At 5 a.m. on Aug. 10, Smithville resident Garry Yoakum was walking through his patio door with a fresh cup of coffee when he looked up, and what he saw stopped him in his tracks.
The sky was still dark, but above him was what looked like a giant fluorescent light bulb, or light tube that appeared to be about a quarter of a mile in length, and had what looked like window frames inside it, illuminated from the inside.
Stunned, he sat down and watched it. “I had no clue what it was,” Yoakum said. “It was big. I don’t know how high it was or how far away it was, so I’m just guessing at the size.”
Yoakum gets up early every day to enjoy his coffee at the patio table to begin his day in a relaxing way. When he viewed the unidentifiable object hovering above him, he was unable to move.
“All I could think was ‘what is it?’ What in the world is it? The same question I still have today.”
As much as he tried, he couldn’t see the shape of the object since it was not light yet.
About 20 minutes after he saw it, two other people in Cameron reported seeing the same thing.
He didn’t have his phone with him at the time to snap a picture, but even if he had, he was so mesmerized by what he saw he wouldn’t have reached for his phone. He just sat down and followed the dreamlike object in the sky. And as he jokingly said, he would even had let his coffee get cold, rather than interrupt this amazing moment in time.
Yoakum wasn’t frightened at all by what he saw. He watched the strange phenomenon for about a minute. He was facing north, and it kept moving to the east out of his sight.
“It moved from left to right across my face. I was stupefied, I didn’t wake my wife up or get the camera, nothing. We’re in the flight path from KCI right here. They fly over our house and around our house all the time so it wasn’t anything like an airplane, there was no noise, it was just there.”
At about 5:30 a.m. he decided to go in the house, get his phone and google how to report what he had seen. “It took me two hours to track that down,” Yoakum said. I just put in on the internet and there’s a reporting page where you can give the details of what you saw. They contacted me a couple weeks later after the sighting.”
He contacted an organization called MUFON, (Mutual UFO Network), an international organization that investigates UFO reports from around the globe.
MUFON is a US-based non-profit organization composed of civilian volunteers who study reported UFO sightings. It is one of the oldest and largest organizations of its kind, claiming more than 4,000 members worldwide with chapters and representatives in more than 43 countries and all 50 states.
States that report the most UFO sightings are: California, Florida, Washington, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan.
About one in 10 people say they’ve seen a UFO or something they believe was extraterrestrial.
According to Margie Kay, a field investigator with the Missouri chapter of MUFON, the number of UFO sightings in Missouri has been on the rise since May 2011, and it’s not slowing down.
“MUFON checks on meteorologists’ reports and they check on the airplanes in the air at that time,” Yoakum said. “They check on all kinds of things. But they couldn’t tell what it was.”
When he told his wife, Peggy about it she also didn’t have any idea about what it could possibly have been. “I could have kicked myself for not going and getting her earlier, but she’s not a morning person,” Yoakum said.
He and Peggy have lived in Smithville for about three years and have built a house there. He is retired from Ford Motor Company.
Still wondering what he saw that early morning in August, Yoakum is keeping an open mind and many explanations would make sense. He enjoys entertaining science fiction and doesn’t rule out the possibility that the UFO he sighted could have been a spaceship from another planet, or possibly some kind of tracking device mapping the U.S.
“I just know it was unidentified and I don’t have any idea where it came from and what it was,” Yoakum said.
In another interview about the sighting, he was asked if he minded if the publication used his name in the story, and he said he didn’t have any problem or fears talking about it and being named in the story.
“I got some attention when people read it and asked, ‘are you the guy?’ and I said ‘yes I am.’”
When asked if he thought aliens are real and what their purpose was in studying Earth he admitted he has no idea.
“There are so many possibilities. They may have come here thousands of years ago and been responsible for the pyramids. I don’t know. It’s just a mystery of life. One of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen.
Unless it’s really cold, he continues to go out on the patio early in the morning and the first thing he does is look for strange things in the sky.
As far as people wondering about what he really saw that day he said, “It’s all interesting and good natured. They might think I’m a crackpot, but I just take it for what it is, the same way I would have been.”