Prologue

“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” It’s…a bird?

I don’t believe in flying saucers. However, over the years, I have had several very real close encounters with unidentified flying objects—UFOs.

People see UFOs every day, and accounts of UFO sightings throughout recorded history are plentiful. Even now, in the 21st century, thousands of sightings are reported every year, but many more go unreported because it’s just not that unusual to see something…well…unusual.

As you might expect, many of the people who claim to have seen UFOs have emotional stories to tell about their mysterious sightings, and some of their tales are quite literally fantastic. Many of those people saw flying saucers. Some of them were abducted by the aliens. A select few were even lucky enough to have been probed.

As I said, I’ve had my own experiences with UFOs, and over the next few pages I will share the incredible details of each of those personal close encounters. To the best of my knowledge, I was never abducted or probed. If I was, either my own mind has repressed the terrifying memory, or perhaps it’s been erased by some Men-in-Black-style flashy-thing.

In all my encounters, I was simply an observer. I had no interaction with the UFOs or any occupants.

Before we get to my own stories, I’d like to share some general background information to provide a bit of perspective to the whole UFO phenomenon. I never officially reported any of my sightings, but if you throw them into the mix with the rest of the world’s UFOs, they would appear no different from most that were reported.

Many people think the terms ‘UFO’ and ‘flying saucer’ are synonymous. They are not. A flying saucer is generally considered to be a spaceship from another planet, probably piloted by an intelligent alien.

A UFO is simply an unidentified flying object: you see it, and you don’t know what it is. You imagine it could be a flying saucer, and therein lies the key to the mystery—imagination.

Throughout my accounts, I use the word ‘flying saucer’ generically, but imagined extraterrestrial vehicles have been described in many different shapes. ‘Flying saucer’ is simply the universally understood term for an alien spacecraft, just as ‘little green men’ is universally understood to refer to beings from another planet. They may not be little or green. The two terms are almost inseparable. If you hear ‘flying saucer,’ you think ‘little green men.’ If you hear ‘little green men,’ you think ‘flying saucer.’

In the vast majority of reported cases that have been investigated, unidentified flying objects are eventually identified. If you were the witness, you may not agree with the official identification—a weather balloon, Venus, or perhaps a pod of pelicans. Yes, you saw it with your own eyes; you know what you saw. But you can rest assured a flying saucer was not involved.

There is no way of knowing how many things I have seen in the sky that I paid little or no attention to, considering them normal, familiar phenomena, unaware that someone else watching from a different perspective saw the same thing and wondered what the heck it was. How many times have I watched a Frisbee in flight? How many times did someone else catch a brief glimpse of the same orange plastic disk and report a flying saucer?

Likewise, there is no way to know how many people saw the same UFOs I saw—from a different viewpoint—and could tell exactly what they were. That is simply the nature of visual phenomena. It’s all about perspective. Distance, lighting, and angle of view are a few of the many factors that affect how we perceive everything we see.

For most witnesses, there is something that can have an even bigger impact on their perceptions: their state of mind. Did the witness just wake up? Or (and more likely) just go to sleep? Had he recently watched Mars Attacks? Perhaps he is out actively searching for flying saucers. All our perceptions are influenced by our current state of mind, but for some observers in certain situations, it seizes complete control over common sense. It can make the biggest difference in how an encounter is perceived and interpreted, yet it is rarely even considered.

I recently watched a documentary about a group of Bigfoot investigators working in a remote area of the Pacific Northwest. There is one scene from that show that beautifully illustrates how an observer’s state of mind can influence his interpretation of a situation.

Several researchers were camping in the forest after a day of searching for the elusive beast. Chatting quietly around a small campfire, they were comparing notes on that day’s events when they heard a noise in the distance.

One of them whispered to the camera (presumably so as not to frighten the monster), “Did you hear that? That’s a classic Sasquatch sound.”

I scoffed, thinking that another camper in a nearby tent who was afraid of wild animals probably thought it was a grizzly bear. To me, it sounded like a pinecone had fallen from a tree and crashed into debris on the forest floor.

In case it isn’t apparent, I don’t believe in Bigfoot either. There is, however, abundant evidence supporting the existence of pinecones. There are pinecones on nearly every tree in that neck of the woods, and the forest floor is littered with them, each one having fallen from a branch and crashed to the ground below.

