I grew up in the small town of Galesburg, IL. I went to school, dueled with wooden swords, played war and spaceship, slid down the stairs inside sleeping bags, became a cub-scout, went backyard-camping, played with transformers, and generally hung-out and talked. It was 1986. Sleeping bags and wooden swords were a thing of the past. It was a long, hot summer in Galesburg and I was bored. I was about to get my first taste of urban exploration.
I explored the old elementary school, Hitchcock, which had been closed and abandoned for a few years. One of the boarded-up windows on the first floor had been pried open, affording me easy access to the building. Inside, I found all sorts of things that reminded us of my recent childhood. I found stories I had written. I found the old tape-players that had been used to teach english to the Vietnamese refugee kids in our school. I explored the darkened halls and staircases of this 1920's red-brick schoolhouse edifice with adrenaline-assisted enthusiasm. I had a strange sense of liberation, nostalgia, and excitement. I returned to the school a few times but this location was starting to lose its appeal, plus, the windows had been newly boarded-up-- it seemed my invitation had expired.

I was incredulous. "They probably thought that old water-tower was a missile silo", I thought, looking at the painted-white cylindrical concrete structure in the distance.
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There was one location from this 1967 wave of UFO sightings which stood out to me: Galesburg, Illinois. Knox County Sheriff's deputy Frank Courson witnessed a low-flying, red, saucer-shaped craft fly over his squad car while parked near the intersection of I-74 and Henderson road, just north of Galesburg. He did not officially report the sighting until two days later, when he and a Knoxville police officer sighted a similar object in the sky on the east side of Galesburg. News of the incident spread quickly through the community. The local newspaper ran articles about the sightings. A few local college students attempted some opportunistic hoaxes with kites and balloons. These stunts had the general effect of reducing the initial hysteria associated with the sightings. Still, Courson and others who had witnessed the flying saucer maintained that what they had seen was no kite or balloon. This incident found its way into project BLUEBOOK. "Blue book" was a semi-public inquiry into the UFO phenomenon undertaken by the U.S. Air Force. These pervasive aerial phenomena were generally dismissed as "swamp gas", planets, balloons, or something similarly prosaic. A fraction of the cases they investigated remained "unexplained". The Galesburg event was one of those unexplained cases.
Upon researching the wave of UFO's of early March, 1967, I was struck by an anomaly: Nearly all 0f the red saucer-shaped craft seen in the midwest were in the vicinity of nuclear missile sites. As far as I knew, there weren't any nukes around Galesburg... or were there?
I remembered the claims about a secret missile base out by "research". Was it possible that there was some kernel of truth in these rumors? Although it seemed to be a long shot, I decided to look into the idea. My starting point was Mayo General Hospital.