Haynesville red-orange glow (Dr. Louie A. Galloway)

Haynesville sits in Claiborne Parish, in the north of Louisiana. Beyond the town, U.S. Highway 79 runs north through woodland and oilfield country.

Friday, December 30, 1966. Around 8:30 p.m. Dr. Louie A. Galloway, 31, was driving north with his wife, 28, and their two children, aged 5 and 7. Galloway was described as a nuclear physicist at Centenary College in Shreveport. The night was foggy and drizzly, the ceiling low.

His wife saw it first. A red-orange glow, ahead and to the left, through and above the trees. The source seemed to sit below treetop level, a luminous hemisphere in the fog and rain. It pulsed regularly, from dull red to bright orange, about every two seconds.

Then the car reached the point nearest the light. It "suddenly brightened to a brilliant white, 'washing out' the headlight illumination on the road, lighting up the landscape and casting shadows of trees." About four seconds. Then the red-orange pulsing returned. No movement was reported. No sound either.

Galloway compared the flash with his car's 175-watt headlamps at about 10 metres. He put the power of the unknown source at about 500 megawatts, noting it might have been substantially less if it was concentrated in a beam.

One chronology says he returned the next day, found traces of burns, and called the Air Force and the University of Colorado project. Jacques Vallée later described a clearing about 30 feet in diameter. Around its edge, tree bark was blackened in the direction of the centre, by the object's light, not by heat.

The report went to Barksdale AFB and soon reached the Condon Committee, which filed it as Case 10. In spring 1967, investigators David R. Saunders and Wadsworth searched by helicopter, by ground transit and on foot. They found "little but trees, underbrush, and oil wells." A burned patch with slight radioactivity proved to be an oil slick at a pumping station. No trains ran within 50 miles that night. No power lines stood nearby. No flares or burn-offs were recorded.

The investigators called the value of several hundred megawatts "highly dubious," citing the rain, the moving car, possible beaming and the unknown nature of the source. The case stayed unidentified in the 1969 final report, and Project Blue Book reportedly carried it as unidentified too.

Sceptics have raised gas flares from local wells, though none were on record. One summary credits the Condon Report with the re-entry of an Agena fragment from Gemini 11, an attribution not found in the case text. Bruce Maccabee reportedly weighed cloud, plasma and ball lightning while analysing a Kodachrome slide, estimating 2.5 to 30 gigawatts. No hoax allegation has surfaced.

Vallée kept fragments of the bark. In June 2025, he, Dini and Mestchersky published the case in Progress in Aerospace Sciences, promoted as the journal's first UAP case paper. It reports radiation burns, caesium-137 in the bark, a revised output of 500 to 900 megawatts, and tree surfaces heated from 20°C to over 760°C within seconds. Vallée presented the case at the SOL Foundation symposium in Italy in October 2025.