Which explanation is more likely? It’s not always the most obvious thing, though. Sometimes it’s something totally weird and unexpected (although not otherworldly). But if you can, eliminate the obvious explanations first. In this scenario, there are many things that are more likely than Bigfoot. In the forest, there are lots of things that go bump in the night. But the researchers were out there looking for Bigfoot, mentally engrossed in all things Bigfoot, so anything they saw, heard or smelled was more likely to be attributed to Bigfoot.

It is my suspicion that one of the off-camera crew simply threw something out into the forest just to infuse some excitement into an otherwise humdrum Sasquatch safari. That’s not unheard of in documentary production: sometimes you can’t wait for things to happen, you need to nudge them along. In this instance, it was a good call. If they had to wait for a genuine Sasquatch sound, they would still be out there in the woods today.

The point is, whether it’s Bigfoot or flying saucers, there are countless things that can affect an observer’s state of mind and how he interprets everything he sees (and hears).

No matter how convincing you think the evidence is, there is always an explanation for a UFO sighting that does not involve aliens. The explanation may be elusive, but unlike flying saucers, an explanation does exist, so look for something else. There is a simple rule that readily distinguishes between UFOs and flying saucers: UFOs are real; flying saucers are not. It really is that simple. We could put this all behind us if people would simply follow the rules.

Millions of people over thousands of years have witnessed UFOs. No one has ever seen a flying saucer.

So what did they see?

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is a large volunteer organization that investigates and researches UFO sightings. Since 1969, in conjunction with National UFO Reporting Center, it has been gathering reports of UFO sightings from all over the world.

Each year, MUFON receives 7,000 to 8,000 reports of UFO sightings worldwide. Of those, up to 75% are from the United States, and reported sightings from California outnumber, by far, reports from any other state.

In any given year, after thorough investigations of each case, about 10% of those reported sightings remain unsolved—unidentified. The other 90 percent were found to be planets, meteors, birds and other natural phenomena that even our ancient ancestors could have witnessed.

For us modern observers, manmade phenomena have been added to the list of things people might see in the sky: airplanes; rockets; satellites; balloons; drones; and just about anything else that emits light, reflects light or makes a sound.

Of course, some were hoaxes. And that also has to be considered as a possibility for some of the unexplained 10%.

To some people though, that unidentified 10%—as well as most of the other 90% of the sightings—are flying saucers. For them, there is no other explanation. For them, a pinecone has never fallen in a forest.

Think about it. If that unidentified 10% were all actually flying saucers, it means that every year, nearly a thousand flying saucers come to Earth from hundreds of light years away and choose the United States—California in particular—as a destination. What is the attraction? Was California featured in some alien travel brochure?

After millions of sightings throughout the history of mankind, from all over the world, there should be some compelling evidence supporting extraterrestrial visits. There is none. I’ve read the books. I’ve watched the documentaries. I have seen countless photos and video clips.

I want to believe. UFO enthusiasts will disagree, but there is simply no credible evidence. There are no recovered flying saucers, no alien beings, dead or alive, and there are no photos or videos that unambiguously cry out, “This is a flying saucer!”

Just because a UFO has not been positively identified as something Earthly, it does not become a flying saucer by default. No UFO has ever been positively identified as a flying saucer. No piece of physical evidence exists that is known to be the product of an alien visitation.

“But wait,” you say. “The government has all that evidence and they are keeping it from us. Are you forgetting Roswell?”

With all you know about our government and its ineptitude, what are the chances they could actually keep a secret like that for 70 years? And how does the government always manage to get to the scene of a UFO crash first and scoop up all the evidence?

There may very well be life forms on other planets. Those life forms may be intelligent. They may be technologically advanced. They may even be capable of interstellar space travel, but the fact remains, a visit to our planet has never been on their itinerary.

So, what did I see? Could any of my own UFO sightings have been flying saucers?

The following accounts of my personal close encounters are presented to you here unembellished, and I have recounted them with as much detail as I can recall. This is what I saw. This is what I was thinking and feeling at the time. I have revisited each experience countless times, but this is the first time I have written about any of them.

One thing all my encounters have in common is that any of the UFOs I have witnessed could easily have been labeled a ‘flying saucer.’

It’s very likely that you have also seen things in the sky that seemed to defy logical explanation, and it’s easy to jump to conclusions, but, as you will see, most of my UFOs turned out to be something other than flying saucers. Eventually.

Close Encounter Number 1
1960, San Diego, California

This was my very first encounter, and it came as close to being a flying saucer as any close encounter ever has. It was over half a century ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

When I was a child, I lived with my family just up the hill from Pacific Beach in suburban San Diego. On the evening of this encounter, my younger brother and I were in the living room watching The Twilight Zone on our small black and white TV.

