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Wednesday morning, 7 August 1957
The newspaper record: The best-documented early Fort Wayne case is a newspaper case. The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette of Saturday morning, 10 August 1957, ran the story under the headline "Pinpointing the Mystery," with a photograph of Don Semancik, meteorologist at the Fort Wayne Weather Bureau, pointing out where the "star" he saw Wednesday morning had appeared in relation to the horizon. As the paper reported it — the clipping is preserved in Loren E. Gross's UFOs: A History — after the unidentified object was sighted in various parts of the state, Semancik watched it for four hours as it changed from red to blue to white within about five seconds; military authorities and Butler University astronomers had been unable to determine just what the object was; and hundreds of persons also reported the strange light in the sky. Wednesday of that week was 7 August 1957. The case, as the contemporary record gives it, is a bright, long-duration, color-changing light, watched by a professional weather observer and reported by hundreds, which the two authorities the paper consulted — the military and a university astronomy department — did not identify at the time. No later official disposition of the case was found in the sources reached.
A caution on retelling: This case circulates in the modern UFO literature misdated by a decade. Dennett's 2024 Fort Wayne compilation tells of a Fort Wayne meteorologist who watched a UFO for no less than four hours, flashing red and blue and white, seen by hundreds, which military officers and astronomers were unable to identify — and dates it 10 August 1967. Every distinctive element matches the Journal-Gazette story of August 1957, including the newspaper's own publication date of 10 August; the compilation appears to have taken the day and month from the paper and the decade from nowhere. The case is entered here under 1957, on the contemporary newspaper's evidence, and the 1967 retelling is noted so that the two are not counted as separate events.
Sources:
- Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, Saturday morning, 10 August 1957, "Pinpointing the Mystery" — clipping reproduced in Loren E. Gross, UFOs: A History, 1957: August–September (Supplemental Notes, 2003).
- Preston Dennett, "UFOs in Your Hometown," episode four (2024) — the same case retold under 10 August 1967; the conflict is stated in the entry.