The Richards Tree Landing

The object came down beside a single tree and thrashed it until a limb snapped and twisted twelve and a half feet up. Leaves were burned, and the tree later died. James Richards and his sixteen-year-old daughter saw it at about half past midnight on 28 June 1973 from their trailer on a rural road near Columbia, Missouri. Two bright beams like spotlights converged into a round luminous object that changed colour and turned sharply in silence before it landed. The phone line went dead and so did the lights until it left. The family dogs hid without a sound. One telling adds that a tall creature was seen.

What is on the record

Four tellings, all on one channel, yield two claimants: James G. Richards and his daughter. Our transcripts give the daughter's first name. She was sixteen and is not named here. Some sources spell the family name Richard. The date of 28 June 1973 is confirmed.

This is a physical-trace case with independent outside sources. Ted Phillips investigated it for the Center for UFO Studies. He recorded imprints in the ground about five inches long, three wide and two to two and a half deep, which the tellings call too deep to be human. The published record says limbs were snapped and leaves burned as high as about thirty-five feet. Our tellings give twelve and a half feet for the snapped limb. Later retellings and local press carried the case on. Nobody official looked at it, and no one has proposed an ordinary cause. The archive holds no laboratory work on the soil or the tree.

Why it sits where it does

On paper the case reaches L3. In practice the file is two witnesses and an investigator's trace report. The damage to the tree and the marks in the ground are the strongest part of it. What came down beside the Richards trailer is not resolved here.