My Personal Experiences - Part 1: UFOs
I was probably eight or nine when I saw my first UFO. The sun had set an hour earlier, and the hills of rural upstate New York were shrouded in darkness; the sky filled with twinkling stars. I was sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's car as we drove through what I semi-fondly referred to as "the middle of nowhere," a stretch of Route 88 that meanders through seemingly endless rolling hills and miles of farmland as far as the eye can see. An alien landscape to a child whose only perception of New York is a massive city bustling with people. My eyes were transfixed out the window, trying to keep myself occupied during the long, five-hour road trip to my dad's new house, farther outside of New England than I had ever been before.
 |
| A portion of Route 88 in Worcester, NY (via Google Maps) |
We were driving along a ridge, with only a guardrail to separate the road (and us) from a cliff that dropped off almost immediately. This gave us a wide view of the adjacent valley. Suddenly, a bright red flash of light in the distance caught my eye. It was in front of us, high above the valley below but more or less level with us on the ridge. I glanced ahead to get a better look. Just then, it blinked out. Nothing but the inky darkness hovering over the distant valleys.
I knew it was a UFO right away. I had seen enough movies and TV shows to know that aliens flew around in flying saucers covered with bright lights. I didn't have any time to collect my thoughts before there was another brilliant flash of red. The UFO was much closer now, approaching us rapidly on our right side. It was about three hundred feet above the ground below it, and maybe three to five hundred feet away from us. It blinked out again. Nothing.
I snapped out of my trance.
"Dad!" I sputtered, nearly jumping out of my seat. My dad glanced over just as the red light blinked on again, illuminating a metallic structure underneath. "Is that a UFO?!" My dad's eyes widened and we both watched in awe as the UFO moved directly adjacent to us...
And we passed it. I think it was at that moment we both realized what it was. I can't remember exactly what was said. Just general expressions of hilarity and embarrassment when we realized what we were looking at was the red beacon atop one of the numerous cell phone towers that dotted the landscape. I was used to traveling at that point and had seen plenty of them before. I don't know why I happened to mistake this particular one for an alien spacecraft.
 |
| (https://ak5.picdn.net/shutterstock/videos/19660375/thumb/1.jpg) |
My dad couldn't tease me about it, though, because he had thought it was a UFO for a moment too! I specifically remember that this was the moment I was introduced to the concept of the UFO phenomenon: my dad's excuse was, he explained, that he had read plenty of stories about people having genuine UFO sightings before. There were even some accounts of alien abduction!
He went on to say that there were books, TV shows, and even alleged pictures of UFOs that people had taken. "We should look into it if we get the time!" he suggested. My imagination went into overdrive, and suddenly the concept scared me. UFOs and aliens joined things like bigfoot, ghosts, and demons as probably ridiculous but still terrifying monsters that could exist somewhere out there. I think I feigned interest for my dad, but I was hesitant.
Alas, this was actually not my formal introduction to the subject.
That happened a few years later, after a trip to the library in middle school. I noticed a friend of mine reading an interesting looking book simply titled: "UFOs." It was a blue hardcover book, rather generic and uniform, and undoubtedly part of a larger series of a wide range of topics for children or young readers; almost like a collection of encyclopedias. If I recall, the picture on the front was an artist's rendition of the Cash-Landrum Incident.
 |
| This is a mock-up of the first UFO book I remember seeing. |
Immediately my mind jumped to that night in upstate New York when I briefly had thought I spotted an alien spacecraft. I questioned my friend about his choice of reading. He began to flip through the book and stopped at an image of a huge, ominous black triangle. He proceeded to tell me that he had seen a ship just like that hovering over the field adjacent to his house.
I was interested. I really wanted the book he was reading; of course, he had already checked it out. "There are plenty more on the shelf," he suggested. I ran over to the computer catalog and quickly ran a keyword search for "UFO." Tons of results! I was lucky that our school library had a great collection of UFO books. I left the library with a stack of books and the rest is history.
My next and last encounter with a UFO happened many, many years later, when I was in high school. I had just gotten off from a shift at Target, and I'm sure I was eager to get home. The sun had set, but its light had yet to fully dissipate; the sky was tinted a deep blue. Driving in my old, beat-up Honda Odyssey, I took my usual shortcut through the adjacent Chili's parking lot, making it a bit easier for me to get onto the freeway.
Like before, my eyes were again caught by a moving light in the sky that instantly registered to me as something unusual. It was multiple lights, actually: a square or diamond-shaped set of them, two blue and two red. They were far off to my right, hovering about 200 feet over the other side of the highway.
I watched as they suddenly moved from right to left across my field of vision. Its speed astonished me. It had gone over the highway and in front of me in a matter of moments. Now it was gliding over the nearby truck stop towards a densely forested area far in the distance.
This is it! I thought. A genuine UFO sighting!
I quickly pulled over, not worrying that I was taking up multiple parking spaces; the lot was mostly empty anyway. I quickly exited the car, whipped out my phone, and started filming.
Looking back, I'm a bit embarrassed by my narration in the video. "Look at that! Look. At. That. That's a UFO! It's making crazy movements across the sky!"
The light was distant now and had come to a standstill, hovering over the treeline. It appeared only as a small point of white light against a black background on my phone camera. Still, I was able to capture it once it began moving again, back and forth across the sky. It paused and hovered once more before it began to descend.
"Oh, it's going down behind the treeline over there!"
It quickly dropped behind the trees and out of sight. I turned off my camera, pocketed my phone, and returned to the car.
In the coming days I did a little digging into my sighting. Once I had the chance to calm down and collect my thoughts, I realized what I had probably seen was nothing more than a hobbyist's drone. My suspicions were all but confirmed when I investigated the area where the UFO had appeared to land.
 |
| (https://www.dronesglobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/drones-with-led-lights.jpg) |
Not only is it directly adjacent to a small, private airport (there is also a larger public airport nearby) but the area that the UFO descended is smack dab in the middle of an industrial park home to numerous technology and engineering firms, the kind of place I wouldn't be surprised to see drones being flown for any number of professional or recreational reasons.
The final nail in the "alien spacecraft" coffin is the fact that a quick inspection of the area where the UFO landed on Google Maps reveals what I can only interpret as a small landing pad for a drone adjacent to one of the warehouses in the area.
 |
| This is exactly where the "UFO" descended (via Google Maps) |
My drone sighting remains ostensibly unsolved, because I never did end up getting concrete confirmation of someone flying a drone above that area on that night. I could choose to brush away the more credible evidence and focus on that fact—it's unexplained! But that would be dishonest to myself and whoever I share the story with.
I approach everything as having rational explanations until proven otherwise, not the other way around. However, I think there are times when any attempt at a "rational explanation" collapses in on itself and becomes irrational. Sometimes we have to accept that someone may have had an anomalous experience.
In Part 2, I will recount the most interesting and, in my opinion, anomalous experience I've had. One in which my attempts at coming to terms with it rationally have ended sounding more ridiculous than just stating the obvious. My dad will tell you it's proof of the afterlife.
If you've made it this far, I hope you know me well enough to know that I wouldn't go as far as to say what happened is proof of anything but just that—it happened. This event still stupefies me ten years later.
Up next: The EVP Experiment!
Comments
Post a Comment