Eagle River encounter

On Tuesday, April 18, 1961, around 11:00 a.m., Joe Simonton (one account calls him Paul) stepped into the yard of his chicken farm at Eagle River, Wisconsin, and saw a silver disc-shaped craft descend from the sky. Accounts differ on what it did next: one says the disc landed, another that it kept hovering just above the ground as a hatch opened. Inside were three human-looking men, according to Simonton. One summary on UFO Evidence calls the chicken farmer Paul Simonton, while the other accounts name him Joe.

Most accounts make Simonton a sixty-year-old plumber, though UFO Evidence says he reported his age as 55 or 60, depending on the interviewer. He was a plumber, a chicken farmer, and the annual Santa Claus for the Eagle River Chamber of Commerce. Simonton was also a former professional boxer and deputy sheriff. Harper’s called him “strenuously honest” and noted that a county judge said he neither drank nor read science fiction. The district attorney said he “told a straightforward story”; the editor of the town’s weekly newspaper echoed that assessment.

The craft was approximately thirty feet in diameter and twelve feet high, described by Simonton as “brighter than chrome.” Six- or seven-inch exhaust pipes protruded from one edge. Inside the hull, he later told investigators, the walls were dull black with the appearance of wrought iron, including three instrument panels he called “extremely beautiful” in the same flat finish.

Three dark-skinned males emerged or appeared within the craft’s open hatch, each about five feet tall and wearing a dark knit uniform with turtleneck top and helmet-like cap. They were clean-shaven and Simonton described them as looking Italian. The entities did not speak; they communicated by gesture. One handed Simonton a silvery two-handled jug approximately one foot tall, heavier than aluminum but lighter than steel, and indicated they wanted it filled with water.

Simonton filled the jug from the water pump in his basement and carried it back, and to return it he had to brace himself against the UFO’s hull and stretch up. He looked into the saucer and observed an entity operating what appeared to be a flameless cooking appliance, preparing small pancakes on a griddle. In exchange for the water, one of the entities gave Simonton four perforated pancakes roughly three inches in diameter; one source accounts for three. The entity with narrow red trim on his trousers touched his own forehead in a gesture that Simonton interpreted as a salute. Simonton saluted back.

The hatch closed. The craft rose about twenty feet, tilted to a forty-five-degree angle, and departed to the south. It disappeared from view in approximately two seconds, its wake strong enough to toss the tops of nearby pine trees.

Simonton ate one pancake. “It tasted like cardboard,” he told the Associated Press. He gave the remainder to Vilas County Judge Frank Wellington Carter, a local NICAP member and UFO study group leader who called the entities “saucernauts” and said he believed Simonton because he could find no motive for the farmer to fabricate the story.

A local insurance agent claimed he also saw a saucer near Simonton’s property at roughly the same time. Two local youths and their family reported seeing a craft the following day.

Simonton lost work as reporters descended on his home. His chickens fell ill and many died after the encounter. He later told United Press International that he had been unable to work for three weeks, according to contemporary reports.

The Air Force sent its civilian investigator, J. Allen Hynek, then an astronomer at Northwestern University. Two versions of the pancake testing survive. UFO Evidence credits Hynek with getting one of Simonton’s pancakes analyzed by a committee at Northwestern and by the Air Force’s Technical Intelligence Center, which found flour, sugar and grease, and it adds a rumor that the wheat was of an unknown type. In another telling the Air Force sent a pancake to the Food and Drug Administration, and an FDA letter of June 8 said the sample was “an ordinary pancake of terrestrial origin” made predominantly of buckwheat.

The official Air Force assessment carried the case as unexplained. The file noted that “the only serious flaw in the story is the disappearance of the craft in ‘two seconds.’ The rest of the story did not contain any outrages to physical concepts.” Sources differ on who decided Simonton had suffered a hallucination followed by a delusion: one says Hynek concluded it, another credits an Air Force psychiatrist. One Air Force investigator said Simonton “appeared quite sincere to me, did not appear to be the perpetrator of a hoax.”

According to Mallan, the Air Force took to heart an unsubstantiated rumor circulated by Raymond Palmer, a publisher of pulp flying-saucer magazines, who believed Simonton had been hypnotized by an Eagle River real estate broker and fed the pancake story. The supposed motive was economic, “a miniature Disneyland that is or was being built in the area.”

By 1975 Hynek had come around to believing in UFOs, and he went back to the Simonton case in The Edge of Reality, the book he wrote with Jacques Vallée that year. Interviewed in the press in 1978, Hynek said that because of its similarities to numerous subsequent cases, he tends to “give it more credence now.” Vallée had discussed the encounter in his 1969 book Passport to Magonia, comparing it to Celtic myths of food received from fairies, and later cited it in rejecting the extraterrestrial hypothesis in favor of paranormal explanations.

The case has been described as “Wisconsin’s most famous claim of alien encounters,” and a 2023 report said a fragment of one of the pancakes is still held by the National Museum of the United States Air Force.