Happy Halloween! UFOs over Lantana?

Readers: Over the years, Post Time has marked Halloween by passing along various local tales of the unexplained, or at least partially explained. Few are as riveting as the tale of D.S. “Sonny” DesVergers. Here’s more from a two-part column in 2004.

In August 1952, the 30-year-old hardware store clerk and Boy Scout scoutmaster emerged burned and dazed from a wooded area off Military Trail near Lantana Road. He claimed he had encountered an alien spacecraft that zapped him with a fireball that came out of a domed hatch.

Post columnist Ron Wiggins revived the story in 1997, tracking down two men who’d been Scouts in Sonny’s troop.

The men said DesVergers was driving them home from a meeting when he saw some strange lights. He made a U-turn, grabbed a flashlight and machete from the trunk, and set off on foot, telling the boys to call the Sheriff’s Office if he wasn’t back in 10 minutes. They said they then saw circulating lights in the trees and ran to a nearby home.

A half-hour later, a deputy found DesVergers. The scoutmaster said he had looked up and had seen a silver disc that was 3 feet thick and 30 feet across.

“I heard hinges open and then they shot at me,” DesVergers said in the 1952 article.

Air Force investigators later said the clerk had a reputation for tall tales, but they couldn’t account for scorching at the site.

After Wiggins’ 1997 column, in which he interviewed the two men who’d been young Scouts in DesVergers’ troop, Lyman Bradford, of West Palm Beach, called in to say he’d seen the UFO, too. He said it landed in the back of his family’s property, five acres of palmetto scrub on Military Trail north of Okeechobee Boulevard. Bradford recalled investigators found a pattern of circular scorch marks at the landing site.

“When young Bradford saw the strange craft hover in front of a melaleuca tree behind their house and settle in a patch of palmetto, he ran to his dad’s machine shop next door to the fire station, yelling for the senior Bradford and another man to come out and see,” Wiggins wrote. “His dad not only co-witnessed the sighting but took pictures, which Bradford says were later confiscated by Air Force investigators. Bradford recalls two men taking their stories and warning them to keep quiet.”

Nothing has come of the story since. DesVergers died at 70 in Apopka in April 1993.

Believers: Mutual UFO Network: www.mufon.com. Read more about it: "UFOs Are Real: Here’s the Proof" by Ed Walters and Bruce MacCabee.

Skeptics: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: csicop.org. Read more about it: "The UFO Invasion: The Roswell Incident, Alien Abductions, and Government Coverups," by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr and Joe Nickell.

Submit your questions to Post Time, The Palm Beach Post, 2751 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach, FL 33405. Include your full name and hometown. Call 561-820-4418. EK@pbpost.com. Sorry; no personal replies.