UFOMYST
CaseCircle1973

Salem, IL, USA

Object with string of red lights hovers over strip mall then moves over interstate highway before shooting into the sky.

Report quality: Moderate55/100

This score reflects report-quality signals on file — how complete, corroborated, and precisely located the report is — not a claim about whether the sighting was a real craft.

  • Duration parsed: 300s, a plausible sighting length
  • Detailed witness text (120 characters)
  • Location geocoded exactly
  • No other reports from this city within 3 days
When
1973-07-20
Where
Salem, IL, USA
Shape
Circle
Duration
5 minutes
Geo
38.627, -88.946 · exact
Slug
circle-over-salem-il-1973-e1399e
Wave

Part of a wave

  • Historical wave1973

    The Great 1973 Flap

    United States, strongest in the Southeast and Midwest

    With Blue Book dead, the biggest post-war flap had no official landing place — reports went to police, press, and the new civilian networks (MUFON, founded 1969, came of age here). October 1973 delivered Pascagoula's…

    Open wave →

In context

  • Salem, IL shows up 8 times across the archive.
  • 3 reports came from Illinois in 1973.
  • In the 1970s, 10.5% of reports described a circle — the all-time rate is 10.6%.

Report

Full narrative lands with dossier import for famous cases, or the NUFORC free-text summary above for standard reports. This shell is SSR-ready: one D1 row (including connections_json) per page.