The Hastings Woods Landing

It was the size of three football fields and three storeys high, flashing the colours of the rainbow. That is how residents of Hastings in St Johns County, Florida described the object they reported one night in December 1975, probably on the 19th or 20th. They said it flew sideways and landed in the woods. At least twelve officers from St Johns, Flagler and Putnam counties searched through the night, with a St Johns County helicopter overhead. The FAA said no aircraft were missing. A spokesman for the Flagler County sheriff said they just did not know what it was yet.

What is on the record

One UPI wire story, reprinted in other papers, is the only outside source. It confirms the residents' report, the search and the size of the object.

The archive's telling carries a fuller story that the wire report does not. In it a local real estate agent drove around the landed craft for fifteen minutes at two or three miles an hour. J. Allen Hynek investigated and found a slick residue, the craft returned, and a deputy reportedly received a Men in Black visit. None of these details appears in the wire story and none has been confirmed. They rest on our telling alone.

The dating needs a correction. The archive's row placed the event around 1978, fifteen years before a 1993 account. The only matching record is from December 1975, and the page uses that date.

The archive's three claimants are a deputy sheriff, two adult daughters and the real estate agent. All three come from our telling and none is named. The wire report's witnesses are different people: unnamed residents and the officers who searched.

Why it sits where it does

Hastings grades L3 on those three claimants, all from a single video. They are not the people the wire story describes. That leaves the contemporary record standing on its own: a police search across three counties after a reported landing. What came down near Hastings is not resolved here.