America Is Finally Taking Extraterrestrials Seriously There was nothing much happening in Jerome and Benno Leuer’s yard in Hamel, Minn. on August 11, 1948. It was noontime in the thick of summer and the boys, 10 and 8, were idly playing when, as they later described it, something overhead caught their eyes. They looked up and their jaws dropped. Roughly 12 ft. up in the air was a dull gray, circular object, about 1 ft. thick and 2 ft. in diameter, slowly descending between them. They stood transfixed as the object settled onto the ground, making a clattering sound like metal hitting metal. The object rested there a moment, and then began emitting a high-pitched whistle that, to the boys, so
unded like a teakettle. It spun in place once, then shot 20 ft. into the air, hovered for a moment, and ascended to 30 ft., maneuvering around tree branches and telephone wires in its path. Finally, it jetted out of sight. Jerome and Benno ran inside and told their parents what they had seen. Their father notified the only authority he could think of: R.R. Sheridan, the local postmaster. Sheridan, in turn, called the FBI field office in St. Paul. To the family’s surprise, the bureau sent an agent. He interviewed the boys and inspected the yard. “The spot where the alleged ‘flying saucer’ had landed was approximately 2 ft. in diameter and appeared as though a heavy object had landed there or
had touched down,” read the statement in the official report. “The ground was dented and protruding rocks had been leveled.” The boys grew up and moved on. Nothing came of their mysterious sighting, but the government preserved the report all the same, filing it away in a cache of documents it had already begun keeping, of both civilian and military accounts of flying, hovering, blinking objects that appeared in the skies, skittering about, sometimes touching down, and then vanishing back the way they came, just as Jerome’s and Benno’s object had. For 78 years, the boys’ story—and hundreds of others like it—had languished in storage. Until May 8, 2026, when President Donald Trump began a ser