Welcome to the August issue
of Odyssey of Oddities
This month the topic is
PERSONAL UFO'S PART ONE
I suppose that I had always believed in
something out of the ordinary most of my life. I was probably around
six or seven years old when our family was exposed to sights that were
unexplainable. Since the initial sightings of "odd" things
in the sky, I have always been on the lookout for UFO's. Now I am in
my 40's and I have had many unexplainable sightings since I was young.
The very first sighting occurred back in the
Midwest on our family farm. My mother was working late in town which
was about 10 miles away from the farm. One night she came flying into
the driveway and got out of the car and ran into the house. She
"ordered" the rest of the family to come out into the
driveway and look up into the night sky. She explained that she saw
something up in the sky when she had made a turn onto the road that
ran past our farm. She drove the three miles to the house watching
these lights and then parked and pulled us out to see the spectacle.
We looked straight up into the sky almost directly overhead and there
were dozens of lights that slowly merged together to create one giant
light formation. The light formation slowly crept it's way over the
horizon and disappeared from sight.
This event happened back in the early
sixties. The Project "Bluebook" was in operation, but we
knew nothing about it to speak of. We did not report the incident to
anyone. After the event, we all tried to make some sort of sense out
of what we had just seen. What is high in the sky and is self
illuminated and slowly merges together to make one giant luminous
object? We had no clue as to what type of phenomenon created a
spectacle of this sort. I'm sure that "Bluebook" would have
called it "swamp gas". Back then swamp gas was the best
explanation for anything and everything that was seen that could not
be explained. There are no swamps in the Midwest though, so that was
not an option to consider. What was it then? Did a meteor break apart
and then decide to attach all of it's pieces back together again? This
flew much too slowly to be any meteor.
Two days after we saw this happen, we read in
the newspaper on how some woman in Michigan had seen the same thing
only in reverse. She saw a large glowing object that was high in the
sky slowly come apart into a series of small objects. The date was the
same night as we saw our object, and the direction of travel was
consistent in linking the two sightings. The object we saw in Iowa was
traveling in a north easterly direction as it went over the horizon.
We still remember the incident and have no explanation for it to this
day. We saw something that science can not readily explain.
The next incident happened around the same
time period. It may have only been a few months later, and it happened
several times over about a week. As I remember it, my mother called
for me to come to her bedroom. My brother and I shared a bedroom which
was right next to our parent's bedroom. I was in my room, and my
mother called me to come into her room. When I arrived in her room the
lights were out and it was dark. She was standing by the window on the
west side of the room. She whispered to come over to the window and
look outside. I looked out the window to see a red object floating
towards a large oak tree which stood out in our field. The tree was
about 200 yards away from the house. This object was small and solid
red in color. It hovered very much like a helicopter would. The object
was round and small and self illuminated. It slowly flew around and
above the tree out in the field, then made a casual turn and flew back
in the direction it had appeared from. At arms length it was probably
about the size of the end of a lit cigarette pointing at you.
This happened a couple of times on subsequent
nights. Of course we didn't think to get a camera and shoot a photo of
it on the other nights. After a couple of "visits", the
object quit it's nightly flights. The next incident happened after we
had moved to the city. I guess I was about 10 or 11 years old. My
brother was 11 or 12 then. We both had a paper route and delivered
newspapers down one street close to our house. We delivered our papers
daily and then once a month we would have to go out and collect money
from our customers for their paper delivery. One night we left to go
do our collections, and it started out okay. We always rode our bikes
everywhere, and also during our collection routine. We both got on our
bikes and we cut across the golf course across the street from our
house. The golf course was up on a hill and we usually cut across the
golf course to save some time. We would then join the street which
went up to the avenue that our paper route was on. It was a long hill
to climb and you couldn't really pedal up it very easily. Sometimes we
would pedal back and forth to climb it and other times we would walk
our bikes to the top. This night we arrived at the top and the sky was
dark and clear visibility. The first house we came to on our route was
a block to the left. We arrived at the house and we were about to go
to collect our money, when my brother noticed something odd in the
sky. I saw it almost the same time that he did and he asked what I
thought that was in the sky. We both stood there watching this object
hover out over this house. There were bluish green lights on one side
and red on the other. Now that is the same colors as aircraft have on
them. This was different though, as the lights were more like glowing
masses. They were not little lights like you see on an aircraft. The
craft itself was illuminated with these colors. One side was bluish
green and the other side was red in color. It just sat there in the
sky not moving. It hovered in the same spot. We sat and watched to see
what it would do for several minutes. Then we walked toward the house
to collect our money in hopes of getting the occupants to come out and
see this "thing" also. The people were not home though, so
we retreated to our bikes and decided to go on with our route. Since
we didn't know what to think of the object, we more or less decided to
ignore it's presence.
