At four in the morning on January 5, 2000, Melvern Noll was driving home from his late-shift trucking job in Highland, Illinois, when something in the sky stopped him cold. Hovering a few hundred feet above the ground was an object he would later describe as the size of a football field – rectangular, two stories tall, with rows of bright windows and dim red lights on the bottom.
Noll drove straight to the Highland Police Department and asked them to send someone to look. That request set off a chain of sightings across St. Clair County that would involve five police departments, produce recorded dispatch audio, and remain unexplained more than two decades later.
What makes this case exceptional is not just the number of witnesses – it’s that they were law enforcement officers, in separate towns, reporting in real time over recorded radio channels. Their descriptions converged on the same thing: a massive, low-flying, triangular craft that moved impossibly slowly, then vanished at speed.
The First Call
Noll’s description was unlike anything the Highland dispatcher had heard. The relay went out over St. Clair County’s Central Command (CENCOM) frequency:
“It looks like a two-story house.”
Officer Ed Barton of the Lebanon Police Department picked up the call. Before heading toward the reported area, he made an off-the-cuff remark that the dispatch tape preserved:
“If I see it, I’m not saying a word.”
Minutes later, he saw it.
Officer Barton’s Encounter
Driving toward Summerfield around 4:10 a.m., Barton spotted two intensely bright white lights in the northeast. As he watched, the lights appeared to merge into one. The object’s profile shifted – first elongated and cigar-shaped, then, as it drew closer, unmistakably triangular.
At its nearest point, Barton described a narrow triangle roughly 75 feet long and 40 feet wide, with bright white lights at the corners and a smaller flashing red light near the centerline. The rear of the craft appeared rectangular, with a lengthwise band of multi-colored illumination. It made no sound.
What struck Barton most was how the object changed direction: it rotated in place without banking, then accelerated so rapidly he could barely track it visually. Within seconds, it appeared to be over Shiloh – miles away.
He keyed his radio:
“Contact Scott Air Force Base.”
Town by Town
The object moved southwest across St. Clair County, and officers picked it up in sequence.
Officer David Martin, Shiloh Police Department, spotted it around 4:23 a.m. over open fields. He described a large triangle or arrowhead shape with three bright white lights and smaller red and green lights on the rear. He rolled his window down to listen. Silence. He estimated its initial speed at roughly 15 mph – a walking pace for something that size – before it rapidly departed.
“I see something.”
Officer Craig Stevens, Millstadt Police Department, caught it around 4:29 a.m. near Liederkranz Park. Stevens described a very large, roughly triangular object at an altitude of 500 to 1,000 feet, moving extremely slowly. Unlike the other officers, he reported hearing something: a faint, low-frequency buzzing. He pulled out a Polaroid camera and took a photo, but the image developed poorly in the January cold.
“It’s huge.”
“It’s kind of V-shaped.”
Officer Matt Jany of the Dupo Police Department was the last to observe the object. By the time he spotted it – through binoculars, sometime after 5 a.m. – it appeared much higher and farther away. He could see an array of lights but could not determine the shape.
“It’s pretty far off.”
“It’s not low at all.”
The Millstadt officer pushed back: the object had been roughly 500 feet above him and it was huge.
The Dispatch Tapes
What elevates this case above most UFO reports is the existence of the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Office dispatch recordings. These tapes capture the entire sequence in real time – the initial Highland relay, cross-department confirmations, altitude disagreements, and Barton’s request to contact Scott Air Force Base.
The recordings were later obtained and analyzed by David B. Marler, then Illinois State Director for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). Marler interviewed each primary witness, reconstructed the object’s inferred flight path, and published his findings in the MUFON UFO Journal in March 2000.
The dispatch tapes also formed the basis of a 2006 Discovery Channel documentary, UFOs Over Illinois: Anatomy of a Sighting, which examined the differences and convergences among witness descriptions.
Scott Air Force Base
The object’s track carried it within one to two miles of Scott Air Force Base, a major U.S. Air Force installation in the Metro-East region that serves as headquarters for Air Mobility Command’s strategic communications and transport operations.
Marler formally contacted Scott AFB seeking information. The base’s written response stated that only media calls had been received, no ground observers came forward, no radar tracking existed for the event (with radar services attributed to the FAA at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport), and no base aircraft matched the descriptions.
Lambert radar personnel reportedly confirmed they detected nothing connected to the event. Scott AFB officials later told The Intelligencer they denied any knowledge of the object.
No publicly released radar track from Scott AFB has been produced.
A Pattern of Triangles
The Illinois case is part of a broader pattern of large triangular craft reports stretching back decades:
| Case | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Hudson Valley UFO Wave | 1983–1986 | New York, USA |
| Belgian UFO Wave | 1989–1990 | Belgium |
| Phoenix Lights | March 13, 1997 | Arizona, USA |
| Illinois Triangle | January 5, 2000 | St. Clair County, IL |
Each case shares key features: multiple independent witnesses, structured craft with bright lights, low altitude and slow speed followed by sudden acceleration, and proximity to military installations. The Belgian wave, notably, involved F-16 radar lock attempts by the Belgian Air Force – one of the few cases where a NATO military formally pursued the object.
In 2002, the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) assessed the Illinois event and concluded it likely involved a classified U.S. military triangular or delta craft. That assessment was reported by journalist Steve Rensberry in The Intelligencer. NIDS offered no definitive evidence for the claim, and no military program has been publicly linked to the sighting.
What Remains
A 2022 review by The Debrief re-examined the original source material and cautioned against later retellings that stylized the event into a “classic triangle” narrative. The review noted real discrepancies – Noll’s rectangular “house” versus the officers’ triangular descriptions – and preserved the time-stamped claims from the dispatch tapes as the most reliable record.
The discrepancies are real. Marler himself discussed the possibility that Noll and the officers saw different aspects of the same object, or potentially different objects entirely. But the core elements reported by four police officers across four towns within roughly 40 minutes remain consistent: a very large, structured, brightly lit object at low altitude that moved slowly – then didn’t.
More than 25 years later, the Illinois Triangle remains one of the best-documented multi-witness UAP cases in the United States. The dispatch tapes still exist. The witnesses still stand by their accounts. And no official explanation has been offered.
Sources: MUFON UFO Journal / CUFOS · NUFORC Sighting 11578 · The Intelligencer · The Debrief · Discovery Channel / TheTVDB · MicahHanks.com