A Large UFO over South Dakota (1956)
In November 1956, near Pelican Rapids, Minnesota to Redfield, South Dakota, via Graceville, Ortonville and Big Stone City, a young dairy truck driver named Marlen Hewitt reported watching a huge, color-changing object in the sky for roughly five hours on or about Wednesday 14 November 1956, while hauling a tank truck from Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, to Redfield, South Dakota. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.
What did witnesses see at Pelican Rapids?
A young dairy truck driver named Marlen Hewitt reported watching a huge, color-changing object in the sky for roughly five hours on or about Wednesday 14 November 1956, while hauling a tank truck from Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, to Redfield, South Dakota. The account was published two days later, on Friday 16 November 1956, in the Bismarck Tribune under a Redfield, S.D. dateline. Hewitt, described as a man who "never held any stock in flying saucer stories," put the time of first sighting precisely: "It was about 1:15 when I first spotted it as I drove along. At first I thought it was a star, I've never seen a star that bright. There were other stars out at the time, and only a few high clouds in the sky."
As he drove toward Graceville, Minnesota, the light shifted color repeatedly. "As I went on down the road toward Graceville, it changed colors a couple of times. Near Graceville, it changed colors four times." Doubting his own eyes, he pulled over: "I thought my eyes were playing tricks with me. I stopped, turned off the lights and got out of the truck to stretch my legs. As I rounded the back of the truck, this thing swooped down about a half mile to the east of me and stopped about 1,000 feet up. I was very frightened, I was terrified."
His description of the object is unusually detailed. "If it had been on the ground, it would have covered about a square block. It looked to be about 12 feet thick. It was a slate gray color, and from the distance looked like it was metal. It was round, and at the base was an opening about 1/10th the size of the object from which a very brilliant light was shining." He described abrupt vertical movement: "It would tilt around and back and forth, gaining maybe 3,000 or 4,000 feet in the flick of any eye." Around its rim ran "a lighted outline," and he could not tell "if there were windows in the lighted part or if there was exhaust coming out all around it." The body cycled "from a blue-white to orange to red."
Then came the detail witnesses found most striking. "I wanted to get out of there, so I jumped back into the truck and turned on the lights. When my lights went on, the thing turned a bright cherry red and shot up into the high clouds. It moved faster than anything I ever saw." It dropped down and shot to the southwest "at a tremendous rate of speed," then stopped and hovered. By Ortonville he could still see the light in the cloud, and at Big Stone City it came down out of the clouds again, "further away but still changing colors." Hewitt said the object made no noise, that there was a little wind, and that the thing seemed to move into and away from the wind with equal speed. He estimated he had traveled about 150 miles over the five hours and that the roads were "very deserted."
What is the official explanation?
There is no contemporaneous record that the United States Air Force or Project Blue Book opened a formal case file on the Hewitt sighting. The story moved as a regional wire item with a Redfield, South Dakota dateline and ran in the Bismarck Tribune of 16 November 1956, but it does not appear among the well-known Blue Book "unknowns" or in the canonical multi-witness case lists, and no Air Defense Command or radar correlation was reported in the press. In that sense the official apparatus of the period simply did not engage it, which is itself a data point: a five-hour, multi-witness report along a 150-mile highway corridor was treated as a human-interest curiosity rather than a defense concern.
What does exist on the record is a documented backdrop. The South Dakota State Historical Society Foundation, in its own published history of the phenomenon in the state, records that "from September until the end of 1956, strange objects and fireballs were reported in Rapid City, Redfield, Mobridge, McLaughlin, Lemmon, Aberdeen, Pierre, Mitchell, Martin and Hot Springs." The Foundation lists concrete 1956 incidents from the same flap: residents near Onida watching a red light that hovered "like a duck," boys from Webster High School observing "a strange object giving off an unearthly, flashing red light," and a state highway patrolman with a radio dispatcher reporting an object in a valley east of Pierre that rose and withdrew when approached. Redfield, the very town named in Hewitt's dateline, appears on that list of towns reporting strange objects in the autumn of 1956.
