Alien Encounters in South Missouri

Jason Offutt

Eighteen-year-old Ralph Carnahan was sitting on his family’s porch in the southeast Missouri town of Zalma at about 9 p.m. May 7, talking to his girlfriend on the telephone, when he saw strange lights.

“In front of me was a pair of bright lights in the sky; one light was red and one was white,” he said. “The other pair off to my side, both were white.”

He called his mother and her boyfriend outside. They didn’t think the lights were out of the ordinary, so they went back in the house. Ralph didn’t; he waited and the lights moved closer.

“The pair that was in front of me started hovering real slow and there’s a tree in my front yard, it hovered around that tree,” he said. Then the light moved off – but it left something behind. “There’s a street light down the road and it glared on the tree. I looked up and there was something in that tree.”

Ralph saw a brownish-green creature with “real big eyes” sitting in the tree. He ran to the house and called his mother and her boyfriend outside again.

“They came out and we tried to see what it was, but when we got close to it, I could see that (thing) started blending in with the tree,” he said. “My mom didn’t see it, so after a minute they went back in.”

Ralph walked to the porch where his mother’s dog was tied; the dog soon started growling toward a bridge over a nearby creek.

“I looked down by the Huzzah Creek by the bridge and there was a green spaceship not real big hovering as high as the street light, you could barely see it,” he said. “I walked down to the bridge and checked it out. You could see it hovering backwards into the dark, so I turned around and … ran to my house.”

From the front porch, Ralph resumed talking to his girlfriend on the telephone. He told her everything he was seeing.

“The alien in the tree was just staring straight at me, so my girlfriend said, ‘throw a rock at it or poke it with a stick,’” he said. “But I was on a phone with a cord and couldn’t go very far with it, so I grabbed this coffee cup on the porch and threw it at it.”

He missed the thing in the tree, but his action caused it to move.

“I could hear the grass go down like something jumped on it,” he said. “So I told my girlfriend that I’m going inside.”

He went inside around 11 p.m. At 12:30 a.m., things in the house started to move; a table cloth, a radio, a piggy bank and sandals slowly shifted as if they were being inspected by a curious child. Ralph was convinced aliens were in his house.

“I knew it was aliens,” he said. “But they were transparent; I could barely see them.”

At about 5 a.m., Ralph decided he didn’t want to be alone.

“A tall alien was looking through the glass on the top of the door,” Ralph said. “It was staring hard. It didn’t have huge eyes and it was red with black markings on its face. He was scary.”

Ralph woke his 16-year-old sister, “and I told her, ‘look at the alien in the window,’” he said. “She started crying and ran into my mom’s room.”

At dawn, Ralph said the creatures disappeared.

“Mom didn’t see them,” he said. “She doesn’t believe me or my sister, but I know different. They are out there and real. I’m not scared of anything, but now it’s hard for me to go outside at night.

“It ain’t no joke,” Ralph said. “Aliens exist, 100 percent.”