By Michelle Quigley
When you search the term “flying saucer” in The Palm Beach Post and Times historic archives, more stories about unidentified flying objects show up in 1952 than any other year.
That was the year Mrs. F. B. Holden of El Prado in West Palm Beach said she and her five children saw a “snow white and round” flying saucer, and hardware store clerk and Boy Scoutmaster D.S. “Sonny” DesVergers said he encountered an alien spacecraft that zapped him with a fireball in a wooded area off Military Trail near Lantana Road.
An enterprising car dealer picked up on the UFO fever and offered a free paint job — “two-tone if desired” — to the first flying saucer owner to bring his saucer in:
A few weeks later the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office identified the source of at least a few of the sightings as dragline excavator with a 90-foot lighted boom that was working late scooping muck west of Lake Worth:
Tags: ufos, unexplained events
Tuesday was April Fool’s Day. Our region abounds with stories that at least someone swears are true.
I got a note recently from Glenn Henderson, chief of our Stuart bureau and a longtime Treasure Coast resident. He says a “Cracker” rancher acquaintance told him about a grim discovery.
“He swears it’s legit. Says the bones were found in an Indian mound in western St. Lucie ‘awhile back’ and sent to Tally, where they determined they were (remains of ) cannibals.”
Not true, says Jerry Milanich of the University of Florida, the leading scholar of Florida’s long-extinct early inhabitants.
And from state archaeologist Ryan Wheeler: “I haven’t heard that one. Typically the tall tales have to do with ‘giant’ Indians, but there is no evidence for that either.”
There is precedent: Christopher Columbus told of man-eating people in the Caribbean.
Books showed drawings of natives with heads like dogs butchering and eating people.
And as Ryan Wheeler says, “tall tales” about Florida’s misty past abound.
Of course, the greatest is the “Fountain of Youth.” Scholars say there’s no evidence that Juan Ponce de Leon was even looking for it.
As late as the 1870s, a New York newspaper described Lake Okeechobee as cavernous, lined with 150-foot cliffs, and stalked by spiders as long as a child’s arm.
And one man has argued that the real Garden of Eden was in North Florida.
Then there are the usual: sea monsters, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, haunted mansions, U-boat crews coming ashore for cocktails, and Southwest Florida’s skunk ape and its North Florida cousin, the “Bardin Booger.”
Readers: Send us your wild tales. We’ll try to run them in future columns.
Tags: ufos, unexplained events
In honor of Halloween, Post Time’s October segments will feature legends and tales of the unexplained.
Last week was the story of the alleged 1952 encounter near Lantana that left hardware clerk and scoutmaster Sonny DesVergers dazed and burned.
After Post columnist Ron Wiggins revisited the story in 1997, interviewing two men who’d been scouts in DesVergers’ troop, Lyman Bradford of West Palm Beach called in to say he’d seen the UFO too. He said it landed in the back of his family’s property, 5 acres of palmetto scrub on Military Trail north of Okeechobee Boulevard.
Bradford, who was 7 at the time, said in 1997 that his dad, a volunteer fire chief, took photographs, which Air Force investigators later confiscated, warning the Bradfords to keep mum on what they’d seen.
Bradford recalls that investigators found a pattern of circular scorch marks at the landing site.
Nothing has come of the story since. DesVergers died at 70 in Apopka in April 1993.
Believers: Mutual UFO Network
Read more about it: UFOs Are Real: Here’s the Proof, by Ed Walters and Bruce MacCabee.
Skeptics: Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
Read more about it: The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups, by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr, and Joe Nickell.
Next week: The Bermuda Triangle
Tags: ufos, unexplained events
In honor of Halloween, Post Time’s four October segments will feature legends and tales of the unexplained in the history of Palm Beach County. This week: UFOs.
As with most of the country, South Florida has had many reports of sightings of unidentified flying objects. The most celebrated might well be the case of D.S. “Sonny” DesVergers.
In August 1952, the 30-year-old hardware store clerk and Boy Scout scoutmaster emerged burned and dazed from a wooded area off Military Trail near Lantana Road. He claimed he had encountered an alien spacecraft that zapped him with a fireball which came out of a domed hatch.
Post columnist Ron Wiggins revived the story in 1997, tracking down two men who’d been in Sonny’s troop.
The men said DesVergers was driving them home from a meeting when he saw some strange lights. He made a U-turn, grabbed a flashlight and machete from the trunk, and set off on foot, telling the boys to call the sheriff’s office if he wasn’t back in 10 minutes. They said they then saw circulating lights in the trees and ran to a nearby home.
A half-hour later, a deputy found DesVergers. The scoutmaster said he had looked up and had seen a silver disc that was 3 feet thick and 30 feet across.
“I heard hinges open and then they shot at me,” DesVergers said in the 1952 article.
Air Force investigators later said the clerk had a reputation for tall tales, but they couldn’t account for scorching at the site.
Next week: Another witness
Tags: ufos, unexplained events
