July 30, 2025 • 21 mins
Archive 182 UFOs and Bigfoot
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
I was born in southern Ohio in the mid nineteen fifties,
and my parents moved to northern Indiana before I quit
wearing diapers. But my dad was from central Kentucky, just
north of the Daniel Boone National Forest. When I was
nine years old, my dad was injured on his job,
and for reasons that I'm still not clear about, he
(00:27):
went to his parents' house in Kentucky, where he would
soon die. He took five of us kids with him,
and my baby's sister and my mother would follow very soon.
My grandparents' home was out in the sticks, and many
sounds could be heard there. While sitting on the porch
in the evenings, we often heard what was described as
(00:48):
wildcats bobcats, screaming just like the sound of a woman.
But several times we would hear unusual sounds from the
mountains surrounding their home. These were just described as boogers
by my uncles who lived with my grandparents. When we
heard these screams or sounds, it meant it was time
(01:08):
to go inside the house and stay there. If a
privy trip was kneaded out back, it was done by
several at a time, but it was done really quickly.
A few times they would speak with quiet reverence about
bookers and how they had, and still at times would
enter the home and eat whatever the leftovers were in
(01:28):
the bean pot or the slot bucket for the hogs.
The next day. I once heard them say that you
could hear a booger scraping the bottom of a bucket
with a spoon or its nails. We were told to
lay still and keep quiet if we heard anything entering
the house late at night, and on a couple of
nights I could hear the adults talking in whispers about
(01:50):
seeing something outside near the window. One night, as my
brother and I were laying on a couch in a
sitting room just off the kitchen, I heard a no,
he's at the kitchen door, and my brother said he
saw something looking in the window. I could not see
the window, but I heard whatever it was slam the
door open, and we could hear the heavy breathing and
(02:12):
the smell, Oh, what a terrible smell, like all the
privy had just been brought in with this thing. We
heard what was later discovered as a slot bucket being scraped, slurped,
and even thrown firmly against the cast iron wood stove
and then subtle on the floor. After a little snooping
(02:33):
around the kitchen, we finally heard this thing leave and
most of the smell went with it. Soon after, my
grandmother came out of her in Grandpa's curtain covered bedroom doorway,
and she gently closed the kitchen door. Nothing was ever said,
but I could hear her praying under her breath. The
(02:54):
next morning, I got up early and went out to
the privy, passing a small shed where the big black
angus bull spent his nights. I noticed the bull was
lying down and he wasn't breathing. I ran back to
tell Grandpa, and when he finally believed me, he came
out and discovered the big bulls and neck had been
broken by being twisted three hundred and sixty degrees, which
(03:17):
was a devastating blow to my grandfather, as his bull
supplied an extra income in breeding fees. Grandpa and my
uncles had to quarter the bull just to get it
loaded for burying. My father died a few days later
at almost forty years of age, and we left soon after,
heading back to Indiana and away from what was a
(03:40):
strange world to us kids. Later in life, in the
mid nineties, I went to Kentucky to go deer hunting
with my cousin on some property adjacent to the Daniel
Boone National Forest. We scattered out a good ridge that
even had a couple of caves to access in bad weather.
I chose to hunt in a creek bottom while my
(04:02):
cousin hunted the ridge, and just as day was breaking,
I heard a noise that sounded like something crashing down
from the ridge in my direction. I mean trees being
broken repeatedly, and like a dozer without an engine was
putting in a new road. When whatever it was got
to the bottom near a trail, it stopped and gave
(04:23):
a loud growl that nearly made me wet my pants.
At the same time, this thing stopped about forty or
fifty yards away, and several deer were trying to step
gingerly over my head while I remained in position on
a tree route in a creek bank. After maybe fifteen
(04:44):
seconds and it felt like twenty minutes, I could clearly
smell the stench of this beast, and my mind went
back to the mid sixties and what had happened at
my grandparents' house, which was only about twenty minutes away
by the curvy country road. Then the beast chose a
path leaning away from me, in a different direction from
(05:05):
the deer that it was possibly chasing, but between my
cousin and myself. I waited about twenty minutes and left
to find my cousin, and I found him examining a
newly built path coming down the mountain. I ask if
he heard all the commotion, and he simply replied, it's
time for us to leave now. And we spoke nothing
(05:26):
about that hunt to each other or anyone else since,
perhaps not as much concerned with anyone not believing us
as to worry about having the beash return to us
in greater anger. Later, on a cold winter night in
nineteen seventy three, my friends and I gathered our ice
(05:48):
skates and headed for the pond. It had recently frozen,
and we wanted to be the first to skate it
with our thermoses full of hot chocolate and our snacks.
