Sighting record / 1973
October 3, 1973. Dawn on Interstate 55, just south of Jackson, Missouri. Truck driver Eddie Doyle Webb saw lights approaching through the fog. Then something overtook his rig. Aluminum. Shaped like a turnip. Wide enough to cover two lanes, with red and yellow lights spinning around it. Webb leaned out of the window for a better look. A flash hit him, one he said "felt like a large ball of fire." He could not see. His plastic frames were melted and twisted, and a university physicist said they appeared to have been heated from the inside. Doctors, sceptics and an insurance company all had questions. Webb stuck to his story.
Autumn 1973 was restless over the American South. Wire stories told of multicoloured lights watched by deputies in Lee County, Mississippi, for a third straight night. In Southeast Missouri, physicist Harley Rutledge had launched Project Identification that April. Eddie Doyle Webb was 45, from Greenville, Missouri, and drove a tractor-trailer for Sam Tanksley Trucking Inc. of Cape Girardeau. He had once believed that people who saw UFOs "were either pilled up or had been drinking."