At the Risk of Sounding Crazy #3

The encounter I am sharing today still terrifies me. To this day I have no explanations as to what I saw. 

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Teachinmama Blog, August 18, 2013

Finally, the unusual phenomenon I saw that most closely resembles "typical" UFO sightings, almost to the point of being comical.

Trust me, it was not comical.

Not in the least.

#3, Urbana, Illinois, early to mid 1990s

Back before my joints and bones began wearing out, I used to walk quite a bit. We had a beautiful Springer Spaniel named Duffy, and he was my walking buddy. One day, I'd gotten the kids all off to school and decided to take Duffers on a walk to the field at the end of Florida Avenue where there were trails through the grass and he could safely play off-leash.

Our Springer Spaniel, Duffy.

We had not been out too long, and he was happily running through the tall field grass, making waves in it as he joyfully bounced around. (There's a reason they call them Springers!) I was standing just where the street ended and the countryside began, and looked up at the beautiful morning sky.

To my surprise, coming across the field was a brown-red cigar-shaped pipe. (Stereotypical, I know, but that is what I saw.) It made no noise as it came quickly floating through the air and appeared to be two to three feet long, flying fairly low over the ground. (It was a bit above my head, so maybe 7-9 feet high.)

At first I thought it had to be a remote controlled airplane or something. But it was totally silent, even eerily so, and it had no wings to help keep it aloft. The shape was simply a tube with some projections (as I remember it now, twenty years or so after the incident, it was sort of submarine shaped. Certainly not the shape of a remote controlled airplane.)

As it flew over the field, the object made a jog in the air so that it was now approaching me.

And then it stopped. Right in the air several feet in front of and above me.

"There has got to be someone flying this thing and having me on," I thought nervously.

The thing sat in the air, no sound, no lights, nothing.

Waiting. Maybe watching.

I felt panic bubble up inside me, looking all around to see if I could spy someone operating the thing.

The tube continued to just hang in the air with no means to stay afloat that I could see. The silence was eerie. And terrifying. Whatever it was and how it worked, it did not make sense to me.

How did it just hover there? Without making any noise? And what was it doing waiting by me?

At that point, Duffy came bouncing out of the tall grass nearby, and so I spun on my heels, grabbed him, and took off at a fast clip toward home. I looked back over my shoulder, and the thing was gone. Disappeared in a blink.

I was pretty shaken when I arrived home.

In the ensuing years, I have thought a lot about that morning and what I saw. Rationally, I tell myself that there has to be an explanation, and yet, the object defied any natural laws of physics and science that we know of. Even with advances in technology over the past twenty some years, I think the way it acted is still outside the reach of current capabilities.

While I did not feel the sense of foreboding and brooding I'd felt from the dark shape I'd witnessed at Crestview Park, nonetheless I felt unsettled and afraid as it hung in front me me, motionless in the air, as though it were observing me.

Like a specimen under a microscope.

And I don't want to think about THAT any further. 

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If I were writing this post now rather than 11 years ago, I would change two things:

1) The length of the object. I'd call it four to five feet, at least. Why? Because now I sew almost every day and have an excellent idea of the length of a yard of fabric (3 feet.) I can eyeball that now without measuring. That thing was longer than two or three feet as previously written, and more likely five to six feet in length.

2) I was surprised that I had written that the thing had disappeared. My memory of its disappearance now is that it suddenly reversed course and flew back the way it had come at a very fast pace. Which memory is correct? I don't know - about thirty years has passed since the actual occurrence, and eleven since I wrote the first blog entry. But, I lean toward the memory of it flying away rather than simply vanishing.

So, there you have it - my three brushes with oddities in the sky. Tomorrow I may do a final wrap up or I will go back to chatting about horses, models, sewing, and family like usual. I haven't forgotten the March give away, either.

Stay 'tooned!

At the Risk of Sounding Crazy #1

Yesterday I posted that I had seen the SpaceX satellites move through the sky and mentioned that they were not the first unusual things I had seen in the sky. I also said that I was considering sharing those things here.