I was 8 years old, and as usual, I was already on edge just from the show’s opening segment. Rod Serling’s monologue and the creepy theme music were enough to send chills through me before the story even started. It was an intentional attempt to influence my state of mind, and because of that, the terrifying events that were about to unfold were inevitable.

The episode that night was The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. A flying saucer had landed on a hill overlooking a neighborhood in a small town, and aliens were secretly taunting the residents on Maple Street by turning their lights, appliances and cars on and off. Eventually, the neighbors turned violent, each accusing the others of being in cahoots with the aliens.

Steve and I were the only ones in the living room that night, and we sat at opposite ends of the couch, quietly enjoying the show together. About midway through the episode we were startled by the sudden sound of a flying saucer that was apparently landing right in front of our own house. The sound was unmistakable. There was no question in our minds that it was a flying saucer.

I had heard the same flying saucer sound many times in the movies, but this was so much louder. It was, after all, in my own front yard. Bright beams of light pierced through the heavy drapes that covered the living room windows.

My mind was filled with visions of little green alien invaders descending upon our house.

The sound grew louder and the lights got even brighter. After only a few seconds, the sound abruptly stopped, but the lights continued their frenzied flashing. The flying saucer must have landed.

Petrified, I was frozen to the big green couch, my legs pulled tightly to my chest. Steve and I looked at each other in terrified silence, then back toward the lights penetrating the curtains. I was afraid to move from the couch, let alone open the curtains to look outside. I didn’t need to; I knew what was out there.

And besides, my concern was not what I might see, but rather what might see me. I could probably watch through the window all night as all sorts of alien invaders and other monster types frolicked in my yard, but if one of them happened to look my way, it would be all over for me. That was my big fear.

As we sat on the couch, curiosity finally got the best of my brave little brother. Steve jumped up, ran right to the window, and without so much as a tentative peek, he threw open the curtains. The room was instantly flooded with the brilliant red and white flashing lights that the curtains had been straining to hold back. I was surprised that he didn’t run away, screaming in terror. But he had only just turned seven, so he really didn’t know any better.

Emboldened by my brother’s apparent bravery, I found the courage to slowly approach the window and see for myself. Using Steve as a shield, I cautiously peeked around him.

What I witnessed was not the scene from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers that my mind had conjured up and presented to me in vivid detail. It was an ambulance parked in front of a house across the street.

An ambulance? I was confused. Where’s the flying saucer? But common sense soon prevailed in the face of reality. It all made sense now—the siren, the flashing lights—but I hadn’t even considered that possibility.

Steve and I were no strangers to emergency vehicles with their sirens and flashing lights. We had just never before heard that kind of siren sound. It didn’t sound like any emergency vehicle we had ever heard. That exotic new sound warbled like the modern electronic sirens. It was the classic flying saucer sound from science fiction movies.

In fact, until that night, the only place I had ever heard that sound was in a science fiction movie. Combined with the bright, flashing lights and the Twilight Zone backdrop, that sound screamed “flying saucer!” No other conclusion could have been reached by an 8-year-old boy. It simply had to be aliens.

The entire encounter probably lasted no more than a minute. I don’t think we missed very much of the Twilight Zone episode, because we were back on the couch—relieved but still trembling— in plenty of time for the end of the show and Rod Serling’s epilogue.

This was not technically an unidentified flying object. I didn’t see anything flying. I didn’t see an object at all. I saw lights and I heard sounds. In most UFO reports, lights are the only thing witnesses report seeing. An object is usually assumed; the lights had to come from somewhere.

Unlike most of those other reports, the lights I had witnessed were accompanied by an authentic flying saucer sound. With my altered state of mind, courtesy of Rod Serling, I don’t think anyone could blame me for jumping to that conclusion.

Although it was a truly frightening close encounter, it was not a flying saucer.

Close Encounter Number 2
1970, Ventura, California

The summer I graduated from high school, I witnessed a UFO that had me baffled for the next 50 years. I’ve thought about it many times over those years, at times enjoying just a fleeting memory, other times genuinely trying, unsuccessfully, to unravel the mystery.

This encounter occurred one Saturday night when I was at the 101 Drive-in movie theater with my girlfriend. We had borrowed her dad’s pickup, and we were watching the movie from the open bed while enjoying the warm summer air. It was a beautiful, clear night, and I was frequently looking up into the star-filled sky.

