Monticello Rectangle of Red Lights, Wisconsin 1964

Spring 1964. Three weeks later, a police officer in Socorro, New Mexico, would report a landing that made headlines. In southern Wisconsin, a quieter case had already reached the files of Project Blue Book.

Monticello is a small village in Green County. County Highway C runs west from it, toward Argyle. On the night of Friday, April 3, one car on that road carried four people. The Air Force list names Mr. and Mrs. R. Wold. He was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Another account, drawn from Thomas M. Olsen's 1966 compilation, names the driver as Mr. Rossing, travelling with his wife, his mother-in-law and his 12-year-old sister-in-law. Every version agrees on four people in one car.

It was about 9:00 p.m. A dark night. Roughly a mile west of Monticello, they saw two blinking red lights in the distance, at 11 o'clock. They thought they might be police cars. At one point they feared an airliner was crashing.

But the lights were too high above the ground. The object came closer. It slowed. In one catalogue's words: "The object slows down to a hover behind some telephone wires about 300 feet from the car."

They stopped the car. Now they could see four red lights in a rectangular formation. One white light sat in front of the others, or above them, depending on the account. No underlying structure. The Blue Book summary called them "Four huge red lights in a rectangular formation, with a white light above." The Olsen version adds many smaller lights and green lights at times. And a name for the whole thing. A flying Christmas tree. Its regular geometry suggested a solid body. It seemed to take an interest in the car.

Then the object passed slowly beyond them. The driver turned the car around and gave chase, at up to about 50 mph. The lights tilted and moved quickly off toward Monticello, then disappeared to the east. The record card gives three to four minutes, the case summary five to fifteen, and the INTCAT account about ten.

The report reached Project Blue Book. The file holds a witness sketch, a record card, a case summary and a letter from a Warren Lane, who apparently took the phone report. It also holds a letter from J. Allen Hynek, the project's scientific consultant, to Maj. Hector Quintanilla, who ran Blue Book. The witnesses were interviewed. Hynek and Quintanilla left the case as Unidentified.

The witnesses' names were blacked out in the released microfilm. Don Berliner copied them from the unredacted files at Maxwell AFB in January 1974.

No hoax claim has ever surfaced. No published source has offered a conventional explanation. None of the accounts records any sound. No photograph, film or radar record of the object is known, and no contemporary newspaper story has been found.

Monticello lives on in the catalogues. Thomas M. Olsen gave it two pages in The Reference for Outstanding UFO Reports in 1966. Jacques Vallée listed it in Passport to Magonia as case 594. NICAP carries it in its 1964 chronology, and Brad Sparks lists it as Case 1557 in his Blue Book Unknowns catalogue. What remains is a sketch, a few typed pages, and four people on a dark country road who watched a rectangle of red lights hang beyond the telephone wires.