Do UFOs like south Louisiana best?
I went through it quickly, but I didn’t see anything in the newly released federal Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) report about the sighting in Ville Platte in 1950 or a handful of others in south Louisiana that set people to wondering and talking.
I don’t know when or why the government decided to rename Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), or even when or why the things known back in the day simply as “flying saucers” got that fancy name, but we seem to have seen a lot of them in the Cold War days of the 1950s. That may have been because we paid more attention to things in the sky. Big airplanes were still a curiosity, and small and fast ones caught the attention of folks who feared the Russians had finally decided to bomb our oil fields and rice mills.
The Gazette reported on the object/phenomena/ saucer that “startled a large number of individuals” in Ville Platte on its front page on June 29, 1950. Some viewers said the thing hovered directly over the town but several others said “the strange sight” was probably over Point Blue, which is just east of Mamou.
“One person who viewed the thing with binoculars reported that it looked like “an old-fashioned dipper, with smoke or vapor emanating from the handle,” according to the news account. “He claimed the object remained stationary for a long time and then just disappeared.”
If little green men were coming to visit us, they seemed to like Louisiana. During the summer of 1949 there were so many sightings that Adras Laborde, who later became managing editor of the Alexandria Town Talk, planned a convention of saucer sighters in his town, partly because of a sighting that also had a Ville Platte connection.
According to another Gazette report, Mrs. V. Dardeau of Ville Platte and her sister, Mrs. Edward Wolff, were sitting on the Wolff front lawn in Alexandria in July 1949, “when they became aware of a saucer zooming overhead.” They said it was the size and shape of a plate, flew lower and slower than an airplane, made no sound, and had a yellow light in the center. The Town Talk’s editors made fun of the spate of sightings, reporting on July 7 that “flying saucers were absent from the skies over Alexandria last night after making an appearance the night before.”
Still, there was another saucer sighting in broad daylight just four days later, on July 11, over Prairie Hayes in Acadia Parish. N. L. Martin and his son Gene saw two of them about 9 a.m. Martin told the Crowley Post-Signal they were “of an aluminum color and kept glinting in the sunlight” and that they “would spin in a clockwise motion and reverse themselves.”
Newspapers reported there was “no credible explanation” for any of the sightings, but several people who said they saw smoke or vapor trailing behind the 1950 Ville Platte/Point Blue UFO may have given a clue.
That was the hint that helped explain a sighting in October 1951, when the Lafayette Advertiser reported, “Many honest and sober residents reported seeing an eerie stationary ‘red pencil of light’ hovering over the horizon at night, and no one seems to have a plausible explanation for it.”
Henry Mullins, who was on duty at the Lafayette airport, said “the ‘pencil’ was not horizontal but up and down, and it had no base.” He said it was visible for an hour and then just “faded away.”
A viewer in Abbeville described it as “about 3 feet long and about as wide as a baseball bat.” Some folks in Franklin “thought it was either the Russians doing something or the result of some atomic test in New Mexico.”
The phenomenon was the talk of the town for several days until an airman who flew military jets came home on leave from Korea. He explained that these newfangled aircraft left something called a “vapor trail” that often picked up reflections from the setting sun or even from moonlight. That mysterious “red pencil of light,” and likely the Ville Platte vapor-trailing whatever, were a part of our introduction into the Jet Age.
But that doesn’t explain all the Anomalous Phenomena that still seem to pop up from time to time in south Louisiana and Evangeline Parish still seems to be a favored place.
As recently as March 2022, an unidentified Ville Platte resident reported to the National UFO Reporting Center that “I was looking at the Stars and I saw a large triangle going NE direction at about 4500 [feet] and there was no sound at all. It [was] a greenish Gray color and there was no lights on it.”
He said he watched it for ten minutes and saw no vapor trail.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at [email protected] or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