We walked a river track that would take us to
the pond. It was a little over a mile away.
The railroad was a line that ran back and forth
to the coal mines. They delivered coal to the Pittsburgh
(06:11):
Steel mills. The tracks were surrounded by forests, and after
dark it was a bit creepy, but even so we
enjoyed the walk. When we arrived at the pond, our
group was excited to be the first to arrive. Others
would arrive later, but for now, we have the whole
pond to ourselves. My friend Larry carried an old tire
(06:33):
with us, and he used that to start a fire,
adding wood to it. After it was burning, we were
having a wonderful time, and then my friend Joyce yelled
that something was wrong. She had seen a yellow light
glowing under the ice where she skated. Everyone stopped to
hear better. We looked like mannekins frozen on the ice
(06:54):
for a minute. I skated toward the fire. I had
an uneasy feeling about this. I could see the light
getting brighter until half of the pond turned from blue
and white to a glowing orange. It wasn't long until
everyone was near me by the fire, and we watched
as the disk that I would estimate to be twenty
(07:15):
feet around and a few feet thick, broke upward through
the ice and hovered for a few seconds. The ice
and water blew all over us. Thank goodness, everyone had
gotten off the ice or someone could have been drowned.
The disk covered above the ice for a minute and
then accelerated up into the sky until we couldn't see
(07:36):
it well after that, we talked about it every day
on the bus going to school for a long time,
and then this subject grew distant until we stopped talking
about it. There is no way to know what we observed,
who would ever be able to explain it. But I
remember it well. It feels fresh in my memory, and
I'm glad no one was hurt. In July of twenty fifteen,
(08:03):
my son was on a seven day, fifty mile backpacking
trip with his Boy Scout troop between Yosemite National Park
and Mammoth Lakes, California. He has since achieved Eagle Scout
and graduated high school. He was honor rolling First Lieutenant ROTC.
I'm sorry I had to brag. I'm a real proud dad.
(08:24):
Well you should be proud. That's those are great achievements.
Eagle Scout is a phenomenal achievement. I have a good
friend of mine that was an Eagle Scout and he
went on to be a doctor, and he was and
he lives in Nashville, and I went and visited him
about two months ago and stayed the night there. And
he's a single guy. He's got this huge house. He's
(08:47):
fifty nine, fifty nine or sixty years old, and he's
already retired. He's done really well. So Eagle Scouts tend
to be achievers. Okay, let's get moving here. His scout
troop completed the fifty mile every year. In twenty fifteen,
eight boys and two adult leaders started the trip, and
I was no longer able to go along because of
(09:08):
issues with my knees. They quickly realized that one of
the boys wasn't quite prepared for the journey, so they
decided to alter the route to go through easier terrain.
Their first day out, they ran into a group of
free range goats and cattle. My son said that of
the livestock had bells around their necks and it was
(09:29):
annoying as hell listening to them bang and clank around.
They decided to make camp under some small trees there.
No open fires were allowed in California outside of designated campgrounds,
so they went to bed shortly after dark, which would
have been around nine pm. They hung their packs in
(09:50):
the trees to keep the wildlife out. My son settled
into as one man coffin tent. At two thirty am,
he woke to the sounds of cat clanging in the livestock,
mewing and bleeding as they were upset and moving quickly
away from wherever they were. The sound was interrupted by
(10:10):
what my son described as the strangest cry or scream
he had ever heard. Even more disturbing, it was answered
by by another strange howl from the opposite direction. He
was now fully awakened, sitting up in his tiny tent
with only a four inch survival knife, and he listened
to the yells or perhaps communications, and they got closer
(10:33):
and grew louder. Then there was a terrified ball from
a cow, along with a loud clanging of its bell,
as if it were running away from a predator. Then
it cut off suddenly, like someone had turned off a switch. Well,
that was followed by complete silence. My son spent the
(10:53):
rest of the night holding that small knife and jumping
at every sound, And the next morning he asked his
friend and if he had heard anything, but he hadn't.
We've listened to sasquatch cries and sounds on the web,
and he says some are similar, but not exactly what
he heard. I know we live in California, the land
(11:14):
of fruits and nuts, but we have spent a lot
of time outdoors, backpacking and camping. We know what most
of the wildlife in the southwestern deserts in Sierra sound like.