While lying on my back stargazing, I saw what at first appeared to be a star directly overhead. It did look like a star, but it was moving, slowly, from north to south.

An airplane? A satellite? It really could have been either except for its peculiar movement: it was not travelling in a straight line. It was tracing an erratic, somewhat zigzagging path across the sky on its slow trek to the south. Its movement reminded me of an ant crawling along. But ants don’t usually fly, and they certainly don’t glow.

I had no idea how high it was. It appeared to be right up there with the rest of the stars, many light-years away. I knew it couldn’t have been that far away, or I could not have seen any movement at all unless it was traveling impossibly fast. I didn’t hear any noise associated with it, and there were no flashing or colored lights that I could see. It was just a star-like point of light, slowly meandering across the nighttime sky.

I pointed it out to my girlfriend, and for a while we both watched it. Neither of us had any explanation for what we were seeing.

I had been watching it for less than a minute when I looked away, distracted by some action in the movie. When I looked back to my UFO, I could no longer find it. It had vanished. Or maybe it just stopped. If it had simply stopped moving, there would be nothing to distinguish it from any of the other stars.

I have since seen space shuttles, satellites, and the International Space Station as they zoomed overhead in their orbits. Except for their movement, they look like stars, their metallic skin brightly reflecting the sunlight as they travel quickly eastward in a gentle arc across the sky, ultimately disappearing into the earth’s shadow. This was not what we saw that night. And it was not an airplane.

Nearly 50 years later I still don’t know for sure what I saw, but I recently had a revelation that seems to fully explain the mystery. I’ll share that theory a bit later. I waited almost 50 years. You can be patient for a few more encounters.

It was a truly mysterious UFO sighting, but I have no reason to suspect that it was a flying saucer.

Close Encounter Number 3
1971, Ventura, California

It started out as just another summer night in Southern California, and I was at the beach to meet some friends. It had been a hot day in Ventura, and we hoped a cool ocean breeze would offer some relief. We had all just arrived and we were gathered just off the road near the end of Seaward Avenue, looking out over the Pacific Ocean.

As we stood there talking, we became aware of what looked like a ring of blue fire in the sky over the ocean. I don’t know if it suddenly appeared, or if we just suddenly noticed it, so I don’t know how long it had been there before we did see it. But there it was, a magnificent corona, about halfway up from the southwestern horizon. The center of the UFO was dark and round, and a circle of bluish-white flames radiated from it. The flames flowed out quickly in diffuse, concentric ripples that grew larger and fainter, eventually fading away completely at the outer edge.

The whole object seemed to be not much larger than the diameter of a full moon. It was not intensely bright, but it was nonetheless vivid.

From our perspective, the apparition was nearly stationary in the sky as we watched. It seemed to be getting smaller, or maybe moving away from us, but then it simply disappeared. As we watched, the final ripple of flame radiated out and faded away. That was it. It lasted only 15 or 20 seconds from the time we first saw it.

We couldn’t really tell how far away it was, and we didn’t hear anything except the distant surf crashing on the jetties. It was there, then it was gone.

Although we kept a hopeful eye on the sky, there would be no repeat performance that night.
We were all pretty excited. We saw a UFO, and we weren’t the only ones. There were several other people near us at the beach who saw it too. We had a great story to tell from an otherwise uneventful night at the beach.

The next day, as I was telling that story to some friends, something in my own description began to sound familiar to me. It was then that it finally occurred to me what we had seen.

At the time of this encounter, I had lived in Ventura for about 7 years, and had witnessed several test launches of missiles from Point Mugu Naval Air Station, just a few miles to the south, and from Vandenburg Air Force Base to the north. Although we didn’t know it at the time, that’s exactly what we had seen: a missile launched out over the Pacific Ocean. We had just never seen one from that perspective. As it turned out, we were directly behind it, looking straight into the rocket engine’s nozzle. What an amazing view!

We were all lucky that night to be in the right place at the right time. It was a spectacular sight, and a bit spooky, because we hadn’t known what it was. It was not the flaming wheel Ezekiel had seen. And it was not a flying saucer.

Close Encounter Number 4
1975, Medford, Oregon

For several months during the summer of 1975, I was the drummer for The Electric Church, a psychedelic rock band, and we got together about once a week to play some music. Rehearsals were at the guitar player’s house on the other side of town from where I lived.

It was about 10 o’clock when we finished rehearsal one evening, and I had just started my drive home.

