The Fremont Porthole Disc

When two other cars came along the road the disc put out its lights. Then it shot straight up and left a bluish trail. For five to eight minutes before that it had hovered over a car carrying a father and his nineteen-year-old son near Fremont in Steuben County, Indiana. It was about twenty-five feet across and convex, lit, with portholes on its underside. The time was 11:25 at night on 22 July 1966 and the father was driving his son home from the railway station. Our telling says the object drew back as if to watch the man. Both described a peaceful feeling and a sense of being humbled.

What is on the record

The two claimants are the father and the son, carried by one telling on one channel. Neither is named in our telling or in the published record. Our transcript calls the father a Fort Wayne businessman and gives only the year. The published record places the sighting at Fremont near Clear Lake on State Road 120, dates it to 22 July 1966 and describes the man as a realtor and retired Navy officer from the Second World War. This page follows the published record.

The outside sources are independent of our channel. J. Allen Hynek set the case out in his book The UFO Experience. NICAP lists it. The Hatch database carries it on the authority of Frank Edwards, and Eberhart's chronology includes it. No official investigation is known and nobody has offered an explanation. The most striking detail, the lights going out for passing traffic, is also the one no third party has confirmed. The drivers of the other cars are not in the record.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L3 because two adults describe the same event from the same car. They are not independent of each other, but J. Allen Hynek thought the case worth printing. What hovered over the road outside Fremont is not resolved here.