced.

Principal Howard Field called Everett "a reliable sort." His father, Frank Clark, said the boy was not given to "telling tall tales." Brewer's own verdict was candid: "I don't think he made it up, but I still don't believe it."

The doubts start with a date. On November 5, 1957, the day before, Reinhold O. Schmidt claimed a landed ship near Kearney, Nebraska. Its crew of men and women, he said, spoke German among themselves. Schmidt took his story to radio and television that same evening. He was later shown to be a fraudster.

Researcher Patrick Gross sees the echo plainly. His catalogue rates Dante a probable hoax: "Very likely a tall tale by a 12 year old boy inspired by radio talks." Against that stand the imprint the newspapermen say they found on their own, the adults who vouched for Everett, and the distress his family saw.

Coral Lorenzen gave the case its first lasting record outside the newspaper, in a chapter of The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen. Alexander Mebane noted it in a 1958 book by Aimé Michel. Jacques Vallée listed it in Passport to Magonia and retold it in Dimensions. After the story ran, local law enforcement received more UFO reports. Whether a boy borrowed a contactee tale or saw something in that pasture on Dante School Road remains an open question.