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Last month's issue discussed the first several sightings that my family and I encountered back when I was young. If you missed it, go into the archives from the main page and read it. This is the continuation of the stories on things that I have seen, or my family has seen.

Things settled down for many years after the last encounter when my brother had his bicycle handle bars zapped by some sort of ray emanating from the UFO that we had seen earlier in the night while collecting for our paper route. We ended up moving to a larger Midwestern city and had nothing unusual happen for a little while.

The next incident happened when a friend and I headed back to the first city for a visit. This was when I saw the "green fireball". I will not relate this story in this article. If you would like to read it, go to the archives in this section and read "green fireballs".

This next story is sort of ironic in a way. It starts out serious, then gets amusing, but has an ironic twist at the end.

I was working at a radio station in a small town in Arizona when this misidentification occurred. A friend who also worked at the station, his girlfriend, and I were all returning from a nearby city late at night after seeing a concert. We were driving back through the mountains when "Tim" got our attention.

"Look over there, what is that?" he exclaimed

Tim pointed over to our right. His girlfriend and I both gazed in wonder at this giant orange UFO sitting on the horizon. From the looks of it, it was a classic UFO shaped object and very large sitting practically on the horizon between the mountains. I looked at it and I figured it out in a few seconds, it was actually the moon sitting on the horizon. The UFO shape it was showing was due to the fact that it was showing in between a valley which cut the round shape and made it into a saucer shape. I immediately told Tim that it was just the moon, and by this time he had rolled to a stop and was able to verify this for himself. When we were driving though, it looked just like a UFO at first glance.

The ironic part of the story was that several months later, Tim took a major roll in the Travis Walton incident in Holbrook Arizona. Both Tim and myself had taken other jobs and moved to other cities. Tim took his job in Holbrook and it was shortly after his arrival, the Walton incident took place. He was responsible for quite a few of the press releases on the story that ended up being broadcast all over the world. So even though Tim thought he saw something that night, he would ironically get a real UFO story to report to the world just a few months later.

After my radio job in Arizona, I married a girl while living in New Mexico. She and I didn't stay long in that state. We moved back to the Midwest where my previous incident took place. One night we were returning to the city from our "old farm" where my uncle was currently living (in our old house). I noticed something out on the horizon. We were almost back to town when I saw two orange plasma semi-disc shaped objects just above the horizon to my left.

I watched these "things" for a moment while driving and decided that I had to get out and see if they were a reflection in the glass of the car etc. I pulled off of the road and got out to watch these two objects. They were not a reflection. When I got out they were as big as life, skimming along the horizon. I would guess that they were about 2 miles in distance from where we were. I asked my wife to get out and look at them. She did as I requested. I asked if she saw them, and she answered that in fact she could see them also. (I wanted to make sure I wasn't seeing things).

These two objects just slowly made their way from South to North in a casual manner. One would move a bit to the north, and the other one would follow the other one. The odd thing is that they both would go backwards just a bit every now and again. They did not go in a steady speed or even directly forward all of the time. Their speed was haphazard, and they went back and forth at random. One would slide to the north for a bit and would stop and the other would come close to it. Then the first one would go forward and the second one would stop and go backwards and then forward again. The objects were disc shaped, but yet as though they were covered with a plasma that glowed orange in color. I watched both objects do their "dance" until they were mostly out of sight in the distance from my position. I didn't know what they were, or why they kept going back and forth as they made their way northward. It was strange. I would say that at arms length the objects were as big as your thumbnail in size. The horizon point where I saw them was about two and a half miles away, and they were probably a half mile closer than the horizon. They were nearly on top of a small ridge that runs north to south in that area.There was also nothing to obstruct my view. There were no trees or any buildings between me and the objects. I had a clear view of them the entire time. The weather was unlimited visibility that night.

The next incident didn't happen to me, but rather to one of my relatives. This happened just a few months after the previous encounter.

My cousin lived on a property in South Dakota not too far north of Sioux City Iowa (where I lived at). One night his wife came home and flashed into her driveway crying and screaming. My cousin tried to calm her down and asked her what was wrong. She told him such an odd story. She was coming home and this white tornado that was all lit up was chasing her car, or so it seemed to her. She was all upset and had to stay inside the rest of the night. My cousin jumped into his pickup truck and drove less than a mile from his house to the area she said she saw it. When he came around the hills, he didn't have to search for it. There it was just bigger than life in front of him.

I got a phone call from my cousin the next day as he knew I was a bit of a UFO buff even back in 1976 when this encounter took place. I answered the phone and he asked if I could come out to his place. It was a Saturday and I had nothing better to do, so I went out to his house and he loaded me up into his truck and we drove to where the incident took place. He related the story to me, on how he had driven all the way around this "lit up vortex" the night before. He described how much it scared his wife and that he went out to investigate and saw it shining as far as you could see into the night sky. He had no explanation as to what it could be, but he drove around it on all sides on the country gravel roads to see it from all angles possible. It looked the same no matter where he was at as he drove around it. At one point he decided to get out and get closer to it. As soon as he reached the fence which went around the field that the vortex was in, it just shimmered out like the transporter on Star Trek. My cousin was not shaken over the incident like his wife was, but he surely was curious and baffled by what he saw.

Being the part time UFO investigator that I am, I agreed to go investigate this one. We decided that we would ask the owner of the property if we could "hunt for our missing dog" in his field. The owners of the property agreed to let us look around and the two of us set out to see if we could find any traces of anything to relate to what he saw. We scoured the entire area and found nothing unusual at all. There were no scorch marks, no indentations, or any other things that we could use for proof. We went back to his pickup and then back to his house. His wife then told me her description of what happened, which was more dramatic than what my cousin had to say. She said it seemed like she couldn't get away from it or it was following her. She said years later that it may have been her perception that it was chasing her. My cousin said that it stayed in one spot on the hill and was a vortex made of light shining clear up as far as you could see. He said it was also like laser like beams in a way. The edges were crisp and well defined, not like normal light. He described one time how he could see the stars between the beams of light. Overall, it was shaped like a tornado and made up of laser like beams, with the stars visible through various spots in the beams. He said that it had places that shimmered like an ionisation effect. When he stepped toward the fence to get closer, the entire thing just faded in a shimmer, very quickly.

We saw in the paper that UFO's were spotted over Sioux Falls (60 miles north) on that same night. This got our attention. Yet we didn't know what to make of it, since no one had ever seen or reported such a thing, until recently.

It was only a few months ago, that a man in Alberta Canada saw the same type of phenomenon. When I saw this, I immediately told my cousin about it, and sent him the url for the articles about the sighting. I was never sure what to make of his sighting, since it was "original", and no one else ever reported such an event. Now that this man in Canada has seen the same thing, it makes my cousin's encounter a bit more important. Now his story is not a one time wonder, but has happened to someone else.

Both my cousin and his wife (a cousin too by marriage), have had other sightings in their area, as has their neighbors. They seem to live in a "hot spot" for UFO's. My cousin's wife saw a triangular UFO one night in nearly the same area that she saw the vortex. She was with a passenger that wanted to follow it. She convinced the passenger that they had better not attempt to do so, and made their way back away from that area. She seems to think that the power substation is somehow attracting the un-invited guests. This is not the first time that this theory has been brought forth.

Swamp gas surely takes some unusual forms doesn't it? It is an odd place out there sometimes.. Gtars said it.

I hope you have enjoyed this month's Odyssey of Oddities. Part three will be the conclusion of the Personal UFO's series, and will be presented next month. If you have a UFO story, any other strange story, or a comment on this story, please leave it on the discussion board in this section.

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