The Kenilworth Police and the "Huge Ball" over Lake Michigan

Kenilworth is a small village on Chicago's North Shore, set beside Lake Michigan. By the autumn of 1966 the region had already had its share of UFO headlines. That March, the Michigan "swamp gas" flap had been the year's big Great Lakes UFO story.

Saturday, September 24, 1966. About 4:20 a.m. Kenilworth police officers Al Largo and Clyde Fazenbaker saw a brilliant, unidentified object in the sky over the lake, east of the shoreline. Largo gave the description. "A huge ball, black in the center and surrounded by a white smoke." Police in the shoreline suburbs saw it too, around 4:30 a.m.

They were not alone. Airline pilots reported to the control tower at O'Hare Airport that they saw "a brilliant light at an estimated 4,000-foot altitude." They placed it some 100 miles east-northeast of Chicago.

The story ran in the Sunday American of Chicago on September 25, 1966, under the headline "Scores See Object Fly Over Lake." The lead spoke of four persons. The headline said scores. The article never settled the difference. Nor did it say how the object moved, how fast, or for how long. Only the headline used the word "Fly," and that was the headline writer's word, not a witness's.

NASA answered in the same article. A spokesman, not named, said "a rocket was launched at 4:13 a.m. Chicago time at Wallops Island, Va." It had "released a 'dust' cloud for observing and measuring electrical fields and wind motion." Between 310 and 570 miles aloft, the release "caught the rays of the rising sun and reflected them." A Chicago weather bureau meteorologist offered another idea. Atmospheric refraction, helped by the lake surface acting as a mirror.

The rocket story holds up. A Wallops launch log lists a Javelin sounding rocket on September 24, 1966, at 09:13 GMT, on a Max-Planck barium release mission with an apogee of 930 km. That is 4:13 a.m. Central Daylight Time. NASA's own report, SP-264, describes joint barium release launches from Wallops Island that September, flown with the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching. Their payloads made artificial clouds in the ionosphere and the exosphere.

A cloud more than 500 km up would sit in sunlight well before dawn, visible to people still standing in the dark. Barium clouds were commonly described as glowing balls. And a very distant bright object is easy to misjudge, which may account for the pilots' 4,000 feet.

The case left a small footprint. It is missing from the NICAP chronology for 1966, which jumps from September 23 to September 26. No Project Blue Book file has been found for it. Its only home online is Patrick Gross's press archive.

Yet it belongs to a pattern. In January 1967, numerous reports of a glowing, bluish-green object near Vincennes, Indiana, were identified by NICAP as "a barium cloud launched from a rocket fired from Wallops island." Before sunrise, an experiment hundreds of miles up looked like something else entirely to the people watching from below.