So the official picture is twofold. There is no surviving evidence of a government investigation that examined and explained the Hewitt object specifically, and there is no official identification of what he and the newspapermen saw. At the same time, an authoritative state historical body has formally documented that Hewitt's sighting sits inside a real, region-wide wave of autumn 1956 reports across South Dakota, which independently corroborates that something was generating repeated nocturnal-light reports across that part of the northern plains in exactly this window.
What did the witnesses think it was?
Hewitt himself was, by his own framing and the reporter's, an unlikely UFO witness. He had "never held any stock in flying saucer stories," he drove for a dairy and was used to long night hauls and lights in the sky, and his reaction was not excitement but fear. He stopped his truck, got out, and twice said he was terrified, which reads as a man genuinely rattled by what he was watching rather than a man building a tale. He volunteered details that a fabricator rarely bothers with: the precise start time of 1:15, the gradual increase in color changes as he neared Graceville, the wind behavior, the lack of any sound, and his own doubt that his eyes were playing tricks on him.
The single most important feature of this case is that Hewitt was not alone. As he reached Ortonville, on the Minnesota side of Big Stone Lake, he found independent corroboration. In his words, "I could still see the light in the cloud when I got to Ortonville, and some editors who were going hunting came out of an eating place and watched it with me." The newspaper names them: "Among the hunters who saw the object at Ortonville were three newspapermen, Lem Kaercher of the Ortonville Independent and Don and Dick Olson of the Marshall Messenger." These were working local journalists, not anonymous bystanders, and their presence is what lifts the report from a lone trucker's word to a multi-witness event. Their joint observation took place at Big Stone Lake at Ortonville, the spot pictured in the case image.
The geography of the account holds together, which matters for credibility. Ortonville, Minnesota, and Big Stone City, South Dakota, are border twin towns sitting about two miles apart on U.S. Highway 12 at the foot of Big Stone Lake, and Graceville lies roughly twenty miles from Ortonville. A driver running a tank truck from Pelican Rapids toward Redfield would naturally pass Graceville, then Ortonville and Big Stone City, in exactly the order Hewitt described, before continuing west toward Redfield. The route is real, the sequence is correct, and the towns where he says the object reappeared are the towns a person on that road would actually reach in that order. Hewitt believed he had seen a structured metallic craft. The newspapermen, by stepping out of an eating place to watch the same light with him, corroborated that there was a real, persistent object in the southwest sky that night.
The dispute
The dispute is not a confession or a recovered prop but a strong astronomical-misidentification reading, and it is advanced here on the internal evidence of Hewitt's own account rather than by a named period investigator who closed the case. The candidate is a brilliant planet or star, most likely Venus or a comparably bright object low in the November sky. The supporting points are specific. Hewitt's own first impression was "a star, I've never seen a star that bright," seen while "there were other stars out at the time." A bright celestial body near the horizon paces a moving vehicle for hours, which fits a five-hour observation across 150 miles of highway that no aircraft or 1956-era craft could sustain. Apparent swoops and instant climbs of thousands of feet are the autokinetic effect plus brief occlusion by trees, terrain and high clouds. The signature color cycling from blue-white to orange to cherry red is textbook atmospheric scintillation of a point source seen through heavy low-altitude air, and Hewitt logged more color changes precisely when the object sat lower near Graceville.
What keeps this at Barely Disputed rather than Strongly Disputed is that the explanation, however persuasive, was never actually demonstrated for this case. No investigator named the specific planet or star, computed its position for that night, checked it against Hewitt's stated southwest heading, or published a worked debunk. The standard for Strongly Disputed requires a confession, a witness recantation, recovered hoax materials, or a positive identification of the specific real-world cause. None of those exists here. Hewitt never recanted, the three newspapermen who watched the light with him at Ortonville never withdrew their corroboration, and no one has tied the object to a particular planet, aircraft, balloon or launch by name and number.
