William Squyres and the Propeller-Rimmed Disc, Pittsburg, Kansas

The summer of 1952 was crowded with reports. In July, unknown targets appeared on radar over Washington, D.C. In September, Flatwoods, West Virginia would have its monster. Between the two, on a Monday morning in Crawford County, Kansas, a radio man set out for work. William "Bill" Squyres was a musician and staff member at KOAM, the radio station in Pittsburg. The local paper called him a "KOAM radio entertainer." He lived near Frontenac, about 1.5 miles north of the highway on the Yale road, and by one account he drove a new 1952 Jeep station wagon.

August 25, 1952. Dawn. Blue Book put the time at 5:35 a.m. Off the road, over a field, something hung in the air. Squyres described it as "two oval meat platters, placed edge to edge." It was dull aluminium. Blue Book Special Report #14 recorded it as about 75 feet long, 45 feet wide and 15 feet thick. The Pittsburg Daily Headlight put it in local terms. It was "as long as Broadway is wide downtown."

It hovered about 10 feet above the ground "with a slight rocking motion." Along its outer edge, a series of small propellers, spaced close together, were "revolving at high speed." A front window glowed blue, the light "fluctuating from dark to light." Through it, "the head and shoulders of a man could be seen," sitting motionless, facing forward. In the middle section, numerous windows showed "some kind of regular movement." "I definitely saw a human being through the window," Squyres said.

He stopped. He got out. He began to walk toward it. He was about 100 feet away when it left. It "ascended vertically with a sound like a large covey of quail starting to fly at the same time." The newspaper said its backwash "whipped the grass and weeds on the ground" as it "rose straight up to disappear in the sky."

Squyres reported to Pittsburg police at 06:43. Officers went to the site. They found no beaten-down grass and blamed the rain that had fallen that morning. The Daily Headlight ran the story the same day: "Flying Saucer Seen Hovering Near Ground Northeast of Frontenac, Radio Man Tells Police; Disappears In Sky." Papers in Neosho, Missouri, and Wichita followed. Frank Edwards interviewed Squyres on the radio, a recording that survives in Wendy Connors's archive.

Project Blue Book took the report. Its summary noted that "Vegetation showed signs of having been disturbed under the object." Soil samples, by one account, showed nothing unusual. The Air Force rated the witness's reliability as good and classified the case Unknown. In 1955 it appeared in Blue Book Special Report #14 among the reliable unknowns.

No one has alleged a hoax. J. Allen Hynek wrote that he had "puzzled long and hard over this case, one of the very early ones received by Blue Book." Hynek first leaned toward hallucination, then questioned such quick dismissals once he had seen similar reports. One conflict remains. The police found no flattened grass, while Blue Book recorded disturbed vegetation. Squyres himself, according to Patrick Gross, did not believe the craft was extraterrestrial. Yet he felt it could not be terrestrial either.

Gray Barker retold the story in 1956, and NICAP included it in The UFO Evidence. Jacques Vallée listed it as Case 98 in the landing catalogue of Passport to Magonia. Brad Sparks catalogued it as Case 795 among the Blue Book Unknowns. Hynek treated it as an early close encounter of the third kind. The propeller-rimmed disc of Pittsburg remains one of the early occupant cases Blue Book never explained.