The Lemon Grove Flashlight

One of the boys tapped the object with his flashlight. It lit up, rose and shot off to the south-west. Around the neighbourhood dogs barked and television sets went blank. The boys were both eleven, and they had come across the thing at about seven in the evening on 16 November 1973 in a vacant lot in Lemon Grove, in San Diego County. Our telling describes it as round and landed, about ten feet high and twelve feet wide. When investigators came they found leg-like indentations in the ground and a patch where the grass had been swept into a swirl.

What is on the record

One telling on one channel carries the case, and its only claimant entry is the two boys counted together. The telling also mentions a woman without making her part in the case clear. The published catalogues do not list her as a witness and she is not counted. The boys were children and are not named here, though some catalogues name them.

Our telling has the object landed. The published record describes a dark domed object hovering just above the lot. The case appears with a matching date, time and physical traces in three outside sources. The Hatch database carries it from the MUFON UFO Journal. Eberhart's chronology lists it and so does Godelieve Van Overmeire's French catalogue. Nobody official is known to have examined it, and it has no published explanation. The archive holds no measurements of the indentations beyond the description that they looked like the marks of legs.

Why it sits where it does

The case grades L0, a single account. Two children who were together make one testimony rather than two independent ones, and a witness this page will not name cannot count as an identified claimant. The catalogues give the file more weight than its grade suggests. They pair the boys' story with physical marks, failed television sets and barking dogs, all reported at the time. What the boys found in that Lemon Grove lot is not resolved here.