www.greatfallstribune.com/ufo

Folks have been reporting UFO sightings from all around the Big Sky State since the early 1950s.

Here's a look at some of the more recent sightings, which were submitted by Tribune readers:

What I saw wasn't much, but it stuck with me in a big way. I didn't even share it with my father until 1995, and we have both been following sightings and cattle phenomena for years.

My parents' home is on Clark Avenue in Great Falls and their kitchen window used to have a wonderful view of the Anaconda Smokestack. I wish I had written down a date but at the time I was more concerned with burying what I saw deep in my mind.

I was up early one fall Sunday morning during the early '80s. At the time, I was in my early teens. Serving as an altar boy for the early mass at Saints Peter and Paul quite regularly, I often found myself making a quick breakfast — Cream of Wheat that morning. It was cooking on the stove as I stood in front of the window and admired the stack.

What I saw didn't last more than three or four seconds. The objects appeared about the size of a slightly elongated pencil lead. One of them came in from the east and the other from the west. They passed each other almost due north of the stack, and traveled on until it appeared they circled back toward one another. They passed one another again, and once again it appeared they circled back toward each other. This last time, however, they didn't pass each other. They stopped right next to each other, as I could see a small space between them, and with speed that I can only call incredible, they shot straight north toward Canada.

Being around aircraft all of my life I know what they can do, and what I saw was no conventional aircraft.

— Erik Schabel, Riverbank, Calif.

This summer, July or August, my boyfriend C.J. Aimsback and I took six of my little cousins swimming. We went to my uncle Joe Bear and auntie Sarah's house, one mile north, past Twins Lake, and asked (Sarah) if she wanted to come down to the river.

After swimming for hours, Sarah said to come up and eat. It must have been 5:30 or 6 p.m. when we went inside to eat, and then we sat around visiting. By this time, night had fallen. As we were getting ready to leave, I told C.J. to go start the truck and he yelled, "Lisa, come here." We all ran outside and saw big lights — red, blue and white ... or was it green? — in the sky above my uncle Sassy's house, and then it moved right next to Joe Bear's house. They just sat there for about five minutes turning and turning in circles, then took off really fast. There were three of them. We watched them play in the sky for a few more minutes, then watched them go into Badger Canyon.

The cops on the scanner when we got home said they were planes. But, what do they know? They weren't as close as we were.

— Lisa Mae Little Dog, Browning

I went grocery shopping with my mother-in-law and father-in-law in Cut Bank. We left Cut Bank around 7:30 p.m. and saw this blinking red light that looked like a Mercy Flight at the height a helicopter would be. Because of its speed we started to think it was moving too fast for a plane or helicopter. In seconds it went all the way across the sky, out by Old Agency.

Twice in one year... yeah, I do think little green men are taking over our big blue sky.

— Lisa Mae Little Dog, Browning

It was a warm summer night in 1976. My husband and I had just left the local movie theater in Cut Bank. It was still light out at 9 p.m. as we drove up Railroad Street to the Point Drive-In for an ice cream cone.

As we neared our destination we could see something huge, long and cigar-shaped hovering over Tank Hill. In those days our craft just did not hover. There were colored lights on the bottom of this craft that sort of glowed off and on. It seemed like there were windows also, but I could not exactly tell what I was seeing.

We stepped right in the middle of the street and got out of our car to get a better look. I noticed the people in the car behind us did the same. All of a sudden, the strange craft zoomed toward the airport at a tremendous speed and hovered there.

We jumped back in our car and headed through town toward the airport to see what the ominous-looking UFO was doing. It had moved so fast that our eyes could barely make out that it went toward the airport. Before we could get there it suddenly zoomed up into the atmosphere and out of sight.

At that time, there were minutemen missiles being put into the ground 50 miles away near Conrad. We had heard stories of strange aircraft and cattle mutilations in the area.

I don't know what I saw. It could have been an experimental aircraft from government sources or a real UFO. For 1976, it was truly an amazing sight to see.