As I turned east from Ross Lane onto McAndrews Road, the main artery that would take me back across town, I noticed a row of 8 bright white lights in the sky, hovering just above the horizon to the northeast, roughly in the direction I was headed.

Because of the soft glow from the city lights, there were usually no stars visible that low in the sky, and these were unusually bright lights, strung out horizontally just above the distant foothills. They were not stars.

The lights appeared to be gently undulating among themselves, but there was no other apparent movement. They just seemed to be floating in that area of the sky. Because of their motion, I assumed they were individual objects, and since they were in the general direction that I was driving, I was able to keep them in view for most of my drive back home.

The trip back to my house took only about 10 minutes. I was hoping to get to my house in time to park and get out of the car for a better look—or run for cover if necessary—before they zoomed away, back into outer space for their rendezvous with the mother ship.

When I got home, I parked the car and ran across the street to a vacant lot where I could get a much better view.

It was an eerie sight. The lights maintained their odd, gently-wavering alignment, and because they now seemed bigger and brighter, I assumed they were getting closer. I couldn’t tell how far away they were, but if they made any sound at all, they were still too far away for me to hear it.

The UFOs remained low in the sky, but from my perspective, they stayed just above the trees and rooftops that stood between us, so I could see the lights during the entire encounter.

I was really getting excited at the possibility that I was about to see flying saucers. I could not imagine what else they could be. What I was witnessing had been reported and described thousands of times over the years by other observers: a group of strange lights in the night sky. I had never seen anything quite like it, and I was thrilled that it was my turn to witness a textbook example of a UFO sighting.

Their approach was painfully slow. My mind had plenty of time to come up with several scenarios to explain what was happening. Most scenarios involved alien invasions. What else could it be? I was well into my 24th year on this planet, and I had never seen anything like it.

As I watched, a very bright beam of white light shot silently from one of the objects straight to the ground below. It lasted just a second, then it was gone. It looked like a spotlight, but I knew it had to be a death ray.

Regardless, the business end of the beam fell behind the houses and trees that were between us, so I couldn’t tell what the target was, or its fate. I didn’t hear an explosion, but something certainly had been destroyed!

Even though the lights were in the general direction of the airport, I knew they weren’t airplanes. They would have been moving faster, and most likely they would have already passed my house by the time I arrived at home. And besides, I was almost sure the Medford airport had no airplanes that were equipped with death rays.

These objects were in no hurry. If it was an alien invasion, they were apparently going to take their time and enjoy it.

The lights continued their approach as I anxiously stood there watching. Several minutes had passed when I finally began to hear a noise coming from their direction. It was a faint but very familiar sound. I finally realized what I was seeing.

The lights belonged to a fleet of National Guard helicopters, and they weren’t coming to fight the UFOs. They were the UFOs, and they eventually passed by me. The nearest one flew almost directly over my house across the street, and the others stretched out side by side to the east toward the foothills. They were very loud now, and low enough that I could feel the wash and see the dust the rotors kicked up.

The bright lights I had been watching were their headlights, one on each helicopter. I could only see the helicopters themselves after the headlights had passed. And although I only saw it once, I had to concede the death ray that looked like a spotlight was indeed just that, a spotlight.

I dodged a bullet that night...or rather a blast from a ray gun. It was a very exciting close encounter, but they were not flying saucers.

Close Encounter Number 5
1985, Talent, Oregon

It was early autumn, and I was returning home to Medford from a weekend gig in Yreka, California. It’s about a 50-minute drive, and there was not much traffic at 3 o’clock in the morning, even on the interstate.

My country-rock band played regularly in the Yreka area, just over the Siskiyou Mountains in northern California. The entire 4-piece band was tightly packed into my Toyota van as we got off the freeway in Talent to take the guitar player home.

As we turned west to drive into town, I called everyone’s attention to the brilliant light show I saw in the sky out of the driver’s side window. As soon as I could, I parked the van, and we all spilled out onto the side of the road to get a better look.

We stood there and watched as a group of brilliantly-illuminated objects passed lazily from west to east, low on the southern horizon, just above the tops of the mountains we had crossed only 15 minutes earlier. Faint rainbow colored beams seemed to radiate from the objects. It was a beautiful sight.

Altogether there were several dozen glowing objects in assorted sizes, all moving together as a loose, elongated group. The light shining from each object contributed to a general glow from the whole mass. That group of objects stretched a quarter of the way across the early-morning sky.

