Through the winter of 1973 this Ozarks town lived in reports of lights: a school basketball bus saw them, so did the sheriff, farmers and the pilot at the local airfield. They hung over Clearwater Lake, ran low along the roads and, by several accounts, killed the headlights of cars. Harley Rutledge, professor of physics at Southeast Missouri State, came to look into it and stayed two years: he brought spectrometers, telescopes and magnetometers and worked in the field. His report, Project Identification, appeared in 1981 and remains one of the few attempts to measure such lights with instruments rather than to interview witnesses. Rutledge reached no final conclusion.

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Ruwa and the School Yard

On 16 September 1994, during break at the private Ariel School in this Zimbabwean town, some sixty-two children between six and twelve said they had seen a silver object down beyond the fence and, beside it, a figure in a tight black suit with large eyes. No teacher was in the yard at the time. A few days later the Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, who studied such accounts, spoke to the children individually. The recordings and the drawings survive. Mack did not claim the event had happened; he claimed the children described it as something they had lived through. It remains the best-known case in Africa and one of the most argued-over anywhere.