I feel comfortable talking about this here, considering I no longer live remotely close to the area this took place in; in fact, by the time this news percolated down to me, I had been living away from Mount Vernon, Ohio for several months. It was late 2018, and I'd recently graduated with my bachelor's degree. In my college town, there wasn't much to do once you graduated other than move away. Most people moved to Columbus. Most people I knew, anyway: Columbus was generally the place to be in Ohio if you were queer, and many of my friends were queer or ended up being eggs. Anyway. I digress.
I was working this insane job at the time up in Cleveland. Data entry, 6am to 4pm, though usually it ended up being longer. I'd get in early, around 5am, to skip the traffic, which sometimes caused my commute to get up to 2 hours long one-way. Without traffic, it was about 40 minutes. It was falltime and a friend from school came up to stay with me for a reading event in the area since I'd just got a piece published by a local literary journal. We caught up about happenings on and off campus in Mount Vernon, all the local and library gossip (we were both former librarians at an independent library nearby), and it was then she told me about the Mount Vernon Alien. It was an early instance of my alien obsession manifesting--someone who knew I was obsessed before I knew, coming to deliver me treasures--but certainly not the earliest instance. I can get into that later. She brought these newspaper clippings. I still keep the headline story framed on my wall.
What you don't understand, maybe, is that this was, in fact, a major source of news for the community. A version of the alien sketch was printed on the front page, overlayed on the newspaper's logo, that sort of thing.
Ignore the meth ring thing.
I'm obsessed with this depiction of an alien as drawn by a community member. Arms akimbo, long feet. He's in profile, fleeing the scene. Or maybe just trying to get someplace fast. In this way, he kind of reminds me of myself when I'm crossing the street. I always used to say that my manner of running was a giveaway of my queerness, back when I cared about my presentation. This alien's got that going for him.
Do I think this alien sighting was real? No, not really. But it's an important artifact in my history with alien encounters: hearing about an alien sighting of this caliber, with such an absurd and unbelieveable sketch to accompany it, is kind of like seeing your hometown on TV (which also happened, as Mount Vernon was featured on an episode of Killer Instinct with Chris Hanson for the eerie Michael Hoffman murders).
I'm curious to dig into the organization mentioned in the article, MUFON, or the Mutual UFO Network. Some of the "news" headlines are a bit suspect, but it looks like they have nifty tracking tools for aircraft, UFO and ET reports in real-time, and a database of historical accounts. I'd be interested in doing a full deep-dive and write-up on them and their (il)legitimacy, as well as what it looks like when one of their investigators conducts field research on "credible" witness statements. It seems that I'll have to create an account to access any content on their site, however, which is never a good sign.