Sighting record / 1957
November 6, 1957. Merom, Indiana. Rene Gilham was eating his evening meal when he went outside. The family across the street was already staring at the sky. Above them hung a circular thing, thirty to forty feet across. Motionless. Silent. Then brilliant beams of blue light began projecting downward from its centre, half a second at a time. For about ten minutes Gilham stood beneath them. The object made a sizzling sound, like a high speed electric motor. And away it went. By Friday his face was swelling. By Saturday he was in hospital, with burns his doctors compared to a welding torch. Air Force officers came to question him, and advised him not to talk about it.
November 1957. Sputnik 2 had just been launched. Days earlier, the Levelland, Texas, case had set off a wave of sightings across the United States, and some of the reports that followed involved burns. Merom is a small town in Sullivan County, Indiana, about 25 miles south of Terre Haute. Rene Gilham lived on its outskirts. He was 33, an ironworker employed in Terre Haute.