Most of the individual objects appeared to be a little larger and brighter than stars, but some were much bigger. They didn’t seem to leave trails, like meteors do, and they were moving much more slowly. The display lasted only a minute or so as they faded from view over the Cascade Mountains on the eastern horizon.

It was spectacular! We were in awe. Everyone was speechless until it was over. Even then, all we could say was, “What the hell was that?” When I got home after dropping everyone off, I couldn’t sleep. I kept wondering where they landed, and what city was being invaded.

I did eventually get to sleep, and after I woke up, I turned on the radio to get the latest alien-invasion news. To my surprise, several other listeners were calling in to share their accounts of the same encounter. Their observations were very similar to mine.

It was during that radio broadcast that I discovered we had witnessed the reentry and breakup of the booster stage of a recent Soviet rocket launch. There were no accounts of anything reaching the ground.

Since then, I have seen videos of other pieces of space junk burning up as they plowed through the atmosphere on their return to Earth, and they all look very similar to what we had seen that morning.

Another UFO identified, a truly amazing encounter with a dazzling visual display, but still no flying saucers.

Close Encounter Number 6
1996, Ventura, California

I was in Ventura again for a few days, visiting my grandfather. It was early in the evening, and I was outside alone, enjoying the warm, springtime air. The somewhat less-than-full moon had just risen and was sitting just above the horizon to the east.

As I stood there in the driveway, casually looking to the south toward Birch Street, something caught my eye. It was barely perceptible, but something was definitely there in the otherwise clear sky. It appeared to be an object, and it was moving.

At first I thought it was a small, wispy cloud, slowly drifting along with the breeze. As it got closer, however, I could see that the cloud was actually a group of smaller objects. They all seemed to be the same size, equally spaced, and all lined up in a neat row. Too uniform to be clouds, I thought.

It appeared to me to be a line of rectangular windows, softly illuminated from inside of what must have been some sort of flying craft. The windows gave off a pale yellowish glow.

Those windows had to belong to something elongated, perhaps an airplane, but there were no navigation lights to suggest that. I have seen airplanes at night, and I don’t ever recall seeing their tiny windows being illuminated. These windows were disproportionately large, even huge, although I had no idea how large the ‘craft’ was, or really, how far away it was.

As it got closer, I started to see some movement inside the windows. It wasn’t very clear yet, and I was still straining to see, but I could just make out what looked like faces.

They were the faces of big-eyed, wrinkly-skinned aliens, and they were slowly moving around inside the craft. They appeared in muted, pastel tints of gray and green against the pale glow of the windows. They seemed oddly two-dimensional, almost like a cartoon on a TV screen. The image even seemed to flicker a bit.

Aliens! This can’t be real, I thought. But I was seeing it with my own eyes!

There was a drive-in movie theater about a mile away in roughly the same direction of my UFO. Trying to make some kind of sense of it, I thought maybe I was seeing part of a movie that was somehow being reflected into the sky. I just needed another explanation.

Coincidentally, it was the same movie theater, the 101 Drive-In, from my Close Encounter Number Two. That encounter remained unsolved, after all. Had the aliens returned a quarter of a century later?

What I was seeing simply could not be happening, and less than a minute into the sighting, the UFO now seemed to be only a few hundred feet away, and closing rapidly. There was no sound, other than the normal sounds of the city.

I was growing a very anxious, because I was in big open area with no place to hide. I was exposed, but it was the only place I could get a clear view that was free from trees and buildings. It was dark though, so maybe the aliens couldn’t see me. I could still see them clearly.

Was this really a flying saucer? I began to feel like I was witnessing one of the most momentous events in human history. I was excited. I was nervous, too.

If the sighting had ended there, I might have become a believer. But not this time.

Once again, the unidentified becomes identified. At its closest approach, the UFO passed silently to my right. Even in the moonlight, it was close enough now that I could clearly see what it was.

What I had imagined to be a cigar-shaped extraterrestrial spacecraft, instead turned out to be a tight formation of six flying pelicans. They were just slightly illuminated by the moon, giving the large, pale birds a soft glow that became the ‘windows’ on my UFO. The movement I had seen inside the windows—the aliens—was simply the flapping of the birds’ wings.

The cigar shape was my mind trying to make sense of what I saw by providing a structure to house the windows. I hadn’t actually seen the structure. My mind knew it had to be there, otherwise there would have been several windows just flying by. That would have worked if it had been birds, or even clouds, but my brain decided they were windows. My mind was doing me a favor.

