Most anyone worth sharing a campfire with has at least one tale of mystery to bring out in conversation. Every neighborhood has at least a little lore behind it, and usually at least one person willing to testify that a face can be seen from the abandoned house of sordid history down the road. Talking to others about one’s brushes with the unexplained requires a certain willingness to make yourself vulnerable to ridicule, especially if the story itself lacks the spice to be entertaining.
Richland native Anita Irene Dawson Kramer Heckel has seen a lot in almost a century of life, and she’s recently decided to open up more about her own run ins with the unknown.
Some of her closer friends and acquaintances may already have an inkling of the story she has to tell. “Lights in the Sky” are common when it comes to uncommon experiences, and while ghost stories might be entertaining for their fright value, many tend to dismiss tales of Unidentified Flying Objects. Indeed, even at the height of UFO popularity during the Cold War, the association of such stories with the less-reputable conspiracy crowd generally keeps them tamped down in polite society. Military personnel and pilots, the most likely candidates for first-hand witnesses, were particularly loathe to report the strange things seen on duty.
Indeed, Anita’s first UFO story comes second-hand from her late husband, Keith Kramer. A committed skeptic, Kramer was a second lieutenant in charge of a small radar station in Vienna, Ohio during the early 1950s. After one haunting midnight shift, he came home shaken and grew irate when Anita repeatedly asked after his health. He eventually relented, explaining that an unidentified object appeared on his radar, seemingly moving under its own power but refusing to respond to hails.
He scrambled fighters from three directions to intercept the intruder and pilots reported a vapor trail from the object. However, Kramer then watched as the mysterious visitor’s radar signature rapidly gained altitude in apparent straight vertical thrust, making its escape into the sky and beyond. Sputnik would not fly for some years yet, leaving few candidates for an easy man-made explanation. Kramer filed a report with his superiors and was purportedly told not to discuss the matter. He passed away in 1976, and Anita kept his confidence in the decades to come.
However, the federal government’s approach to such things has softened a great deal in recent years. Now referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, the Department of Defense released a report last year on its analysis of 144 such accounts collected from 2004 to 2021. Of those, only one was definitively identified as a large, deflating balloon. The rest remained left to speculation.
The stigma against military personnel and other skywatchers coming forward with evidence, or personal stories, has also spurred a new wave of fresh reports. A Navy task force’s total load of official cases continues to rise as older incidents filter in from past witnesses. Indiana’s own Andre Carson, Representative for the Seventh District, oversaw a House Intelligence subcommittee hearing last year.
“Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat and they need to be treated that way,” said Carson. “For too long, the stigma associated with UAPs has gotten in the way of good, intelligent analysis.”
With the “official” stigma against UFOs slackening somewhat, Anita has decided to be more open about her own experiences. Over the course of 2001, Anita encountered a string of unexplained lights and objects in the skies above southern Indiana. Cell phones at the time did not double as cameras, or much of anything beyond a flashlight. Fortunately, Anita did have a video camera loaded with tape and managed to record some mysterious lights in the skies above the Troy hills, close to Waupaca Foundry.
During further review, she took several photos of the television screen to capture specific still shots of the action. A decidedly odd practice in the age of screen shots and direct streaming, but hardly out of place for those who got their “free” music with a tape recorder and a radio before the rise and fall of Napster.
Naturally, the photographic equipment Anita was working with at the time could not match her own eyes, but her scrapbook does contain several noteworthy anomalies. Spherical and oblong lights of varying colors, contrasted against the Hoosier twilight. More descriptive were Anita’s own notes on the object she observed the Sunday night of February 10, 2001.
At around 9 p.m. that evening, her husband alerted her to a series of planes passing by a north-facing window of their home. Anita saw no planes when she came to check, but did see what appeared at first glance to be a star. That explanation seemed to lose credence when the light began to move, twist and spin.
Her husband posited the object could be Mir, the old Soviet space station. At the time, Mir was at the end of its operational life and was, in fact, only a little more than a month from destruction in a staged decommissioning via re-entry. That explanation was enough for him, but Anita grabbed her video camera and went outside for a closer look.
The object continued to gyrate in the sky and eventually came into view. The camera failed to capture everything Anita managed to make out, but she quickly noted every detail she could.
“I was shocked beyond belief when all at once the bright star turned into a silver disk,” she said. “For a few seconds I got a detailed view of it. I saw it much better than the camera filmed it. There were two raised lines through the middle portion of the bottom of the ball. There were markings, or it appeared, hieroglyphics in a semi circle across the top and bottom of the disk. The disk was not smooth. It looked like a piece of tin that someone had battered from behind with a sledge hammer.”
The object was accompanied by orange and red lights, followed by flashes of white and blue. Anita had trouble keeping eyes on the object, which seemed to disappear and reappear, jolt from position to position in a matter of seconds and finally depart straight up and out of sight. She gave up the hunt around 10:15 p.m. and went to bed, but found herself unable to sleep.
Convinced she was hallucinating, Anita reviewed her tape. Realizing that many details were not picked up by the rapidly maneuvering object and its kaleidoscope of lights, she committed every detail she could to writing.
