Flying saucers over the Sandhills? UFO investigations now public in University of Nebraska archives

Did you see a flying saucer hovering over the Nebraska Sandhills in the 1970s?

In the 1980s, did you report a long-dead relative refusing to give up the ghost in the family home in Omaha?

In either case, you may have been approached at the time by a uniquely inquisitive schoolteacher named E.A. “Earl” Kral, who wanted to investigate whether it was an authentic encounter.

Kral’s files are now available to the public. The materials, donated to the archive at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, document investigations of dozens of purported UFO sightings and suspected paranormal experiences collected by the advocate of exploring the unexplained.

The archives are being released amid a heightened interest in the paranormal after former President Barack Obama discussed the possibility of aliens being real on a podcast earlier this year. On Friday the Pentagon released never-seen files detailing UFO encounters.

The 16 meticulously organized boxes at UNL include folders with subject headings that include visitors from outer space, cults, extrasensory perception, ghosts, cattle mutilations and conspiracy theories. Hundreds of original documents, newspaper and magazine articles, and scholarly research reference everything from Bigfoot to spoon-benders to psychics.

Mary Ellen Ducey, the special collections librarian for the University Archives, oversees this set of research materials like no other at UNL.

“This is the only paranormal collection we have,” she said.

Previously, the library stored “a few anecdotes about ghost stories, but nothing specific like this collection.”

The collection represents the life’s work of Kral, the man once considered the state’s leading advocate for scientific research of unexplained phenomena.

Kral passed away in 2021.

Ducey described him as “a curiosity in many ways.”

Many who took Mr. Kral’s English class at Grand Island High School in the 1970s and 80s might remember him. In yearbook photos, he looks to be the nerdy stereotype of the uncool teacher at the time -- bald, glasses, kind of rumpled.

Some thought him odd, but the kids he connected with, like Larry Molczyk, gave him their full respect.

“I know that there were other students who felt like he was one of the hardest teachers they ever had,” Molczyk recalled. “I'm glad I had him as a teacher. He was appreciated, in retrospect, by a lot of those same people (who complained at the time)."

There was a whole different aspect to Kral that many students and faculty did not fully understand. The biography describing his donated papers notes he was also “an author and researcher who had a sympathetic interest” in the paranormal and alien encounters.

“It was normal for Mr. Kral to want to document things which other people might have found obtuse,” Molczyk said. “That's not saying anything bad. I'm just saying that he had a wide variety of interests and was hard to keep the man down in his later life.”

That lifelong obsession with investigating the obtuse and his efforts to document his findings provide the real treasure in Kral's archives: dozens of carefully researched case studies of UFO sightings from people all over Nebraska. Each is documented on a standardized form that Kral apparently created. As the first state director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), he recruited a team of 40 people with backgrounds in science to collect and analyze the data.

Jack Kasher, who took over the Nebraska chapter after Kral stepped aside, said Kral, “wanted the investigations to be done thoroughly, like MUFON does, and to be done accurately, to find out the truth, to try to get to the bottom of whether this stuff really is real.”

Kasher, a university professor teaching physics in Omaha, became one of Kral's recruits with backgrounds in science and technology to investigate UFOs.

“Elmer Kral was a very interesting person,” Kasher said in a recent interview. “A little quirky, but he was a genuinely good person interested in finding the truth about UFOs.”

Nebraska Public Media was the first entity to request access to the files since they were made available last year.

The University Archives was bound by an agreement with Kral requiring the reports not be shared with the public until 2025 to protect those who reported seeing UFOs.

Former MUFON state president Kasher felt that decision was appropriate.

“Some people would not like it that people know that they're saying they saw UFOs and stuff. The stigma of saying something weird happened,” according to Kasher.

Among the UFO investigations reviewed:

• Ernest Dahlke called the Hamilton County Sheriff to report a bright white light dropping from the sky outside his bedroom window.
• In Grand Island, teenager Kevin Aldridge grabbed his camera when he saw an oblong object crossing the sky for almost four minutes. He actually got his photos published in the local newspaper.
• Farmer L.J. Garrison and his wife in Burwell asked MUFON to investigate their UFO sighting from 1953. On their Sandhills ranch they watched two amazingly bright objects float in the southern sky, connected by a beam of light.

“You can't say that all that stuff is nonsense,” said Kasher. “Some of them are really strong cases, so it's good to have those out.”

In one case from 1973, a science teacher in central Nebraska saw a hovering object in his backyard that seemed to rocket away quickly. The teacher took notes and included some decent photos. Kral and the team picked apart every earthly option. They analyzed the photos for evidence of “trickery” and found none. As a result, the team came up with a rare “unexplained” designation. In this community, “unexplained" equals “we don’t know.”

Of the dozens of sightings investigated by MUFON, only three or four of the flying objects were ultimately unidentified. None could be considered extra-terrestrial.

Included with most reports are hand-typed letters from Kral to the Nebraskan requesting the UFO investigation. He lays out in detail why his investigators concluded their sighting was not an alien encounter. Instead, after reviewing weather reports, star charts and aviation records, there was only evidence of bright planets, or a weather balloon or a visiting helicopter.

Kasher considers the follow-up letter “a really good thing to be doing instead of slanting it” in a way the person making the report hoped it would turn out.

“Some people may be overly wanting to have a really good case, and maybe they embellish it a little bit.”

After Kral stepped away from MUFON, he told a reporter with the Omaha World-Herald that investigating UFO sightings had taught him about “the unreliability of eyewitnesses.”

“I'm disappointed (Earl) became somewhat of a skeptic,” Kasher said. His friends' early enthusiasm for the potential for real alien encounters “somehow… melted away.”

As his interest in UFOs waned, Kral took on a new and equally obtuse interest: paranormal encounters.

In the 1980s, he donated $10,000 of his own money to the University of Nebraska Foundation to establish the Scientific Claims Investigation Hotline. Interesting reports of incidents that initially seemed inexplicable by conventional science were assigned for investigation.

Topics in those reports range from haunted houses to mysterious crop circles.

The material he collected is one of the oddest sets of papers ever shelved in the University of Nebraska archives, said Ducey, the special collections librarian.

“That's what we do, is we collect research materials that may be of interest to other people,” Ducey said. “This is a fascinating area to think about for many people. We don't understand it. Let's see what we can learn from somebody who tried to understand it.”

She said it will be fascinating to see how writers and researchers will make use of such a unique collection.

Anyone interested in viewing collection can contact the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's library department.