Saturday Night (UFO) Fever

In October 1973, President Richard Nixon was up to his neck in Watergate, Edwin Edwards was well into his first term as Louisiana’s governor, and David Duke was the newly appointed Grand Dragon of the KKK. In Tiger Town, the LSU football team was undefeated, Leisure Landing was selling Neil Young and Cat Stevens LPs, and American Graffiti was playing at the University Cinema, where tickets cost ninety-nine cents for adults and fifty cents for children.

And UFO fever was in the air.

Two men fishing in Pascagoula, Mississippi, on the night of October 11 had reported being taken onto an alien spaceship, where they were examined and then released by three “humanoid” beings. Soon the national and even international media were flocking to Pascagoula. Forty years later, their story remains a legendary example of encounters with UFOs—unidentified flying objects.

Brothers Guyton and Romney Stubbs were inspired by that story. “It was so interesting and highly believable,” recalls Guyton, who now lives in Lake Rosemound near St. Francisville. “We wanted to capitalize on the UFO hysteria.”

Capitalize how? By creating a fake UFO and sending it up over a venue where it was sure to grab attention—Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night.

The brothers were recent LSU graduates who had moved downtown but maintained ties with the university area. On Saturday, October 20, 1973, they showed up at my apartment near LSU and asked to borrow my iron. The Tigers were playing Kentucky that night, with kickoff at 7:30. 

They had brought along a grocery bag full of stuff—visqueen plastic drop cloths, aluminum foil, a tin of Kiwi shoe polish, aluminum clothesline wire, and an old ripped-up T-shirt.

With these ingredients, they constructed a rudimentary hot-air-balloon. First they made a hoop with the wire, then they fashioned the nine-by-twelve-foot drop cloth into a cylinder. They sealed the edges by covering them with foil and ironing along the foil—the heat from the iron annealed the plastic so it stuck together, and the foil prevented the plastic from melting and sticking to the iron.

They attached a wire cross to the hoop at the bottom of the balloon, then ripped off a four-by-five-inch piece of T-shirt and spooned the entire contents of the can of shoe polish—wax that contained a flammable solvent—onto its center. They tied the cloth into a golf-ball-sized mass and attached it to the center of the hoop.

“We used the entire can [of shoe polish] because we wanted this thing to go far,” says Guyton.

“This thing” was a UFO to be released in time to pass over the stadium at halftime, just as the Golden Band from Tigerland was taking the field.

Earlier that day, Guyton and Romney had gone to the LSU parade ground with a map that showed the stadium. Orienting the map like a compass, they determined that the wind was coming from the east at about ten miles per hour. “It was a significant breeze,” recalls Guyton, who remembers that the temperature was moderate. The parade ground, they determined, would be their launching point.

“If it was too windy, the UFO could be unstable,” says Romney, who also now lives in Lake Rosemound with his wife Pam. “We had to position ourselves so it would go in the direction we wanted it to go. The parade ground was perfect because it was a big open space.”

Just before halftime we hiked over to the parade ground to launch our missile. “We could hear the crowd noise subside and the band start playing,” recalls Guyton.

The finished balloon was nine feet tall and four feet in diameter. Somehow the three of us held it up, more or less straight, and Romney lit the fuel-soaked “wick” with a cigarette lighter. Within fifteen seconds, the plastic cylinder filled with hot air. “It was really taut, but really flexible, like a giant condom,” Guyton recalls today.

“It was tugging at our fingers,” says Romney. “Then Guyton said, ‘Okay, let it go.’”

I held my breath as we let go, and our UFO sailed up, up, and away—right toward the stadium!

“It teetered a little bit, then it straightened out, and the wind just took it,” recalls Guyton. “We stood and watched until it was well over the stadium. By that time it had risen several hundred feet. All you could see was this pulsating orange light. You couldn’t see the flame, just this orange pulsating thing. A perfect UFO.”

“It went over the southeast corner of the stadium,” recalls Romney. “To the naked eye you’d swear it was a UFO. We were really pleased with ourselves.”

Some 68,000 fans filled the stadium that night, and their attention was soon diverted from the marching band to the UFO soaring overhead.

The next morning, we eagerly scanned the joint Sunday edition of the State Times and Morning Advocate. Sure enough, we had made the news.

Under the headline “UFO Sightings Continue Here,” the newspaper reported, “The UFO rage continued Saturday night . . . when an apparently home-made flying saucer sailed over the heads of some 68,000 people watching the … game. The object which ‘flickered like a candle,’ according to one observer, moved slowly over the stadium at half-time. Word about the UFO spread through the crowd and a murmur went up as heads turned to the sky. A photographer on duty at the game … solved the UFO mystery when he peered at the object through his telescopic lens. He identified the UFO as a cellophane bag with a ‘flickering candle’ sticking from it. … The home-made UFO apparently crossed the Mississippi River and landed around Port Allen, where it was sighted by residents of that community.”

This wasn’t the first time the Stubbs brothers had created a hot-air balloon. They had made a few ill-fated early attempts in which the plastic bag had caught fire. But they kept working at it, perfecting their technique.

“At first, we used a dry cleaner’s bag instead of a drop cloth,” recalls Romney. “We started small and, like NASA, our program got bigger.”

On one memorable night, they had released a hot-air balloon from the roof of the ramshackle Chimes Street apartment building known as The Ghetto. They watched in amazement as the wind carried it north. “We tracked it with binoculars as it went over Exxon,” recalls Guyton. “We could see the flares of the refinery. It passed over Exxon and kept going toward Port Hudson until it was just the faintest light in the sky.”

The LSU hot-air balloon was their last hurrah. “That UFO story made international news,” recalls Guyton. “Johnny Carson mentioned it on the Tonight Show, and I saw a newspaper from Bogota, Colombia, that carried the story.

“Today you can’t believe anything you see or hear. Photos can be Photoshopped, and even audio can be altered. When we made the hot-air balloon, sixty-eight thousand people saw it with their own eyes and swore they saw a UFO.

“But things are not always what they seem. That’s the lesson of this thing. It’s just a reminder that we’re all tricksters.”

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.