Additional Witness to New Richmond UFO
Forty years after the incident occurred, one of the original witnesses of the New Richmond UFO sighting has come forward and corroborated the story. Troy Schmidt read our write-up on the UFO sighting on UFOdays.net. He spoke up on social media when another reader expressed skepticism about the events described in the story. Schmidt remembers the incident vividly, and he provided the map (below) to indicate the exact location of the event and the movement of the object.
The original sighting took place on September 4, 1979 around 7:45 PM when three young men from Hudson, WI spotted “a small, silvery dome-like or disc-shaped” object hovering 10-20 feet in the air over a field near a turkey farm off County Road A. They described it as “shining brightly … polished stainless steel,” 2-3 feet in diameter. It seemed to wobble as it moved. The young men stopped their truck and one of them left the vehicle to try to get a closer look, but as he approached the object, it flew off. Additional vehicles stopped on the road to watch. CUFOS investigator Bradley Ayers asked the young men if they could identify the other witnesses in those cars, or even describe the vehicles they were driving because he hoped for additional witnesses who could corroborate the story. To his disappointment, the young men admitted that they did not speak with the other drivers or get their names, instead, they immediately drove off in pursuit of the little flying saucer. Ayers said the three Hudson men were “so captivated” by what they were seeing that they didn’t pay any attention to the other two vehicles. Read the whole story of their sighting here.
Hoping to find the additional witnesses, Ayers gave the story to the New Richmond News, and they published it in the September 27, 1979 edition under the headline, “Other witnesses sought in UFO sighting near NR.” The article contained contact information for Ayers.
So far as we know, the New Richmond News article did not produce those additional witnesses for which Ayers hoped, but it did bring another September 4 New Richmond sighting of the same or a similar object to attention. Read about that sighting here.
When UFOdays.net revisited the story on its anniversary in September 2019, Troy Schmidt read our post and contacted us through our Facebook Page. He said, “My grandmother and I were behind the truck mentioned in this story. We were headed home from New Richmond on [Co. Rd.] A. I remember it crossed the road just west of the turkey farms and flew past the WIXK radio tower (pictured above). We turned down [Co. Rd.] G to follow it and it was gone.”
We saw what appeared to be a large Frisbee hovering over a field.
Schmidt provided more details to UFOdays.net for this writeup. “I was seven years old. My grandmother and I lived in Boardman and were on our way home from New Richmond. We saw what appeared to be a large Frisbee hovering over a field on the north side of County Road A next to the turkey farm. It flew across the road in front of us.”
Like the three young men from Hudson, Schmidt and his grandmother attempted to pursue the object but quickly lost sight of it. “We followed along A past the WIXK radio tower. We turned down Cty Rd G to follow it, but it was gone by that time.”
What did Schmidt and his grandmother think they were chasing? Because of the small size of the object, the idea that it might be a vehicle or spacecraft did not seem plausible. Instead, Schmidt says, “I remember that it wasn’t very big, so we always assumed it was someone with a remote control toy of some kind.”
The remote-control toy theory seems unlikely. Today’s drones simply did not yet exist in 1979, and, as far as we know, no such flying toy did either. But reports of small UFOs such as the type and size described by Schmidt and the other witnesses are not uncommon. The files of UFOlogists contain many similar sightings of small saucer-shaped objects. Moreover, this sighting took place in the context of a whole series of local encounters with flying discs and nocturnal lights, such as the incident at Balsam Lake the previous day or Dresser on the following day..
Schmidt remembers seeing the story appear in the New Richmond paper, and he even kept a copy of the article as a souvenir, but he does not know if his grandmother ever contacted Ayers to follow up as the newspaper requested. “I don’t remember if she reported it to anyone else,” Schmidt said. If the notes from Bradley Ayers’ original investigations can ever be obtained, we might learn more.
Schmidt provided the Google Map above with the following explanation:
We saw [the object] hovering over a field on the north side of Cty Rd A (red circle) next to the turkey farm (blue circle). The red flag on the Google map isn’t the turkey farm, but was (and maybe still is) owned by the Stork family. Cty Rd G runs parallel to the Cemstone property on the bottom of the map.
Click here to let Google Maps show you around the location where the sighting occurred.
The New Richmond sightings were part of a series of a 1979 UFO Flap in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin. Read the whole story and learn about the former CIA operative who investigated the sightings.
Follow UFOdays.net for more great UFO stories. Like us on Facebook.
UFO Days and UFO Stories 