The mind will do that for you. It can be very accommodating by filling in the blanks. It is for that very reason that eyewitness accounts are not always reliable. I had clearly seen big-eyed aliens inside the ‘windows’ on that spaceship. A moment later, I clearly saw the birds flapping their wings. Within seconds there were two completely different first-hand descriptions of the same encounter, by the same credible witness!

My aliens simply evaporated, even more quickly than they had appeared just moments before.

My unfettered imagination took me down that extraterrestrial road, and the rest of my brain foolishly went along for the ride. That surreal joyride ended abruptly when imagination crashed head-on into reality. I was bewildered for a moment. It was like waking up from an exceptionally vivid dream.

Finally back on Earth, I was both disappointed and relieved. Disappointed because it wasn’t a flying saucer. Relieved because we were not being invaded.

I was wide-awake, and I saw aliens. You can never take that away from me. The vision lives on in my memory as vividly as it appeared in those fleeting seconds 25 years ago.

It was an exciting, emotional UFO experience. But it was not a flying saucer.

Close Encounter Number 7
2008, Medford, Oregon

I am including this final encounter as a special case, because I did not personally witness the UFO. I became involved the morning after the sighting.

A colleague’s wife had seen a UFO one evening, and the morning after his wife’s encounter, he shared with me some pictures she had taken of the encounter. He said his wife was very emotional after the ordeal, and she was convinced it was of extraterrestrial origin. I know that feeling.

Always a skeptic, I volunteered my considerable expertise to investigate. But I was not only skeptical, I was genuinely intrigued. It reminded me very much of my pelican misadventure a dozen years earlier.

On the evening in question, the woman had seen a diffuse, faint light in the distance. She watched it for 20 to 30 minutes, taking pictures as it moved back and forth across the sky. The light moved very slowly, and stayed in roughly the same part of the sky on each pass, not too far above the horizon.

She said the light seemed to slightly fluctuate in brightness; it was “pulsating.”

The light was somewhat elongated, but it changed its shape occasionally as it moved, particularly when it changed direction, she said. It would get smaller, fade away, and then gradually reappear traveling in the opposite direction. There was no distinct outline, and there was no sound.

It had been an overcast night, with a bit of a light fog or haze in many areas.

Along with the photos she took, this second—hand description was all I had to go on. This was an important investigation, possibly with national security significance. Even so, I felt I needed to do a little more poking around myself before calling the Men in Black.

Playing CSI investigator, I studied the fuzzy digital images. As a graphic designer, I am experienced in Photoshop, so I could adjust many aspects of the image well beyond just a touch up here and there. And I needed to. These were terrible images. It was a lot more work, and required a lot more of Photoshop’s capabilities than I normally would utilize when simply editing pictures for a catalog.

I chose one image that seemed to show the most detail and went to work on it. After a few minutes, an image began to emerge. It was a clear enough image that I felt I had identified the UFO. But just to verify, I edited another image. My first conclusion proved correct. It showed the same object, but from a slightly different angle, which actually helped to tell more of the whole story.

It was an advertising blimp. I could not make out the advertisement’s message, but the outlines were consistent with a blimp sporting an advertising panel on each side. A little online research seemed to confirm my conclusion. The Goodyear blimp had indeed been flying around the Rogue Valley that evening.

The light that my coworker’s wife had seen was the illuminated, rectangular advertising display panel. The blimp itself was effectively invisible; it was the same color as the overcast nighttime sky.

I could not tell from the still images, but I surmised that the pulsing she described was simply the advertising message scrolling by on the electronic display.

The blimp moved through the sky slowly with only the illuminated display being visible through the haze. As it turned, the display seemed to change shape as its angle changed. It faded out. Then, as the other side of the blimp became visible, the display on that side gradually faded into view.

It turned out to be a very simple explanation for a very normal, though fairly uncommon phenomenon. And again, not a flying saucer.

Epilogue

None of the UFO encounters I shared involved flying saucers. They turned out to be common phenomena that were simply seen in situations that made them seem unnatural, at least from my perspective. I didn’t need to report any of them, as the initial mysteries were resolved during the encounters in all but one instance.

In all six of my own close encounters described here, I had considered a possible flying saucer explanation at the time. At the very least, it crossed my mind. At the most, I was convinced it was the only possibility. I really thought I saw aliens in the windows of a spaceship.

