Dearborn, MI being encounter — September 30, 1954

Lawrence Cardenas reportedly saw an unusual gathering while driving to his laundry job at Dearborn, Michigan, before dawn on September 30,1954. Harold Wilkins’s account, repeated by Vallée, gives about 4:45 a.m. and describes a road-construction site near a traffic signal. Cardenas’s reported age varies between 41 and 45. He said roughly fifteen men in dark-green uniforms stood near construction equipment, apparently speaking an unfamiliar language. They wore tight caps with pointed fronts, heavy goggles and cylinder-like equipment on their shoulders. A somewhat taller man in brown seemed to address them. Cardenas also described a large oval object on the grass some distance away, with flickering colored lights and smoothly finned sides. He drove on rather than miss work. These are substantially human-sized, clothed figures; the account does not justify standard grey-alien faces. No arrival or departure connected the men to the object, and the original newspaper references remain incompletely identified. Construction workers or another ordinary scene are possibilities, not established resolutions. The plate shows a representative Cardenas, a group in goggles and work-like uniforms, their brown-clad leader and an approximate oval object; the imported count of eighteen is not treated as exact.