South Dakota, Minnesota UFO Encounters Reported 50+ Years Later

If you had a close encounter with something you thought was from out of this world,  would you sit on that information for more than five decades?

That’s what’s happened with a pair of supposed Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings in South Dakota and Minnesota.

Both date back to the early 1970s but were just reported to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) in the past year.

Earlier this month (February 11), NUFORC received a report of a supposed sighting in Buffalo Gap, just east of South Dakota’s Black Hills.

The date of the encounter? July 21, 1973.

According to the report, the 10-15 minute incident was observed by two people who claim to have seen a ‘metallic silver disc-shaped object’ in the sky’:

‘We had just stepped out to enjoy the summer afternoon when we noticed we were in a shadow. Looking up, we saw a very large disc-shaped object about 30 feet above our heads. It was about 80 yards in diameter. Really large but made absolutely no sound. It was just floating over our heads. It then started heading south slowly and went about a mile when it just made a really fast 45-degree angle going to the east and up. It only took a second to do that and disappeared. Again no sound. It stayed in the same horizontal position when it did this. No sonic boom.’

In Minnesota, someone went back even further when they contacted NUFORC in September of 2023 about an alleged UFO sighting in White Bear Lake, northeast of the Twin Cities.

The date was May 5, 1972, and lasted about five minutes. According to the report, one person observed a cylindrical object in the sky that had an ‘aura or haze’ around it complete with ‘electrical or magnetic effects’:

‘Woke from sleep and saw an illuminated craft hovering low on the front lawn. It was the mid 70’s, and I was just 8 or 9 years old when just after midnight, I woke to the feeling that I should get up and look out the front window. I walked down the hallway and the stairs to the living room, climbed up onto the couch, and looked out the window. It was after midnight but the front lawn area surrounding the object was illuminated by a bright white light; the craft hovered at about 25-35 feet from the window and about that high from the ground. The object was composed of 3 cylindrical tubes set one on the other in a pyramid form. My father had been wall-papering the family room recently and the white tubes became my reference. I called out to “Come look, there’s wallpaper outside!” When my mother arrived minutes later, they vanished. What stays with me the strongest is the feeling that I had been summoned by the object—like it was checking on me and didn’t want to be seen by anyone else.’

The most recent UFO reports in the Tri-State Area (South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota) all took place in the last year.

In South Dakota, it was a September 30, 2023 incident on the south side of Rapid City. That’s when a ‘large boomerang-shaped UFO with no lights’ flew over a house there.

In Iowa, an unknown object was spotted three different times on May 7, 2023, southwest of Des Moines. It was described as having a ‘very bright green light with yellow purple and red lights rotating in the middle’.

Minnesota’s most recent UFO report came exactly one week after the Iowa incident, May 14, 2023, in the skies above Little Canada, just north of St. Paul. That’s when ‘a very bright triangle, very high in the sky’ was observed for about 30 seconds.

In 2023, more than 4,000 incidents (4,330) were reported to NUFORC from all around the globe.