A recreation of the 2007 sighting near Golconda, IL, showing the metallic saucer as seen by the witnesses from their backyard.
THINK ABOUTIT UFO|UAP SIGHTING REPORT
2007: Typical “Sci-fi” saucer seen near Shawnee National Forest, Illinois
An eight-year-old boy in the backyard of a cabin rental property in Golconda, Illinois — deep in Pope County, at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest — was looking at the moon through toy binoculars when something large blocked his view. He lowered the binoculars and saw what he would spend the next fifteen years trying to convince his mother was real: a classic silver saucer with a domed top, a row of black square windows, and a rim studded with steady red and strobing blue lights. It was spinning. It was silent. And it was, by his estimate, roughly three hundred feet above him, close enough that he could study individual features before it drifted over the tree line and disappeared. His eleven-year-old sister saw it too — but kept quiet for days, assuming she had dreamed it, until she overheard their mother retelling the boy’s story and laughing. Now in their twenties, both siblings stand by the account.
Date: Summer 2007 or 2008
Sighting Time: Approximately 6:00 PM CDT
Day/Night: Daytime — late afternoon, moon partially visible during daylight hours
Location: Backyard of Willowbrook Cabin Rentals property, Golconda, Pope County, Illinois — adjacent to Shawnee National Forest
Urban or Rural: Rural — isolated cabin property at the edge of 280,000-acre national forest
No. of Entity(‘s): None observed
Entity Type: N/A
Entity Description: N/A
Hynek Classification: CE-I (Close Encounter of the First Kind) — structured craft observed at approximately 300 feet, well within the 500-foot CE threshold
Duration: 15–20 seconds
No. of Object(s): 1
Description of the Object(s): Classic disc-with-dome saucer — silver metallic hull with a domed top featuring a row of black square windows resembling harmonica note holes. Rim-mounted lights: red (steady) and blue (slow strobing). Craft appeared to be spinning, but the lights remained stationary relative to the observer. Silent throughout.
Shape of Object(s): Disc/saucer with dome — classic symmetrical saucer profile viewed in perfect side-on presentation
Size of Object(s): Estimated approximately 50 feet in diameter — witness compared it to the width of a semi-truck and trailer
Color of Object(s): Silver metallic — reflective enough to catch sunlight on the right side
Distance to Object(s): Approximately 300 feet altitude — witness compared it to the height of a small Cessna aircraft
Height & Speed: Approximately 300 feet, drifting slowly and silently laterally until it passed over the tree line
Number of Witnesses: 2 — primary witness (age 8) and older sister (age 11)
Special Features/Characteristics: Perfect side-on presentation — the craft was oriented so the witness could see neither the top nor the bottom surface, only the exact lateral profile. The witness noted this was geometrically improbable given the craft’s altitude and proximity, and described a subjective impression that it was presenting itself. The spinning/stationary light paradox — hull rotating but lights remaining fixed relative to the observer — was flagged by the witness as anomalous.
Case Status: Insufficient Data
Source: Self-submitted to Think About It (“Reported To Think AboutIt by D”)
Summary/Description: Two siblings — the primary witness age 8 and his sister age 11 — observed a classic silver saucer with a domed top, black square windows, and rim-mounted red and blue lights hovering at approximately 300 feet above their family’s cabin rental property near Golconda, Pope County, Illinois, at the edge of the Shawnee National Forest. The craft drifted slowly and silently over the tree line after 15–20 seconds. The mother dismissed the report. The sister independently confirmed the sighting days later but did not report it to any external organization. Both witnesses, now in their twenties, maintain the account.
Related Cases: None documented in the immediate Golconda/Pope County area
Detailed Report
The Golconda saucer sighting is a self-submitted childhood account filed directly with Think About It by the primary witness, identified only as “D.” The witness was eight years old at the time of the observation and is now in his twenties. His account is written as a retrospective adult narrative — clear, self-aware, and careful to distinguish between what he observed and what he interpreted.
The setting is significant. Golconda is a village of roughly 650 people in Pope County, the second-least-populated county in Illinois. The witness’s family operated Willowbrook Cabin Rentals, a property backed up against the Shawnee National Forest — 280,000 acres of oak-hickory forest, sandstone bluffs, and deep hollows in the extreme southern tip of the state. Light pollution is minimal. Air traffic is sparse. The nearest commercial airport is Barkley Regional in Paducah, Kentucky, roughly 40 miles south.