There are also genuine residuals the planet reading does not fully absorb. Hewitt describes the object swooping to within about half a mile and hovering near 1,000 feet, close enough to perceive a metallic gray disc with a lighted rim and a bright basal opening, which is not Venus behavior. The southwest dash followed by a stationary hover, the silence, and the apparent indifference to wind direction are awkward for a fixed celestial source. Those residuals may well be perceptual artifacts of a dazzling point source watched under fear for hours, but that is an argument, not a proof. So the case stands as a credible multi-witness report against which a strong but undemonstrated natural explanation has been offered. Under UAP Globe's rules a plausible-but-unproven natural reconstruction is Barely Disputed, and that is where this lands.
Is the A Large UFO over South Dakota (1956) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, how this could be entirely ordinary. The strongest mundane reading is a bright celestial body, most plausibly a planet such as Venus or a brilliant star low in the November sky. Almost every signature in Hewitt's own words fits that reading. He says his first impression was literally a star: "At first I thought it was a star, I've never seen a star that bright." A planet near the horizon does pace a moving vehicle for hours and appears to dart, swoop and "gain 3,000 or 4,000 feet in the flick of an eye" through the autokinetic effect and through being briefly occluded and revealed by trees, hills and high clouds. The color cycling from blue-white to orange to cherry red is classic atmospheric scintillation of a bright point source seen through thick low-altitude air, which is exactly why he saw more color changes "near Graceville" as the object sat lower. A five-hour duration over 150 miles is far too long for any aircraft or drone of the era and is precisely what you expect from an astronomical object that simply stays put in the sky while the witness drives. Even the dramatic moment when "my lights went on, the thing turned a bright cherry red and shot up" is consistent with the contrast shift and eye adaptation that follow switching on headlights, plus the apparent jump of a point source against a dark sky. The structured details, the metallic look, the rim of light, the basal opening, are the kind of form the human eye and memory impose on a dazzling, shape-shifting point of light watched under stress for hours.
Pass two, if it was a real structured object. Taken at face value, several elements resist the planet reading. Hewitt describes the thing swooping to within about half a mile and stopping at roughly 1,000 feet, close enough to resolve a slate-gray metallic disc "about 12 feet thick" with a defined rim and a bright basal aperture, which is not how a fixed celestial body behaves. He reports it moving into and away from a light wind "with equal speed" and making no sound, and the southwest dash followed by a dead hover is hard to map onto Venus. Crucially, the object was seen jointly by Hewitt and three named newspapermen at Ortonville, and Redfield sits inside a documented autumn 1956 South Dakota wave that the State Historical Society Foundation records across ten towns, including others who watched red lights hover and withdraw. A genuine unidentified object, seen by independent credible witnesses across a real flap, cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Weighing the two passes. The natural explanation here is unusually strong and is built directly from the witness's own description rather than imposed from outside, but no named investigator ever ran the actual numbers for this specific night, identified the specific planet or star, plotted its azimuth against Hewitt's southwest heading, or published a method-shown debunk of this case. There is no confession, no recovered hoax prop, and no positive identification of a particular object, aircraft or balloon. What we have is a credible, well-supported but unproven natural reconstruction sitting against a coherent, geographically consistent, multi-witness report. That combination is the definition of Barely Disputed: a plausible counter-explanation exists and is persuasive, yet it was never demonstrated for this event and the core report largely stands as recorded. Tier: Barely Disputed.
Sources
- www.ufocasebook.com/56southdakota.html
- www.sdhsf.org/news_events/history_articles.html/title/august-2021-is-it-an-airplane-star-or-flying-saucer-
- www.distance-cities.com/distance-ortonville-mn-to-big-stone-city-sd
- www.distance-cities.com/distance-ortonville-mn-to-graceville-mn
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