— Nadine Akkerman, Havre

The Washington-based National UFO Reporting Center is dedicated to the collection and dissemination of objective UFO data. The NUFORC Web site, http://www.nuforc.org/, has an extensive database that files sightings according to state, event date, shape of UFO and date posted.

The site includes about 235 sightings from Montana, each listed with an event date, city, UFO shape and a brief summary. In most cases, the dates are approximated. NUFORC adds comments at the bottom of some listings, noting incidents that may have been a twinkle star or other celestial body.

Here's a sampling of reports from Big Sky Country:

I was stuck outside of the house waiting for my girlfriend and her family to come back home. We live in a residential area near the airport, and Malmstrom Air Force Base is about 10 or so miles away.

Around 9:30 p.m., I saw two shapes outlined under the clouds — pitch black, boomerang shape, no lights, not a sound. At an arm's distance they would be about the size of my hand. One was slightly smaller, or further away. I have no idea how high the clouds were that night, but I felt they were close.

I didn't think much of the sighting at first. There were lots of large birds flying south and I had seen them in the daytime flying in similar formation. But I kept my eye in the sky.

About five minutes later, a few more went nearly overhead — no sound, same shape. But these were not birds or crazy hang-gliders. They seemed to be going too slow to stay in the sky.

After that I saw something that made me scream ... and cuss just a bit. A triangle shape, with two rows of lights on all sides came just over a neighbor's house, about 200 feet down the road. Silent. Then it stopped completely and stood up as to show off. It sat for maybe three or four seconds and faded into the stars.

— Great Falls, 10/5/05

First incident: At 21:55 I was outside and noticed a light in the sky moving. It looked just like a star. There were no flashing strobe lights on it, just a solid light. I watched the object move toward my location. I then went and got my wife to come out and look at it. My wife and I observed this object go directly above our location. Once it started passing by I noticed another object that looked identical. The new object was going towards the other object. It looked like they were about to collide because the new object appeared to pass right in front of the other. The objects continued their course for another minute, and then both disappeared. There was no sound throughout the incident.

Second incident: I went back outside to look at the sky again, this time with my son who is 10 years old. At 22:25 my son and I noticed an object that looked just like the one I saw 30 minutes earlier — just a solid light that looked like the other stars in the sky. It made no noise. As my son and I watched this object go overhead again I noticed another object again that looked identical. This time both objects were parallel to each other. As we watched these objects, we noticed that one of the lights got extremely bright for less than five seconds, then went back to its normal setting. The objects were observed for another minute then again disappeared.

— Great Falls, 9/10/05

This is actually a case of two separate incidents exactly one week apart. A family friend is a landowner in central Montana near Harlowton. As such, he invited my family up to his place (great fishing and hunting) any time our hearts desired. Over the years my brothers and I became intimately familiar with every canyon and creek on the ranch. We also began to realize that a lot more seemed to be going on there than at first met the eye and everything culminated in the events I will describe.

On this particular evening, my brother and I had just exited a thick patch of trees after a long day of deer hunting. It was nearly dark, the first stars were out and we had about a mile walk back to our truck. Being aware of anomalies in the area, we were always on the lookout for ANYTHING out of the ordinary.

Upon looking to the eastern sky, we both saw three "stars" that seemed brighter than the rest. These lights were stationary and seemed to be regular stars out in space. We then continued on our hike to the truck and went home — nothing unusual. This is where it starts getting strange.

One week later almost to the minute, my brother and I emerged from the same patch of trees after hunting all day. As we again surveyed our surroundings, we noticed the three stars from the week previous in the exact same place. Only this time they were a different color (orange) and seemed to be moving slightly in conjunction with each other. Really interested now, we watched as the formation of lights gradually picked up speed coming in roughly our direction (west). We then realized that we were in a bad situation and started for the truck at a fast walk. Keeping an eye on the object, we observed it change to a more northerly direction and fly into a low cloud formation. By this point we could tell that this was no ordinary aircraft (as a student pilot with 10 years in aviation, I'm familiar with nearly all known a/c).

