The Saucer That Stopped a Car near Meridian, Mississippi
In 10 July 1967, near Lizelia, near Meridian, Lauderdale County, Mississippi, United States, on the late afternoon of 10 July 1967, at about 5:50 p. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.
What did witnesses see at Lizelia?
On the late afternoon of 10 July 1967, at about 5:50 p.m., a man was driving on a rural highway in Lizelia, an unincorporated community in Lauderdale County roughly 12 miles north of Meridian, Mississippi, along Mississippi Highway 39. As he drove, his car lost power and coasted to a stop and his radio faded out. The driver got out, and according to the account walked to the front of the car as if to check the engine, at which point a large object passed low overhead.
The object had a dome on top. Its upper surface was a gunmetal blue, described in the Air Force file as the color of the bluing on a well kept firearm, and its underside was the dull color of old lead. It was moving toward the east. It crossed the highway, tilted upward and banked to the right, then accelerated and climbed away, vanishing into low cloud. The whole pass was brief, on the order of three to five seconds in the primary record. The witness reported that the object made a swishing sound as it went, like a sudden rush of strong wind.
The single recorded witness was Harold Washington, listed in the Blue Book file as a golf professional and a retired United States Marine Corps captain. The combination of effects he described, the engine and radio cutting out followed immediately by a low, fast, domed disc, is the classic vehicle-interference close encounter pattern that recurs across the better Blue Book "unknown" cases of the 1960s.
A second, looser retelling of this case circulates widely online and gives the witness as "Philip Lanning," puts the encounter just south of Meridian, and describes the object as completely silent and shaped "like a cymbal on a drum set," dirty metallic gray, roughly the size of a house and about 300 feet up. That version is addressed in the assessment below, because it does not match the contemporary Air Force record on the witness name, the location, or the sound.
What is the official explanation?
This sighting is in the Air Force's own files. It is Project Blue Book case number 11869, dated 10 July 1967, location Lizelia, Mississippi, and it carries the Air Force's final evaluation of "unidentified." It appears under that case number and date in the published list of Project Blue Book cases officially classified Unknown, the roster headed "U.S. Air Force Project Blue Book Cases Officially Listed as Unknown."
The most detailed primary transcription of the file comes through Don Berliner, the aviation writer and Fund for UFO Research investigator, who in January 1974 spent a week at the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, reading every case the Air Force had tagged "unexplained" and copying out the witness names and identifying details that the later sanitized public microfilm stripped out. Berliner's notes are the source for the named-witness summaries reproduced by researcher Patrick Gross and folded into Brad Sparks's Comprehensive Catalog of 1,500 Project Blue Book UFO Unknowns. In Sparks's catalog this is case 1517, and the entry reads: "July 10, 1967. Lizelia, Mississippi. 5:50 p.m. Golf pro Harold Washington (Capt., USMC Ret.) saw an object with a dome, the top gunmetal blue, the bottom the color of old lead, moving E, crossing the highway tilted upward to the right, then accelerated and disappeared into the clouds, with a swishing sound. (Berliner)," with duration noted as 3 to 5 seconds and a single witness.
The significance the Air Force itself attached to the case is in what it did not do. By 1967 Blue Book was running thousands of reports a year and resolving the overwhelming majority as aircraft, balloons, astronomical objects, or "insufficient data." Investigators were, by the accounts that survive, impressed with Washington as a witness given his Marine Corps background and training, and after their review they were unable to attach any conventional cause to what he described. The report was left "unidentified," and it stands as one of the last Mississippi entries to carry that label before Blue Book was wound down and formally closed at the end of January 1970. No prosaic identification, no named aircraft, no weather balloon, no specific astronomical object, was ever entered against it in the file.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Harold Washington was not a casual or anonymous observer. The Blue Book file records him as a retired captain in the United States Marine Corps and a working golf professional, a man with formal military training in observing and reporting. That background is exactly why the investigators took the report seriously rather than filing it as a misperception, and it is the detail every retelling of the case keeps, even the ones that get his name wrong.