Attempts to share her story and evidence, such as it was, proved disappointing. Most family members were outright dismissive, a few others offered only a feigned, if polite, interest.
A few days later, she decided to check the internet for resources on her experience. It’s hard to believe now, but the internet was still a rather small, if wild, place back then. A UFO search online could take someone just about anywhere, to many websites that no longer exist. Anita happened upon the web page for the National UFO Reporting Center, a non-profit established in 1974 to document, and if possible corroborate or debunk such sightings. On Friday, February 14, she got a call from NUFORC Director Peter Davenport (still listed as the organization’s director today). He suggested Anita had filmed Venus, Earth’s unfortunate hothouse sibling.
Davenport’s theory was not surprising. Venus is relatively close to Earth and light reflecting off the planet can easily be seen with the naked eye. The planet is known to beat stars to the punch at twilight, dazzling stargazers with its reflected light as it emerges into view. This earns it the dual monikers, “Evening Star” and “Morning Star” as it is often the first “star” to appear at night and the last to be subsumed by sunrise at dawn.
As Venus is only about 148 million miles away, it moves much faster across the sky than any distant star, giving the impression of a plane in certain circumstances. Naturally, seasoned UFO hunters are well acquainted with this attention-grabbing solar neighbor.
Anita hoped to prove Davenport wrong, however. On Wednesday, February 18 she filmed the starry sky once again to see if Venus would reappear. To her dismay, strange lights did make themselves known in roughly the same position — about six discs in total, accompanied by a familiar kaleidoscope of colors. Believing the phenomenon to be related to Venus, as Davenport suggested, she stopped filming. Over the next few days, she continued to take pictures around the area out of curiosity, occasionally finding unusual sparks or odd lights.
By February 26, she was ready to forget about the whole ordeal when “Venus” returned. Determined to put the matter to rest once and for all, she started filming. Again, the object seemed too bizarre to be Venus or a star. It seemed to spin, and left apparent vapor trails on all sides.
“Soon there appeared a cluster of stars,” she said. “I zoomed in on them and there were more disks. Then I found a red ball that resembled the shape of the first disk, but the flat part was on the top of this one and not the bottom. It looked almost like a light instead of a solid object. I realized when I filmed the red, orange and white lights that they were actually the disks at a distance. Sometimes they were in formation, sometimes they were not. I knew that night, at that time, that this sucker was NOT Venus.”
Anita continued her outreach to UFO organizations and enthusiasts. Davenport eventually decided her experience warranted further investigation and reached out to Jerry Seivers in Vincennes, an associate with the Mutual UFO Network. Eventually, Anita donated a copy of her tape for review by astrophysicist Eric Davis, who said he had seen nothing quite like it. Davis is still active in the UFO community today, and has actually been one of the bigger contributors to the Pentagon’s efforts to document and understand these phenomenon.
The video also contributed to a local science fair at South Spencer, where Anita’s nephew’s daughter showcased it for her exhibit. Whatever anyone thought about the sights on the tape, or what they really were, it proved a popular spectacle and the judges deemed it worthy of second place.
Throughout those odd winter nights, the only time Anita was genuinely unnerved was when the lights seemed to get between the tree line and the house.
“There was never any sound, but the only time I ever got concerned was when it was outside my window,” she said. “It just seemed too close for comfort.”
A measure of trepidation is to be expected, especially given some of the other stories percolating across the tri-state during Anita’s lifetime. Perhaps one of the more famous “encounters” made the front page of The Evansville Press on August 22, 1955 involving a gun battle between “Little Men from Space” and Kentucky locals about 80 miles south of Evansville.
Members of the Sutton family and a visiting Billy Ray Taylor, saw what they believed to be a space ship land at the Sutton homestead. Shortly thereafter, Taylor and family members reported seeing creatures on the property, with Alene Sutton saying the “figure looked like it was made of aluminum foil. It had two big eyes pretty far apart.”
Taylor and the Sutton men quickly committed to a firefight with the intruders, emptying four boxes of .22 caliber rifle ammunition and 17 12-guage shotgun shells. Those on scene then fled to inform authorities, who subsequently found no evidence of otherworldly involvement.
However, on August 14, 1955 a separate incident occurred in which 35-year-old Naomi Johnson reported being grabbed by a scaly hand while swimming in the Ohio River near Dogtown. Her family reported a blue stain on her leg for weeks after the incident, but no evidence of any monster was ever found in the river.
Anita’s own experiences have been far less dramatic, but no less intriguing regardless of one’s beliefs. Until recently, she has been content to leave her stories to herself, convinced no one else would believe or care. Despite this, she remained committed to keeping those memories alive, even affecting something akin to a farewell to whatever had visited her 21 years ago. Anita’s last recorded encounter was in June of 2001.
“I was driving home at about 3 a.m.,” she said. “I had been sitting up with my sick sister in Rockport. The sky was clear and the moon was bright. I was so tired I could hardly drive. I topped the hill there at home. All at once I looked to my left over the Ohio River and there they were, three of them, big as full moons. My chance of a lifetime to get a great picture, but so what!? No one would believe me. I waved to them, blew them a kiss and drove into the garage and headed for my bedroom. I would love to know what they were thinking.”
Story and photos by Don Steen.
