Mindblogging

It’s been over 48 hours since I saw the unidentified object fly over my house. I am more certain than ever that what I saw was different from any type of aircraft I’ve ever seen, and I have seen many. The Navy trained me to identify enemy aircraft and part of my duties at sea was as a member of the ship’s Snoopy Team – charged with photographing enemy aircraft as they overflew us on patrol.

What I saw was not a conventional aircraft, powered either by jet or propeller. Nor was it a bird, or “flying squirrel” as I first described its shape. It was a craft which was apparently guided, as it moved against a wicked crosswind blowing at the time.

That said, I have no compelling reason to believe it to be extra-terrestrial. I played on the fringes of military intelligence in my Navy career. I know enough about the skunk works to know its an almost certainty that secret aircraft are being flown unlike any others publicly known. Aside from this object being completely silent there’s little else to cast doubt on a manmade origin.

An Apache helicopter definitely followed it, though. I’m certain I identified it correctly. In fact one was flying low near the house today, taking a lazy northern tack north up Capital Boulevard in the area where I lost sight of the object two days ago. The Apaches frequently fly around here, usually on drug-spotting missions, so I’m trying not to read too much into that. It sure would be interesting, though, to interview the crew that followed the object. I wonder what they saw from up there?

My recent sighting of an unidentified object has brought to mind an incident which occured to me years ago: one that might or might not be related.

It was March of 1988. I was in my fifth week of Navy boot camp at Recruit Training Command in Orlando, Florida. Boot camp had been tough physically but not mentally. I did my pushups and kept my mouth shut, grinning only on the sly whenever my company commanders went on a humerous tirade over some poor bastard’s lack of military bearing.

The fifth week was known as Work Week. It was the downhill end of boot camp: a chance for recruits to try out some leadership skills. Some worked in the base galley. Others elsewhere. I and some of the more shipshape members of my company got chosen to run a RIF group. RIFs were recruits who had washed out of training for one reason or another and were basically killing time before their paperwork was processed for going home. All they wanted was to go home, so they had nothing to prove and were thus pretty easy to manage.

I was walking on air the first day of Work Week. Our company commanders were nowhere to be found – it was just us reporting to a much more laid-back petty officer who let us run things. I had my first contact with the outside world in five weeks when I bought an FM radio and a newspaper at the base Navy Exchange. I was working with my company peers, enjoying the responsbility of being in charge of something.

I stayed up past lights out, saying goodnight to the watch and climbing into my top rack. Among me were a few dozen men in various states of loud snoring, the room illuminated by red glowing exit signs at either end. I glanced at my watch before settling in. It was a little after 10 PM.

No sooner had my head hit the pillow than something happened to me that never happened before nor since. I became aware of seeing the room but my eyes were somehow closed! I heard the snoring so I knew I was awake. My head began to spin somehow, yet my view of the room did not change.

One other thing was immediately apparent, and incredibly terrifying: I could not move! My brain’s signals to my feet and arms were not being received. I could breathe but could not make a sound.

In the midst of this confusion, I heard a voice in my head. It was robotic in a way, sounding like a synthesizer playing voices in unison. At the same time, an image of an old-timey radio popped into my head.

“You don’t want to fight,” the robotic voice told me, in a tone of voice I found condescending. The word “fight” seemed to echo as my mind spinned around the room.

“Fuck that!” I replied in my head. I wasn’t sure what was happening but I sure as hell wasn’t going to submit!

I put all of my will into moving my arms and legs. After what seemed hours, my toes began to move, followed by the rest of my body soon afterward.

Breathing heavily, I sat up and looked around the room. Everyone else was asleep save for the sentry.

I looked at my watch. A mere eighteen seconds had elapsed!

Somehow I managed to fall asleep after this, and slept soundly (it had been an exhausting day). The sun came up as usual and my duties continued.

After I fetched the morning’s Orlando Sentinel, I was surprised to read the feature story. A guy in Pensacola named Ed Walters was claiming to have been visited multiple times by UFOs.

Coincidence? I’ll never know. But re-reading accounts of alien abductions this evening made me wonder if I had almost become an abductee that night.

Now I know I’ve got UFOs on the brain right now. I’m reading Ingo Swann‘s aliens-on-the-moon book, Penetration. I’ll skip the book review for now, though, and tell you what happened.

This afternoon at 3:15, I stepped outside on this blustery, partly-cloudy day to refill my windowsill bird feeder. It hangs well above the ground, necessitating a look skyward when unhooking it. As I’m unhooking the feeder, I see in the sky above me a peculiar dark shape. Thinking it was one of the many turkey buzzards that hang around here, I turned back to the feeder.

I looked up again and saw it was no bird, as it had too many “wings.” The object was star-shaped, with about six points or so. It looked like a huge flying leaf, or a “flying squirrel” as I amusedly told myself. I stopped to watch it sail quietly across the sky, passing almost directly over my house.

Just as I realized how bizarre the object was, I started in to grab my camera. I had taken shots of a hawk earlier in the day and still had my 200mm telephoto on the camera. After one step, though, I knew the object would be gone by the time I fetched the camera.

I turned back to it in time to see it appear to change into a ball. I could no longer see the points and don’t know if they were simply at an angle where they weren’t visible to me, or if the object had actually morphed into a ball. At any rate, the whole viewing lasted perhaps 10 seconds.

I finished filling the birdfeeder and went back inside. Exactly ten minutes after seeing the object, I looked out to see what appeared to be an Apache AH-64 helicopter heading at the same altitude and direction as the earlier object. The airport is home to the Air National Guard so these helicopers are familiar to me. I don’t know if the two were related but it bears noting.

Afterward I tried to rationalize things by thinking the object was a very large balloon. Then I considered the crazy winds that were present today. High cirrus clouds were moving south to north. Low clouds (roughly 500 feet above the surface) were moving northwest to southeast. I decided any balloon traveling west to east wouldn’t make any headway against such a crosswind. Whatever it was, it flew west to east in spite of the wind.

Later I heard planes approaching the airport. These were traveling from east to west, which means its likely the airport was launching planes on the southern ends of the runways at the time I sighted the object. Thus the object was very likely heading in the wrong direction to be a recently-departed plane from RDU.

After thinking more about it this evening, I am taken by just how ordinary the sighting seemed. I didn’t feel fear or much wonder. Frankly, aside from its unusual star shape it was pretty boring. No beams of light or ETs waving out the window. Other than its flying against the wind, I may be inclined to dismiss it as a balloon.

I guess that’s why unidentified flying objects tend to remain unidentified.

[Update]: Thanks to the magic of The Google, I found a similar UFO report. This is the same shape I observed in the sky, only in my sighting it was black against a blue sky.