In 1961, a strange incident took place in Eagle River, Wisconsin, USA. A local resident named Joe Simonton claimed to have encountered an alien who gave him four pancakes. According to Simonton, on April 18, 1961, he heard a strange noise outside his house. When he stepped out, he saw a silver, disc-shaped object about 10 meters in diameter and 2.5 meters high. The craft had exhaust pipes around its edges and was resting on three legs. It was unlike anything he had ever seen, and what happened next made the encounter even more bizarre.
While handing over the water, Joe Simonton noticed that one of the aliens was cooking on a flameless stove. He saw four thin, brown discs resembling pancakes. Curious, he asked for one, and the alien kindly gave it to him. Simonton mentioned that the aliens didn’t speak any language he could understand, but they seemed friendly and polite. He estimated them to be about 1.5 meters tall and weighing around 60 kilograms. After receiving the water, the aliens departed in their craft, leaving Simonton with four pancakes as an unusual souvenir of the encounter.
Simonton reported his strange encounter to the local sheriff, who then contacted the US Air Force. At the time, the Air Force was investigating UFO sightings through Project Blue Book, a program dedicated to studying unidentified flying objects. Two officers from Project Blue Book visited Simonton and interviewed him. While they found him to be sincere and believable, they remained sceptical about his story. They took one of the pancakes for laboratory analysis, and the results revealed it was made from ordinary ingredients like flour, sugar, and grease, with no trace of extraterrestrial materials or radiation. In fact, the pancake was similar to regular buckwheat pancakes made by humans. As a result, the Air Force concluded that Simonton’s story was either a hoax or a hallucination, and they closed the case as “unidentified,” meaning they couldn't fully explain what had happened.
Joe Simonton maintained his story until his death in 1985. He insisted that he never regretted meeting the aliens or eating their pancakes, and even felt honoured by their visit, hoping they would return someday. Simonton was indifferent to public scepticism, saying he knew what he had seen and experienced, and that was all that mattered to him. The incident became famous in UFO circles, regarded as one of the most bizarre cases ever reported.
Some ufologists speculated that Simonton might have encountered interdimensional travellers or time travellers rather than aliens, while others theorized that the aliens were testing human reactions or conducting an experiment involving food. Simonton’s relatives still preserve the remaining three pancakes as mementos of this strange encounter.
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