The pelican UFO could still be a mystery if they had not flown close enough to allow me to identify them as birds. If my encounter had ended just a few seconds earlier, I would always think I had witnessed a cigar-shaped craft with windows and aliens. I would have no other option. That is what I saw. No other explanation could convince me it was something else. If someone had proposed the pelican story to me, I would have said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Flapping wings? Preposterous! I know what I saw. I saw aliens!”

All I had seen was a group of pale, fuzzy shapes, slowly moving together. My imagination provided everything else. My mind decided they were windows and produced the craft to house them. I tried to make it an airplane, but my mind went another direction and added the alien passengers to seal the deal. I clearly ‘saw’ details that did not exist.

I’ve always considered myself to be an observant witness. But I must admit that night I turned a flock of lazy birds into an alien invasion. And I don’t even believe in flying saucers, so I suppose that proves that I do have an open mind. I was willing to consider it, even accept it, if only momentarily.

Because of my own sightings, I can understand how some people are convinced they have witnessed alien spaceships. To this day I can still see the faces of the aliens I had seen in the windows as clearly as I did that night over 20 years ago. How many others of the thousands of eyewitness UFO accounts are tainted by a similar mental deception?

You and many other people witnessed a UFO last night. You reported it as an exceptionally bright light in the sky. Some reported that it was moving. A hundred other people saw the same thing but did not report it. Why? Because they knew it was Venus. Some of the people who reported it probably ‘saw’ a flying saucer. That is what they will always remember.

The one encounter that had eluded a rational explanation and remained unidentified for me was Close Encounter Number 2, that odd little light zigzagging in the nighttime sky over the movie theater. I wondered about it often over the next 50 years.

What if I hadn’t been distracted and looked away. Would its identity have been revealed? Did it just stop and blend with the stars? Did it explode? Maybe it went back into the mother ship. (Common sense aside, I couldn’t rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors. Just because they haven’t yet, doesn’t mean they never will stop by to see us.)

I will never know for sure, and I can’t go back to investigate. All I have are decades-old memories. But I never lost hope for an identification. And I kept wondering. It was fun thinking it might have been a flying saucer, but deep down I knew there was a rational explanation. And indeed, I recently had a revelation that I feel has solved the mystery.

As you recall, I was looking straight up into the sky at night during an outdoor movie. Directly over my head would have been the beam from a 6000-watt movie projector lamp. The UFO was moving north to south, straight toward the movie projector. Anything in that beam would have been brilliantly illuminated.

A small white moth flying 40 or 50 feet high in that beam would have glowed like a star with reflected light. And, like moths do, it would have been traveling toward the light source, but not in a straight line. Moths flit about, meandering like an ant, just like the zigzagging I witnessed. When it disappeared, the moth had simply drifted out of the direct beam of light.

Once I had the revelation, I couldn’t imagine anything else. And the best thing is, it elegantly accounts for every detail I remember from that night. I don’t have to bend the laws of physics, and I can quit worrying about when the aliens will return.

All these years, the one overlooked piece of evidence was the movie projector beam. Although it had to be there, I didn’t see it, so I didn’t consider it. I never even thought about it. But with that simple little realization, everything falls neatly into place.

It certainly could have been something other than a flying bug, but I am content with this explanation. I can’t prove it, but I don’t have to; it works for me. Of course, I also can’t prove that it wasn’t an alien moth. All I can say is that there is no evidence pointing that way.

For me, this case, Close Encounter Number 2, is finally closed. It has been solved. Rational thinking eventually prevailed. It was not a flying saucer.

From my perspective, the UFOs in all seven of these encounters have been positively identified as normal, earthly things. Six were relatively common ‘flying’ phenomena: birds; a moth; helicopters; a missile; a rocket; the Goodyear blimp. The other one was a common ambulance with an uncommon voice (along with a healthy dose of childhood imagination). Anyone witnessing these events from a different location or emotional perspective might have seen something quite different.

As I stated in the prologue, there is always an explanation that does not include aliens—so far.

The universe is mind boggling in its vastness. We can never say for certain that there is no other life out there. But someday we may be able to say there definitely is. It may be under the next rock the Mars Rover flips. Or Earth could harbor the only life in our entire galaxy. We simply do not know.

No one can say that we’ll never encounter a flying saucer here on Earth. It could happen tonight. We will probably always consider the possibility, but we shouldn’t label it a flying saucer just because we can’t seem to explain it any other way. Most likely, there is overlooked or obscure evidence that points to something extraordinarily mundane.

Or it could be a flying saucer. I have had close encounters with both.

Scott Wright ©2016

 

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