While it is certainly possible that the above witness made up a sighting based on the following, it doesn't seem likely and, if he did not, what do we make of both sightings?

This earlier incident took place during the time that the vast section of the Midwest was under one of the most extensive and disturbing UFO flaps ever recorded which occurred in the mid-70s. From Maine to Virginia to Michigan to Montana to Nebraska to New Mexico were record reports of UFO sightings, phantom helicopters, cattle mutilations and incidents like the following from Fawcett's and Greenwood's 1984 book, "Clear Intent":

January 21, 1976 – 2100hrs – 12 miles outside Fairfield, Montana. Bill Link (pseudonym) stated to investigators that he and his wife, a brother, his two sons and a daughter saw on that night. The following are excerpts from Link's statement to the police:

We first spotted them from the house. My boy saw them first just as we turned in to go into the house…It didn't look strange to me. My wife, boy and little girl stayed out, and pretty soon she said, "Come out, Bill. Look at these. They're really funny!" So I went out there, and by this time there is a row of trees down the road about three-quarters of a mile. Well, by this time, these lights were coming back and forth out from behind this row of trees. And they appeared at the time to be landing in the field and taking off and landing in the field and so forth. So we watched them for quite a while, probably twenty minutes, there with the field glasses on. About this time we saw two red blinkers down on the highway and I said, "Well, somebody has reported it to the sheriff or somebody is out there now with a patrol car watching them, so we'll go down too." So I think I took the two boys and jumped in the pickup and as we turned the corner off our approach on the main highway, why, these red things that we thought were patrol cars, they then floated off the highway over this field, still blinking or they were then. So we drove on down there and then, as we approached the field where they had went, why we saw this structure that looked like a hotel. A two-story hotel sitting out there in the field and the other lights were grouped around it. About four sets of lights grouped around it.

[The object that resembled a hotel] had a rectangular shape, you could see the outline of it. You couldn't see the outline till you put the field glasses on. [Link stated he was about 500 yards from the object.] Then you could see the dark outline.

There were, there were lights, windows, I'd say about…there were two rows of those and they appeared to be probably, oh, five to six feet high, and maybe two or three feet wide. With no…that is standing on end like this….Single pane windows. No divisions at all in them.

…[T]hey were the full length of the machine. Well, they come about…they were…there was none in the exact corner of it. They started in a ways from each end of it. In the meantime, these other lights seemed to be kind of affiliated with it, 'cause they grouped around it. They would come up close to it and then they would leave, hover about it, and rapidly change places, and then they would appear to set down right in the stubble and then they would…some of them would die down to a very dim light and then we would watch them for a while and they would flare right back up very brilliantly…