The St. George, Minnesota Photograph: Deputy Arthur Strauch's Rotating Saucer

Arthur Strauch was 47 in the autumn of 1965. A Second World War veteran, he had been a Sibley County deputy sheriff since 1960, and a 1961 injury had left him paralysed from the waist down. On Thursday, October 21, he was driving home to Gibbon, Minnesota, after a bow-hunting trip. With him were his wife Katherine, their 16-year-old son Gary, and two friends, Donald Grewe and his wife Retha, a registered nurse.

About 6:10 p.m. Just after sunset. The sky was clear and moonless, with Venus in the southeast. Two miles west and two miles north of St. George, Strauch spotted something to the northwest, hovering at an estimated 2,000 feet about a quarter mile away. He and Donald Grewe got out of the car. The others watched from inside.

Through 7x35 binoculars, Strauch saw a metallic silver-grey dome with four small portholes giving off yellow light, and a blue glow beneath them. "The outer ring was rotating counterclockwise," he reported. "The extreme outer edge of the saucer glowed a bright orange, and this part did not move or rotate." To the naked eye it was about the size of a quarter at arm's length. Katherine Strauch called it "much larger than the evening star."

At first there was no sound. The object moved into the wind for what appeared to be several hundred feet, then stopped for a few seconds. Its lights alternated from bright white to dull orange, turning it into a large orange ball. After about ten minutes the group drove half a mile, stopped, and kept watching.

Then it came toward them. Almost directly overhead. Grewe heard a "whistling whine." Strauch described a "high-pitched whining sound, as made by an electrical motor starting up." The object raced to the southeast and was gone within seconds. "It had such tremendous speed that it just disappeared into space," Strauch said.

As the object began to move, Strauch took a single frame on a Kodak Instamatic 804 loaded with Ektachrome X colour slide film. He also sketched what he had seen through the binoculars.

On November 25, 1965, he sent a letter, the slide and two enlarged prints to the USAF 934th Troop Carrier Group at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Col. Eric T. de Jonckheere replied in January 1966. The Air Force photo analysis, Report 65-59, was inconclusive and suggested examining the original film. The file entered the Project Blue Book records.

Philip J. Klass attributed the photo to "a plasma formation." A later review of the Blue Book files, published in SUNlite, called it the most interesting case of late October 1965, but said "the photograph, while interesting, only shows a bright light source." Because the witness never filled out the sighting form, the reviewer left it as insufficient information. No hoax allegation has surfaced.

The APRO Bulletin ran the story as "Deputy snaps UAO color photo." In January 1967, Frank B. Salisbury featured the case in BioScience. "Much detail was observed, several witnesses were present, ample time was available, a photograph was taken, and hence this instance meets the criteria nicely," he wrote. In July 1968 the photo and an APRO painting went before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics.