Look, up in the sky...It's a bird...It's a plane...

On April 1, 1967, this photo appeared on page 1 of the Kankakee Daily Journal. It purported to show a crashed “flying saucer” being recovered from the Kankakee River, just below the Illinois Central Railroad bridge. (Kankakee County Museum Photo Archive)

By Jack Klasey

May 10, 2025

Did you complete the phrase, “It’s a bird. It’s a plane.” with the words, “It’s Superman”? If so, you probably grew up in the 1940s or 1950s, listening to “The Adventures of Superman” radio show and/or reading Superman comic books.

But you also might have finished the phrase with “flying saucer”—the late 1940s and 1950s were the era when, as one reference work put it, “The term flying saucer was widely associated with extraterrestrial life….The shape became visual shorthand for alien invaders.”  The article also noted, “Pop culture embraced flying saucers. The discs appeared in film, television, literature, music, toys, and advertising.”

The origin of the flying saucer phenomenon was a June 24, 1947, incident involving businessman and amateur pilot Kenneth Arnold. While flying near Yakima, Washington, on that day, Arnold observed nine unusual aerial objects passing his plane at high speed (he estimated their speed at 1,700 miles per hour). One newspaper report described the shape of the objects as “saucer-like,” and the term “flying saucer” was born.

In succeeding weeks and months, hundreds of “saucer” sightings were reported across the country, and even in other nations. One 1947 U.S. Air Force report (later retracted) claimed that a saucer had crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico.

Although they occurred less frequently, sightings of saucers continued into the 1950s and were reported from time to time in later decades. Many of the saucer reports were explained away as conventional aircraft, weather balloons, and normal celestial events.

On Friday, July 25, 1952, the Kankakee Daily Journal informed its readers, “Sorry, but those “flying saucers” you thought you saw Thursday evening were not flying saucers. In fact, they weren’t even space ships being used by men from other planets. What you saw were just plain, ordinary hydrogen-filled balloons—25 of them—bearing cosmic-ray recording equipment …released by a professor of physics at the University of Chicago.”

The balloons were released in Chicago at 6 p.m. on Thursday, the newspaper reported, “and it wasn’t long after that that the Journal, radio station WKAN, and police headquarters were receiving numerous calls from residents reporting that they had sighted ‘flying saucers.’”

Two local aviators, Delbert and Roger Koerner, “jumped into a plane to go aloft and investigate the objects a little more closely,” noted the Journal. “They reported that at 12,000 feet, they didn’t seem any closer to the objects than they were from the ground….They reported the balloons apparently were traveling at between 40,000 and 60,000 feet.”

One month later, on Tuesday, August 19, 1952, another mysterious object in the sky was spotted over Kankakee. Armand Betourne, who was working in the upper floors of a downtown Kankakee office building at about 8:45 p.m., saw puzzling sight. He told the Journal that he “happened to look out a south window and see a lighted object hovering over the tracks” of the Illinois Central Railroad, two blocks to the west.

He quickly telephoned his home at 500 S. Dearborn Avenue and asked his son, John, to go out and look for the lighted object. John did so, and told the Journal, “It was an object about five or six times as large as a star and was moving south slowly just above the treetops. I quickly ran toward the tracks, but by the time I arrived, it had disappeared.” An Air Force veteran, John Betourne said that he had seen all types of planes while in the military, but “Tuesday night’s object resembled nothing he had ever seen before.”

Armand and John Betourne “weren’t the only ones Tuesday night who saw a bright light in the sky, a light that might be kin to the much-heralded flying saucers.”  In its August 22 edition, the Journal reported that William Lockwood of Kankakee and two other men had seen the mysterious celestial object as they were leaving the Kankakee Country Club at about 8:45 p.m. Tuesday.

“It was to the southwest, and was visible just over the treetops,” Lockwood told the newspaper. “At first, it was indistinct, then it blazed forth and finally disappeared. At the very first, we thought it was just a star. Then, we changed our minds when it blazed forth.”

Some fifteen years later, a “flying saucer” was again local news in Kankakee.  On April 1, 1967, the Daily Journal carried a front-page story describing a “saucer crash” in the Kankakee River between the Illinois Central and Washington Avenue bridges. “Efforts to recover an object that apparently flew into the side of the Illinois Central Railroad bridge early today and fell into the Kankakee River were suspended shortly after noon, when the need for heavier equipment developed.

The Journal quoted an eyewitness who was fishing from the Washington Avenue bridge and “saw this thing…it looked like what I would call a flying saucer…it was moving pretty slow and wobbling a bit.” The witness said the object “missed the bridge rail by about a foot and headed for the railroad bridge. It looked like he tried to go under one of the arches, but must have hit the bridge and bounced off, because the next thing I saw was a big splash.” The Journal story was accompanied by a photo showing a crane on the railroad bridge attempting to raise a disc-shaped object from the water below the dam.

Certain items made the truth of the story suspect: the name of the eyewitness (Isa Lyar), a reference to a scientific theory (the Concentric Lirpa Loof Effect), and most importantly, the publication date (April 1), Yes, the “flying saucer crash” was an example of the traditional April Fool’s Day jokes published by the Journal in the 1950s and 1960s.

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.