The observation began incidentally. The witness was playing in the backyard, using toy Viewmaster-style binoculars with the image disc removed to look at the partially visible daytime moon. While focused on the moon, something large crossed his field of view. He lowered the binoculars and saw a silver disc with a domed top hovering at an estimated 300 feet. He immediately raised the binoculars again and began studying individual features: a row of black square windows on the dome, rim-mounted lights with red steady and blue strobing, a spinning motion with lights that paradoxically remained stationary, and a metallic surface reflective enough to catch the late-afternoon sun.
The craft drifted slowly and silently over the tree line after 15–20 seconds and was lost to view. The witness ran inside to tell his mother, who dismissed the account immediately. He attempted to draw the object on printer paper — a detail he credits with preserving his visual memory over the following fifteen years. His older sister, age 11, who had been relaxing in an inflatable pool in the same backyard, saw the same object but kept silent for days, believing she had dreamed it. She came forward only after overhearing their mother retelling the boy’s story dismissively.
The witness’s retrospective commentary includes several observations that distinguish this account from a typical childhood misidentification. He explicitly notes that the craft’s perfect side-on presentation was geometrically improbable — at 300 feet altitude and close range, he should have seen the underside, not a pure lateral profile. He describes a subjective impression that the craft was presenting itself. He flags the spinning/stationary light paradox as something that puzzled him even at age eight. And he preemptively addresses the overactive imagination dismissal: he was never the type of kid who had an imaginary friend, nor did he ever imagine things so vividly that he saw them.
No external investigation was ever conducted. No NUFORC or MUFON filing exists. The account rests on the witness’s retrospective narrative and the uncorroborated confirmation of a sibling who did not report independently.
Researcher’s Notes
The Golconda Sci-Fi Saucer — Pope County 2007/2008 and the Limits of Childhood Testimony
- Source Chain Assessment: This is the thinnest possible source chain. The report was self-submitted directly to Think About It with no intermediary investigator, no organizational filing, and no follow-up. The witness provides his first initial only. The only corroborating witness is a sibling who did not report independently, initially believed the experience was a dream, and has not filed a separate account. The family’s cabin rental business — Willowbrook Cabin Rentals, Golconda IL — is verifiable as a real enterprise and confirms the location, but this establishes only that the witness lived where he says he lived, not that the sighting occurred.
- Date Discrepancy and Classification Rationale: The page header lists 2007; the witness’s narrative states “the summer of 2008 I believe.” The qualifying “I believe” is important — the witness is not certain of the year. Without a confirmed birth year to verify “I was 8 years old,” the date cannot be resolved. Both 2007 and 2008 should be retained with the discrepancy flagged. CE-I is defensible: the witness estimates 300 feet, well within the 500-foot CE threshold, and the object was described as a structured craft with distinguishable surface features — dome, windows, lights — not a distant point of light.
- Analytical Weight of Childhood Observation: The case carries an inherently limited evidentiary ceiling. The primary witness was eight years old. Children can be excellent observers — detailed, unfiltered, less likely to self-censor — but they are also more susceptible to confabulation over time, and their distance and size estimates are unreliable. The witness acknowledges this directly. The spinning/stationary light paradox is an interesting observational detail that argues against simple fabrication — a child inventing a story would be unlikely to include a self-contradictory perceptual anomaly and then flag it as puzzling. The drawing-on-printer-paper detail is a small but significant credibility marker: the act of immediately rendering the object in visual form suggests a genuine attempt at documentation rather than a narrative constructed after the fact.
- Geographic and Pattern Context: Pope County is one of the least-populated and most heavily forested counties in Illinois. The Shawnee National Forest region has produced sporadic anomalous reports over the decades, including a 1970 entity encounter near the forest perimeter involving a cat-like creature and vehicle electromagnetic interference. However, there is no sustained pattern of disc sightings in this area. The isolation of the location cuts both ways: it reduces the likelihood of conventional air traffic misidentification but also eliminates any possibility of corroborating observers.
A child with toy binoculars, a silver saucer over the Shawnee, a sister who kept quiet for days, and a mother who laughed. The record is thin, the source chain is minimal, and the date cannot be confirmed. What survives is a consistent visual memory and a sibling who eventually stepped forward. The archive holds it as reported.
