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Police in Prophetstown, Illinois town are trying to identify a mysterious UFO that was spotted by multiple witnesses this week, including the Chief of Police.
“I was off duty sitting at home and I got a phone call from a man we call ‘Rocky Ballard,'” said Prophetstown police chief Bruce Franks. “He works at Todd’s Tire and Auto, and he says ‘Hey, I see what looks like a balloon and it hasn’t moved in the past 20 minutes.'”
UPI reports that “a crowd had gathered” at the store to watch the strange UFO hovering in the daytime sky.
“Rocky says it’s right up there, and he points to it and sure enough, there it was — and it didn’t move forever,” Franks added.
“Looked like kind of a clear plastic balloon, and what it was doing, we have no idea,” said Officer Boyd Van Dellen.
Van Dellen continued, “We then notified the Quad Cities airport to notify the towers, at least let aircraft know. It looked high enough that it was possibly in airspace.”
The National Weather Service in the area reported that they had not deployed any weather balloons that day.
Chief Franks added, “I’m at a flag football game now watching my grandson, and mentioned it here to a couple of people, and they’re like ‘Oh yeah! We saw it.’ Everyone around town has seen it — a lot of people.”
The National Weather Service suggested that perhaps the object was a research balloon launched by someone other than them.
UFO expert Scott Waring, however, has other ideas.
“Now I just reported a similar transparent UFO over Indiana few days ago, and now its it Illinois?” he wrote on his website. “Wow, this thing is doing something out there over the farm states. Possibly scanning the farm animals to see how much the medicine and steroids injected into the farm animals will one day be injected by humans, thus having potential effects on humanity’s future and direction.”