On Christmas Eve, we were sitting around our fire pit, warming our feet, and started talking about UFOs. I suddenly remembered two instances when I had a sighting.
The first must have been around 1963. I was in boarding school in Massachusetts, there because the high schools in Venezuela weren’t that great and the company my dad worked for paid for it. Six or seven of us were in a room on the ground floor of an old Victorian house that comprised one of the dorms. The room belonged to Holly Smith, who had inherited a ton of money when her parents had passed away a few years before. Holly was a trust fund kid – there seemed to a be a lot of them at this boarding school – and had a prime room with fantastic floor to ceiling windows that offered a panoramic view of the campus, the sky, the world. She paid extra for that room, where she lived alone.
Many nights, some of us would sneak down to Holly’s room after lights out – yes, 10 PM was the magic hour for the dorm to go dark, arcane, I know – and sit around talking and gossiping and smoking cigarettes.So one night six or seven of us were sitting around in Holly’s room, doing our usual forbidden things, and I happened to look out one of her fabulous windows and saw a very strange light. It hovered, it was soundless, it pulsed red, yellow, blue.
“Hey, look,” I whispered to one of the other girls. “What the hell is that?”
“A plane,” she said.
“It’s not making any noise,” I said.
“We’re just not hearing any noise because it’s too far away.”
Except that it wasn’t far away. The light was close and now it was moving strangely, swiftly, zigzagging across the sky, growing larger, brighter, and changing colors. “That’s a UFO,” I said.
“No way,” said Holly.
The light zoomed in closer – not flush to the window or anything like that – but close enough for all of us to see that it wasn’t a plane, wasn’t a chopper, wasn’t like anything any of us had ever seen before. It performed – racing from right to left, moving diagonally, spinning, slowing, hovering again.
By then, I was practically hanging outside the window. I knew what I was seeing, I knew what this was, and so did everyone else in that room.Then the light shot off into the stratosphere at the speed of light.
The second sighting occurred on November 9, 1965, during a blackout to the Northeast coast of the U.S. The Life Magazine cover story depicts it well. The lights went out. I was a freshman in college, in Utica, New York, wedged between Schenectady and Syracuse. I was in my double room on the ground floor, had just come in from a class or dinner or something, and hit the button on my desk lamp – which didn’t come on. No electricity. It was already dark outside, and I made my way over to my bed and sat down and tried to remember where I had put my flashlight.
My room had long windows that slid open and looked out over the back campus where everything was totally black. But suddenly, the sky lit up and dozens of bright, orange objects cascaded through my vision. At first, I thought it was a meteor shower that was visible because of the blackout. But after a few moments of watching these objects, I knew they were the same thing I had seen two years earlier in Holly’s room. These were UFOs.
When I Googled blackout 1965, a wikipedia entry was one of the first URLs that came up. Here’s what it says:
On the same night, many UFO sightings were made in the same area. One occurred at 4:30 PM over Tidioute, Pennsylvania, and another at 5:22 PM between Syracuse Airport and Rochester, New York. They were described as fast, bright objects. During the blackout, a private pilot and a flight instructor both witnessed a bright fireball 50–100 ft in diameter, which quickly vanished. The fireball was observed over the Clay Power Station, which was originally said to be the source of the blackout before authorities reported the source of the surge to be at Beck. In New York City, UFOs with a strange glow were reported, and one of the pictures of the object taken was printed in Time Magazine. Before the Federal Power Commission‘s explanation, the Indianapolis Star, the Syracuse Herald-Journal, and the Associated Press all picked up the UFO reports.
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So now, all these many years later, I’m left to marvel that I twice witnessed something inexplicable, that I intuitively know were UFOs, and that I got as close to them as I can personally accept. Years ago when Rob and I met, I defined my boundaries with UFO experiences. I didn’t want little grays running around in my bedroom, I didn’t want implants, I didn’t want terror.Forget pain and malaise. Give me magic, give me mystery, give me proof. Back then, as now, I’d like to meet a friendly ET, you know, the funny looking guy in the Spielberg movie who will take me on a wild bike ride through the light of the full moon.