For the past several weeks, I have been trying to determine what the blue object in three consecutive photographs was, and what caused the strange hole in the clouds over Mt. Herman that morning.

Satellite photographs of this region place the approximate location of the cloud anomaly quite close to the McCurtain County Wilderness Area – a 23-square-mile, heavily wooded and rugged mountain region, about six miles east of U.S. 259.

Set aside for conservation purposes by the Oklahoma Legislature in 1918, much of the vast wilderness area is on the east side of the Mountain Fork River and strictly off limits to the public without special written permission from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation.

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The morning the digital photographs were made, Veterans Day, Nov. 11, I’d left my cabin around 9:30 a.m. and was on the way to do a couple of interviews for upcoming articles.

Outside the window of the car that morning there was a layer of stratocumulus clouds highlighted by a bright mid-morning sun. The leaves on the trees lining the highway glistened with autumn colors.

Employees of Beavers Bend Resort Park had just finished putting on the big weekend fall festival and the timing for the event had been perfect. The Kiamichi Mountains were draped in peak colors and thousands of tourists had shown up to enjoy the spectacle. By Monday morning, most had gone home and U.S. 259 was abandoned.

Only about one mile north of the Mt. Herman Store, I noticed a very large gap in the clouds on the east side of the highway.

Looking closer, it appeared a cookie cutter had sliced a half-mile elliptical hole from the blanket of clouds. Above this gap in the cloud layer the morning sun was bright and beaming straight down. Inside the hole I could see wisps of clouds being drawn toward the center of the anomaly. The total effect was pure science fiction and completely foreign to me.

Just a few years ago I owned a cabin class twin-engine Cessna 421B (NIDX). The plane was purchased as an investment and put in charter service. When it wasn’t hauling paying clients, I traveled extensively in One Delta X-Ray. Not once that I can remember, though, had I seen clouds like those outside the window of the car that morning. With a camera on the seat next to me, I pulled over to take a few pictures.

Looking through the viewer, I realized the sun was so bright and so near the subject to be photographed, it was doubtful any photos would turn out well. But in the span of about 30 seconds, three pictures were taken and I went on.

The next day I pulled the camera out to look for a photograph. In the viewer was the first of those three Mt. Herman pictures.

As suspected, the sun was too bright. I started to erase all three shots, but paused long enough to put the diskette in a reader to get a better look before the images were forever lost.

When the first photo came up on the screen , my attention went to a bright object underneath the hole in the cloud cover. In the next picture , the object had dropped hundreds of feet and was putting off what appeared to be a blue gas. The final picture was probably the most startling.

Staring at a close-up of a brilliant blue ball, I remembered that I’d hit the zoom for this last shot and put the camera dead-center on the cloud anomaly. By pure luck the object was caught just as it rocketed straight up through the large gap in the cloud cover. As it raced into the heavens, long slivers of clouds appeared to be drawn toward the brilliant blue object.

What was on the computer screen came as a complete surprise. When I was standing outside the car taking photos the previous morning, I never noticed the blue object captured in the photographs. Possibly the reason I didn’t notice the object was that the sun was shining in my eyes.

During the course of trying to learn more about what was caught in the photos, Sharon Huff at the Mt. Herman Store gave me a lead on a potential eyewitness account of another sighting.

Customer Roy Patrick learned I’d been to the Mt. Herman Store with pictures of the strange object and told Huff his children saw something quite similar the same day.

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