By his account the object was a structured craft, not a light or a glow. He gave specific, unusual color values that a person inventing a story is unlikely to reach for: the top the gunmetal blue of gun bluing, the bottom the flat gray of old lead, a dome on top. He gave its motion in detail, east across the highway, a tilt and bank to the right, then a fast climb into cloud. And he described the engine and radio failing in the same moment the thing appeared, which is the part that makes the case more than a distant-light report. He was the only witness on record, which the file notes plainly.
There is no sign that Washington sought publicity or money from the encounter. The case did not become a book or a lecture circuit. It survived only because the Air Force wrote it down, classified it Unknown, and because a researcher later went and read the file. That quiet provenance, a trained military witness, a single brief daylight sighting, and an official "unidentified" with no walk-back, is part of what gives the report its weight.
Is the Saucer That Stopped a Car near Meridian, Mississippi real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the ordinary explanations. A late-afternoon daylight sighting lasting only three to five seconds leaves room for misidentification, and the honest skeptical reading starts there. A low-flying aircraft seen at an odd angle, a helicopter, or a small private plane could in principle account for a fast domed shape crossing a highway and climbing into cloud. The trouble is that none of those fit the whole report at once. Aircraft do not normally read as a domed disc with a gunmetal-blue top and a lead-gray belly, and an ordinary aircraft pass does not stop a car. The engine-and-radio failure is the hard part for any mundane explanation. It could be coincidence, an older car stalling on its own at the exact moment an unrelated aircraft happened over, with the radio fade being a separate electrical fault, but stacking two independent failures onto the precise instant of the sighting is a strain. The Air Force, which had every institutional incentive to resolve the case as a conventional object and routinely did so for thousands of reports, looked at this one and could not name the aircraft, balloon, or astronomical body involved. That matters, because Blue Book's standing pressure after the Robertson Panel and Project Grudge was to close cases, not to leave them open.
There is also a documentary dispute that has to be handled in pass one, because it is about evidence quality rather than about the object. A widely copied online version of this case, traceable to a blog item by Landon Howell republished on UFO Casebook and ThinkAboutItDocs, names the witness "Philip Lanning," places the encounter south of Meridian, and describes the object as silent and shaped like a cymbal on a drum set. That account carries no primary citation. It conflicts with the contemporary Air Force record on three checkable points: the witness is Harold Washington, not Philip Lanning; the file location is Lizelia, which is north of Meridian, not south; and the object made a swishing sound, it was not silent. The "Lanning" version appears to be a later, garbled retelling. It does not constitute a counter-explanation of what was seen. It is a reason to trust the Blue Book file and Berliner's transcription over the blog chain, not a reason to doubt the event.
Pass two, if the report is accurate. Then a trained Marine Corps officer watched a domed, metallic, disc-shaped craft cross a Mississippi highway at low altitude in daylight, kill his car's engine and radio as it approached, bank and accelerate, and climb out of sight into cloud in a handful of seconds. The vehicle-interference detail puts it in the same family as the strongest Blue Book electromagnetic-effect cases, where the object appears to exert a physical effect on the witness's car. No identification has ever been attached to it in more than half a century.
The tier is Verified Unexplained. This is not a case resting on a blurry photograph or an anonymous tip. It is officially documented in the United States Air Force's own catalog of cases classified Unknown, case 11869, evaluated "unidentified," with a named, credentialed single witness and a consistent primary description preserved by Don Berliner's direct reading of the original file. The only live dispute is over a careless secondhand retelling of the witness's name and a few details, and resolving that dispute strengthens rather than weakens the underlying record. The object itself remains unexplained.
Sources
- www.nicap.org/bluebook/bluelist.htm
- www.fcoiaa.it/wp-content/uploads/Data/Ufo/USA/BBook/BB_Unknowns_1_7.pdf
- ufologie.patrickgross.org/htm/bluebooku67.htm
- www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/sightings/the-last-decade-unexplained-blue-book
- archive.org/details/nara-pbb
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