I got some interesting comments and emails after I posted that. One experience shared with me was eerily like my own second sighting. Since I have never shared what I have seen with anyone except with my family and in my journal, that gave me goosebumps.

Photo from ABC News

Before I begin, there are a couple of things I'd like ya'll to know:

~ I am no liar - I really did see what I say I saw. 

~ I have always believed that it is logical and highly probable that we are not alone in this universe. 

~ Please do not cut and paste the journal entries I will be sharing and post them elsewhere. If you want someone to read about these incidents, give them the link to the blog. Thank you for respecting that.

~ Teachinmama was my first blog and is where I posted what you will read below. At the time, Teachinmama functioned solely as my journal and was only shared with my family. Years later I changed that, but these journal entries were buried so far back in years of blog posts that I highly doubted anyone would go way back into my journal entries and find them.

~ The entries were shared on Teachinmama in 2013, many years after any of them happened. I wrote them as I remembered them.

Ready? Here is the first one. (And the least frightening.) I was ten or eleven at the time. As time passed and I had two more sightings of unexplained phenomena, this first one proved to be the "mildest" and least terrifying of the three.

Teachinmama Blog, August 18, 2013

This afternoon I was looking at news headlines and trends, and one caught my eye. In India, the military recently reported that a UFO had been sighted while their troops were doing practice exercises.

I tend to stay away from stories about UFOs and rarely read them thoroughly (including this particular report.)

Why?

Because I find them terrifying. Not scary. Not frightening. Panic-driven terrifying.

You see, I, too, have had three experiences where I saw unexplained phenomena in the sky. Three separate incidents, years apart, and in two different states. The first was more puzzling and a bit unsettling than anything else; the other two absolutely terrified me. I don't think I have ever written down what I saw and, aside from a few close family members, I have never spoken of them. It is time to at least write them down in my journal. 

What happened is true. I am not a liar nor do I make up stories for attention. I think the fact that I have kept quiet all these years proves that.

#1, West Lafayette, Indiana, late 1960s

There used to be a gravel path between Soldiers Home Road and Cumberland School directly across from the intersection of Overlook Drive and Soldiers Home Road. The parents of school children on Prophet Drive, including my own, built it so we could walk to school safely. (You can still see a remnant of the path if you know where to look. Makes me smile when I drive past that spot.)

One summer afternoon I had walked over to Barberry Heights to play with friends, and about 4:00 in the afternoon was walking back home heading east on the path. I remember the sky was that brilliant summer blue and completely cloudless. That's what made the white disk in the sky all the more noticeable. I remember stopping in my tracks when I spied it and a sense of unease coming over me. The disk was stationary in the sky over the woods and fairly large, about the size of a pencil eraser.

I observed it for what seemed a long time. It did not move; it simply was there. I ran through ideas in my mind as to what it could be, but nothing came to mind that would fit the description of a motionless white disk in the sky. I remember turning my back on it, facing west, and thinking that surely when I turned around, it would be gone. But it wasn't. When I turned back and checked, it continued to hang in the sky.

The more I watched it, the more uneasy I felt. I was alone on the gravel path, and so there was no one to turn to and ask, "Do you see what I see?" or to at least step closer to for comfort. I started walking home again, moving quickly because I was scared, and glancing up at the sky occasionally in the hopes that the object would disappear. 

The disk never moved from its spot in the sky until suddenly it vanished. It was there one moment, and gone the next.

I told my mother about it when I reached our home. She took me seriously, but could not explain what I had seen. "Maybe the sun was shining in your eyes and you were seeing a reflection of a white blood cell," she offered. (We both knew that was a stretch.)

So what did I see?  Forty plus years later, I still have no idea.

But I DID see something, and watched it for an extended period of time.

Of that, there is no doubt.

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Looking back more than fifty years later, I am still puzzled. And, I actually laughed as I remembered my mother's explanation. Having said that, I will always be grateful to her for not even questioning me or doubting my story. She knew I did not lie or make stories up, and I think she was a little unsettled by my story and probably grasping at straws to explain the  white disk.

Tomorrow I will share my second bump with unexplained phenomena in the sky. It happened at night and I had my children with me.

Stay 'tooned.