Champaign
The Orpheum
The Orpheum opened in 1914 as a 754-seat Rapp & Rapp vaudeville palace in downtown Champaign, hosting Will Rogers, the Marx Brothers, and Bob Hope through the 1920s before sliding into RKO film exhibition and, by 1986, dark. Saved from demolition by local preservationists in 1990, the building spent 1994 to 2020 as a children's science museum, then reopened as a private event hall with a 250-capacity floor under the restored French Renaissance ceiling.
// prior contact
The What-Is-It, summer of 1952
On a July night in 1952, an airline pilot on approach to the University of Illinois Willard Airport near Gilman radioed in a "great white What-Is-It" moving at the limit of his instruments. A University of Illinois professor on the ground clocked the same object covering the run from Philo to west Champaign in roughly fifteen seconds, putting its speed past two thousand miles per hour, and Chanute Air Force Base, fourteen miles east in Rantoul, confirmed no jets were airborne. Chanute would keep quietly handling central Illinois UFO reports for another twenty years; in 1971, when the University of Illinois's Vermillion River Observatory drew a daylight sighting, Chanute officers interviewed the witness and reviewed his Polaroids, then publicly insisted no investigation had occurred.
- sighting
- government
// sources
- Urbana Free Library, "Bizarre Stories: UFO Sightings from the Past" ↗
- Champaign County Historical Archives, "Greetings from Chanute! — UFOs and Project Blue Book" ↗
- Champaign-Urbana Courier archives (1947, 1951, 1952)
capacity
250
year opened
1914
venue type
theater
doors
tba
// market
Champaign-Urbana, IL MSA
city
91,961
2024 est.
metro
243,252
2024 est.
// coordinates
346 N Neil St, Champaign, IL 61820
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