Harvey, North Dakota Landing

Late one night in November 1961, during a storm of rain and sleet near Harvey in Wells County, North Dakota, four men returning from a hunting trip observed a lighted craft descending into a completely open and deserted field. The object had a distinctive silo-like shape. The weather conditions and the craft’s apparent landing led them to a natural assumption: an airplane was in distress and had made an emergency landing.

Acting on this belief, the four hunters set out across the field to offer assistance. As they approached the craft, however, they realized it was not a conventional aircraft. Around the object, they could make out four humanoid figures, each approximately five feet three inches tall, dressed in white overalls.

Startled and alarmed, one of the witnesses drew a firearm and fired a shot. The humanoid figures did not appear to react in any conventional way. The men, confronted with a situation far removed from the downed airplane they had expected, retreated from the area.

In the aftermath, the four witnesses realized they could not account for a period of time during the encounter — a detail consistent with what researchers would later term “missing time,” a recurring feature in close encounter reports.

The case was documented in NICAP’s occupant encounter files by researcher Richard H. Hall, and subsequently discussed by J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee in their 1975 book, and by Jerome Clark in his encyclopedia of UFO phenomena. The precise identities of the four witnesses have not been widely published.