The Elmwood Park Police Chase

As the object came close, the squad car's headlights and spotlight dimmed. At about half past three on the morning of 4 November 1957 two Elmwood Park patrolmen and a fireman watched a perfectly round reddish-orange light some fifty to a hundred feet away. It changed into a bright cigar shape and seemed to head down towards a cemetery on the edge of the village. Then it paced their car. In the account the archive holds it disappeared "as though it took a shade and rolled it up."

The men were on duty and they filed a report. United Press put the story on the wire at the time.

What is on the record

Three claimants are resolved: Clifford Shaw, Joseph Lukasek and Robert Bolts. The contemporary record names the patrolmen Clifford Shaw and Joseph Lukasek and the fireman Bob Volz, whom the archive's transcript renders as Bolts. The 1957 reports also name a third patrolman, Dan DiGiovanni, whom the archive's telling does not mention.

Outside documentation comes from two independent sources. One is the United Press wire story. The other is the vehicle-interference catalogue compiled by Hynek and Rodeghier, which lists the case among sightings where cars were affected.

The telling notes a similar case in Texas the night before. That is Levelland on 2 and 3 November, which the archive publishes separately. Elmwood Park was part of the wave of reports that followed it. No explanation was recorded for the Illinois sighting, and none appears in the sources checked.

Why it sits where it does

Police officers and a fireman reported seeing the same thing together, and their report reached the wire service at the time. That shared sighting is the basis of the L3 grade. The timing next to Levelland matters to any reading of it. What paced the squad car beside the cemetery is not resolved here.