The object was close enough for us to see a structured triangular fuselage, dark in color. It made absolutely no sound. Upon the object entering the cloud, there was a flash of light similar to lightning but fluorescent green in color. This was immediately followed by the object emerging from the cloud in roughly a 10-degree bank. As the object made it's way clear of the cloud, we observed the "cloud" literally change shape until it appeared like a tornado but horizontal to the earth, not vertical, with the "foot" of the funnel pointing toward the object. At this point we broke into a sprint for the truck. As we ran, the object literally DRAGGED this "tornado" to the west. We could see that the whole eastern horizon was black now. Just as we reached the truck we were hit by huge gusts of wind and debris from the east and visibility was around two feet. Concerned now, we piled into the truck to find that this reliable vehicle was completely dead (it was just like in the movies!). With the nearest help miles away, we readied our rifles (made us feel better) and waited. Total elapsed time so far was approximately six minutes.

The dust storm and confusion lasted about 10 minutes, and then the wind stopped and the dust settled. As visibility improved and things became quiet again, we could see objects — lots of them. Besides the original triangle a/c, which was now making a 40-50nm circular flight pattern, we could see discs trailing the triangle, all moving independently. We were now using our 10x50 Zeiss binoculars and could see that the discs were definitely metallic in nature. The most impressive object however was a gigantic cylinder that descended from nowhere then hovered in an approximate 500-foot angle around a 1000 yards distance over a field.

Peter, I swear to you on my father's grave that along each side of this thing were "windows" in which it seemed like there was movement! It was around two football fields in length, approximately 700-1,000 feet in diameter, and bright silver in color. The front end glowed blue, intensifying the farther one got from the center, and the rear end glowed red in the same manner. What drew your eye though was the yellow and orange strobe exactly centered on the bottom. We watched this object in pure horror for about an hour until it ascended straight up and out of sight. It did not disappear in a split second but rose rapidly taking less than a minute to completely vanish.

Well, back to the other objects, which were by now in the company of several F-15's. It was very easy to differentiate between the jets and the other objects. The F-15's flew around for about a half hour, then headed northwest in a tight formation and the triangle followed close behind, all disappearing over some hills. We never saw them again. The discs continued to maneuver throughout the area. We had pretty much resigned ourselves to our fate by this point and now felt the worst was over. It all became rather entertaining by midnight. We spent a cold night in the truck, falling asleep eventually watching these discs and their erratic flight.

— Harlowton, 11/24/93

I was up late reading, had just let my dog inside, when she wanted to go out very badly. I opened the door, and she indicated that I follow her. Once outside, I heard the horses in our pasture, and the cattle across the road just going nuts with fear, and all of the outside neighborhood dogs barking. My dog was looking straight up, snarling, and had her fangs bared. I looked up and saw a single green light. I watched it for just a few seconds, then I looked down and said to my dog, "I certainly hope you are seeing what I am seeing." When I looked back up, the light was gone, the horses and dogs in the area were quiet.

At that time, this was a very rural area. The next day, I questioned a couple of neighbors, and none of them had heard anything. I was unable to determine how close this light was, there were no reference points and there was absolutely no sound but for the animals.

— Lolo, 3/15/78

After a basketball game at the Butte Civic Center, eyewitnesses reported seeing an object described as "flying car" in the air. After awhile it appeared to explode as if it was a fireworks display and disappeared.

— Butte, 1/15/69

On the outskirts of Malmstrom Air Force Base, my parents, two sisters and two guests of my parents, my girlfriend and myself were on a cookout when seven saucer-shaped crafts flying in formation cruised across the sky. My father was a 22-year weather observer and guessed their altitude at 12,000 to 15,000 feet and their speed around 2,000 to 6,000 miles an hour. No alert from SAC at Malmstrom? They were traveling from southwest to northeast.

— Great Falls, 6/12/60

From June 1956 to August 1959, we were stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base. I don't recall which year it was, but in the summer during a baseball game, three balls of light came down and bounced around on the field and then suddenly took off. It was witnessed by hundreds of fans and it was big news at the time. They said it was ball lightning but it didn't go over with the locals who were use to Northern Lights, etc.

— Great Falls, 6/15/57