Louisville, Kentucky, TIMES, 14 April 1945, page

A Meteor?

To the Editor of The Times:

What did I see? Tuesday night at eleven o'clock I walked out on my front porch. Straight ahead, high in the sky, I beheld the most beautiful light I had ever seen. It was straight east and looked as if it were directly over Fisherville, three miles east.

It seemed to be the size of a large cantaloupe and glowed and receded in brilliance like a heart throb. It seemed to be coming straight at our front porch and I suggested to my wife we had better get aside because if it missed the barn I felt sure it would strike the house head on. It cast a light downward like a lamp shade over the earth. First we thought of a plane with some new signaling device, but there was just brilliant light and no flame.

After about ten minutes it went out like a snuffed candle. I found one man in Jeffersontown who had seen it and he thinks it was a meteor. No, Mr. Editor, I don't drink a drop. I'm bone dry. JAMES L. HENDRY, Jeffersontown, Ky.

KITE TOWED LANTERN
He Flew 'Saucer' In '97 And Started Run on Bank
By SHERLEY UHL
Louisville Times Staff Writer

Owen Kelly, 3008 Fifth, is skeptical of flying saucers. After all, he flew one himself once, causing, among other things, a run on a bank.

Kelly, a retired racetrack detective, told how he and some small fry pals panicked the city 55 years ago by hitching a switchman's lantern to a 6-foot-high kite and sailing it at the end of three spools of trotline.

Kelly, who at 66 still has a sparkle in his eye, recalled that the kite was was launched at night in a woods near SS. Mary and Elizabeth Hospital. He and his pals then walked slowly toward the old city limits, at Oak Street, towing the lantern in their wake.

"Residents around 18th Street thought the world was coming to an end," Kelly remembered. "They all started to draw their money out of Schwartz's bank on Market Street and said they intended to go back to Germany."

That Louisville's German colony remained and populated a large portion of the city can be credited to Kelly. While transferring the string from one hand to another, the little Irishman let it slip from his fingers and the floating lantern eventually crashed to earth near Kosmosdale.

Citizens were indignant, he related, "and a big cop named Sheehan got a tip, rounded us up, took us to headquarters and bawled us out."

Some alarmists at that time had insisted his flying lantern was a fugitive from another planet, mused Kelly, staring dreamily toward the skies from his back door.