Larned to Abilene Lights and the Pawnee County Sheriff Report, Kansas, 1966

Central Kansas, summer 1966. US-56 runs northeast from Larned toward Great Bend and Lyons. That July, the Great Bend Tribune carried reports of strange lights in the sky. On July 25, the paper counted 18 area residents, from Great Bend to Larned, who had reported sightings over the previous year.

The story survives today through a single retelling. The Tribune's "Out of the Morgue" column, which reprints stories from the paper's archive, revisited the July 1966 coverage around October 2018. No second independent account has been found.

July 13, 1966. About 10 p.m. Larned Police reported an object emitting a bluish-green light. It was heading in a northeasterly direction.

They were not alone. Deputy Nate Sparks saw it near US-56 and Dundee Road. John Liston was driving west on Bissell's Point Road when his wife, Ruth Liston, spotted it. Lyons Police reported an object north of Lyons. And County Attorney Brock McPherson, returning from Topeka, saw what appeared to be the same object near Abilene.

Larned, Dundee, Lyons, Abilene. The reports run southwest to northeast across roughly 120 miles. The paper's verdict was brief. "It was not learned what the object was but all descriptions matched."

On July 25, Tribune reporter Carol E. McWilliams asked readers a question. "Have you seen any UFOs lately?" Her round-up carried the strangest account of the summer. Pawnee County Sheriff Roland Reese and Deputy "Tiny" Ness were out in a rural area after watermelon thieves. In the distance they saw a zig-zagging red light. It came toward them. Then it hovered over their car, at about 500 feet. For a few minutes it stayed there. Then it sped west.

Bright lights, zig-zagging through the night sky, hovering over areas, and then darting away. That, the paper wrote, was the common report. In May 1966, Patrolman Larry Schenkel and Larned high school students Barry Chesebro, Butch Strain and Sally Strain watched several lights at the Larned drive-in. The lights moved in several directions, they said, then darted off.

On the night of July 26, the witness was the Tribune's own photographer. Jim Lewellen, at Hoisington, first took the object for a shooting star, until it came almost to a complete stop at about 400 to 500 feet. It was, he said, "like no aircraft I have ever seen." He had no camera, so he made a sketch. A little later that night, Tribune employee Mrs. Richard Latas saw a similar object with her husband at the Larned drive-in.

No official inquiry is known. Secondary indexes of Project Blue Book cases list no Kansas report for July 1966, and the NICAP chronology for that year has none either, although the full Blue Book microfilm has not been searched. No photographs, radar returns or physical traces were reported. No hoax has been alleged, and no conventional explanation was ever published.

One possible reading, offered by a researcher rather than any source of the time, is a bright fireball. A coloured light seen from points far apart, moving steadily in one direction, fits that pattern. It suits the July 13 reports. It does not account for a red light that hovered over a sheriff's car, or lights that zig-zagged over a drive-in. The case remains thin on paper and rich in names, and the original newspaper pages have yet to be checked.