PIEDMONT, Mo. — Some claim a small Missouri town has been a beacon for out of this world visitors for the past half-century.
In fact, Piedmont, Missouri, has been named the UFO Capital of the Show Me State.
"My grandpa loved to spin a tall tale about things he saw,” Sara Phillips, executive director of the Piedmont Area Chamber of Commerce, said.
In small towns across the Show Me State seemingly everyone has a story, but in Piedmont, the stories are out of this world.
"I had a gentleman set at my desk and cry about how things that he has seen have illuminated and changed his life over the years,” Phillips said. “My husband and I moved back here years ago and he swears he saw some kind of lights."
The Wayne County community was named the UFO Capital of Missouri after a 1973 incident that drew national attention.
"There were over 500 reporting sightings of UFO's in the area,” Phillips said.
"One resident said that if they had to estimate half the residents had seen something in the sky. Clearwater Lake becomes kind of the epicenter of this,” Sean Rost of the State Historical Society of Missouri said. “There are people reporting seeing lights above the water. There are people seeing lights under the water."
"The FBI came in back then, and tons of military, just trying to prove that it was something explainable,” Phillips said.
Over the years, many of these sightings have been determined to be aircraft or even weather phenomena, but that doesn't explain why sightings are still happening today near Clearwater Lake.
"There was this light that looked like a star and it just sat up there,” Dr. Darrin Bauer said. “We're just watching it and it went to the side, and then went back, and I was like what are we watching."
Bauer and his girlfriend, retired Air Force Col. Tracy Edwards, shot video of an object in the sky over their Piedmont area farm.
"It was frightening actually to me,” Edwards said.
"It started getting closer to us and I was like you know something tells me we ought to go inside,” Bauer said.
"It was too close for comfort for me,” Edwards said. “I didn't even look out the window. I didn't want anybody to look out the window. I knew what it was. I knew it truly was a UFO."
It's unknown what exactly they captured on video.
"It's definitely something in the sky doing that,” Bauer said. “A UFO of some sort it would have to be ... I don't see stars doing that."
"It's maybe a little self-centered to think that we're the only thing out there in the whole universe,” Phillips said. “Am I saying there are aliens living under Clearwater Lake that are beaming UFO's up out of the lake? Probably not."
The Piedmont Area Chamber of Commerce recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the sightings.
They plan to welcome beings of all forms again in 2024 in conjunction with the total solar eclipse in April.