At the time we saw it, I would estimate it
was probably as big as a large private airplane in size. I would say
at least 25 feet in size. The distance from us and the house was
somewhere around a half a mile or more away. It was out over another
part of the city when we saw it. When we left to go collect our money,
it was just hanging there. We gave it about ten minutes to do
something before we left. It didn't do anything though, it just sat in
the sky.
Our paper route was about 3/4 of a mile in
length and all on the same street. We went about collecting our money
and didn't really bother to look for the object any longer. There were
lots of trees to obscure our vision of the sky once we got underway.
It took us about an hour or so to collect our money from the
customers. We ended up back at the top of the hill not far from the
house that we saw the object over. From this point we would make a
left turn onto the street that took us back down the long hill to our
house. Just before we would get to the bottom, we would cut back
across the golf course. When we were at the top of the hill, I had to
stop to adjust something. I forgot what it was that I had to adjust,
but I remember stopping for some reason and my brother went straight
down the hill. I either had to tie my shoe lace, or put the chain back
on the sprocket of my bike. Whichever it was it only took about twenty
or thirty seconds to get underway again. I took off and sailed down
the street. You could go like the wind, since it was all downhill and
steep. I jumped over onto the golf course as normal. Right in the
middle of the golf course portion, I saw my brother slumped down over
his handlebars on his bike. I skidded to a stop and asked him what was
wrong. He was as white as a ghost. He mumbled a little bit as I
dismounted my bike. I went to him and pulled him up where I could see
his face. He was in shock or so it seemed. Again, I asked him what was
wrong. He was crying and shaking very badly. He explained that the
object we saw earlier had swooped down right over the top of his bike
and shot a bright laser like beam of light at him. He said that the
beam hit his handlebars and he felt a shock or something when that
happened. It was just a few seconds later, when I arrived. He was
slumped over the handlebars by the time I got there. I had to help him
the rest of the way to the house. I held him up as best that I could
and walked him and our bikes back to the house which was practically
across the street from where we were. When we got into the house, my
mother asked me what was wrong with him, and that is when I told the
story of what happened to him. Since she had seen the lights in the
sky on previous occasions, she was able to at least consider the story
that we told her. My brother shook, and was white as a ghost for
several hours after we got home. Things finally got back to normal. We
didn't report the incident to anyone.
Thirty later, I had an occasion to be in that
city and this time I was armed with a camcorder. I decided to retrace
the incident on camcorder so that I could have some video reference
material for that sighting. I also made a rendered version of what the
thing looked like from our perspective using one frame of the video. I
drew in a fairly close approximation of what the object looked like
out over the same house. Since I took the picture of the same house
during the day, I had to simulate a night sky by painting the sky with
a paint program on the computer. My final product came out fairly
close to what we saw. I did enlarge the object a bit to get a better
"view" of what we were looking at in the distance. I doubled
the size of the object. It's at the bottom of this page.
This was only the beginning of many strange
sightings. I wish I could explain what these objects really were, but
sometimes you just can't explain them, after all it's an Odd place out
there sometimes..
Part two of personal UFO's will be next
month. Some of the most intriguing things are yet to come.
If you have a paranormal story, post it on
the discussion board. If you have comments on this article, we welcome
them on the discussion board as well. I would also like to thank all
of you that have taken time to vote for this feature on the main page
of Odyssey. We hit number one on the poll for a while.
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