My son won't come right out and say that it
was bigfoot, but he will say that it sounded like
nothing he had ever heard before or since. I just
(11:35):
thank God that he still loves the outdoors and refuses
to get spooked by this experience. He has the right attitude.
He believes these creatures do exist, and if they do,
they have been out there for a long time and
probably don't want anything more to do with us than
we do with them. I was a college student in
(11:57):
rural Tennessee in the mid nineteen eighties. The campus is
on a plateau in the Blue Ridge Mountains and has
been there since the Civil War. There are ten thousand
acres of woods, with the buildings all clustered together, and
we were thirty minutes from the nearest wal mart and
hours from a big city. There are lakes and caves
(12:20):
and waterfalls and I had grown up in a congested area,
so this place was a dream come true. I attended
one session of summer school in nineteen eighty five. Class
was over at noon most days, and it was hot
at lunch. On one of those days, my friend Jane
and I decided to go swimming out at a lake
(12:42):
where we didn't have to wear bathing suits. We did
it partly to cool down because it was so hot,
but mostly to be wild, free and brave in our
own little way. No one ever went to this lake.
Jane and I discovered why as we stepped in and
sunk deep into the monkey bottle. We were standing there
(13:02):
up to our knees in the murky water, swatting it flies,
trying to pull our feet out of a suctioning mud,
and laughing at the gigantic failure our swimming venture had become.
When a silver craft appeared over the treeline across the lake.
It looked like the classic nineteen fifties flying saucer. It
(13:23):
moved from right to left, neither fast nor slow, and
then stopped right in the middle of my field of view.
It hovered in place for what was probably only a minute,
but it felt much longer. I remember it seemed to vibrate.
It's hard to describe. It was just almost imperceptible vibrations,
(13:44):
but with absolutely no other noise. Well, Jane and I
were dumbstruck. We were naked and afraid, but without the
camera crew to film it. The bottom of the lake
was the closest thing to quicksand I hoped to ever
stand in. We snapped out of our shock and started
clumsily trying to get back to the bank. I was
(14:06):
trying to keep my eye on the saucer without falling down,
while at the same time pulling each foot from the
deep muck and then sinking it back in another step
closer to the bank. As we tried to run away,
the saucer zipped off in the direction it was already heading,
and then it accelerated to an incredibly high speed and
(14:26):
disappeared from sight. We were in such a hurry to escape.
We jumped into Jane's car, still covered in mut from
our knees down. She was and still is, such a
tidy person. We kept saying how weird it was and
that it was a UFO, and we agreed not to
tell anyone because they wouldn't believe us, and worse, they
(14:49):
would gossip about us being crazy or weird. I recently
learned that Bigfoot has been spotted in that area. I've
talked to Jane about that day. They both get white
eyed thinking about it. The hovering maneuver, the silence, and
the high speed at which it left convinced us that
it was no normal technology. We both feel like it
(15:11):
was going about its business when it spotted us and
observed us in naked earthlings for a minute, and then
made up for lost time getting out of there. It's
funny because we picked that lake hoping no one on
earth would spot us, and in a way, I guess
we succeeded. Twice more in my life I have seen UFOs.
(15:33):
Both were in northern California, and both times I was
sober and with a friend. The sightings were three years apart. Sadly,
it's been decades since I've seen one. One UFO chased
my friend and me as we sped off in our
rental car. There was no Bigfoot connection there, but if
you're interested in the story, let me know. Of course, ma'am,
(15:56):
of course we're interested. Please send him. Thanks for there
were a great resource for all of us who are
curious about and open to the strange possibilities of our galaxy.
During the summer of nineteen seventy five, about a month
before my seventeenth birthday, I was hanging out in front
(16:17):
of my house with my friends Anne, Bob, and Wayne.
They were all two or three years younger than me,
so they were like my little brothers and sister. We're
all still close to this day. Bob and Wayne had
to be home by eight pm, so Anne and I
walked them to their house. That was when kids played
outside after dark without fear of strangers, and houses were
(16:40):
left unlocked. As we walked back to my house, we
were looking up, as we often did, trying to find
the big and little Dippers and any other constellations we
could identify. I looked over into the southeast and noticed
something dark hovering over the park. Hey, look at that,
I said to Anne, what is that thing? The object
(17:02):
was a big dark mast that wasn't making any sound
at all. It had a light under it. It was
moving very slowly from side to side in a sweeping motion,
and then it would go straight again before repeating the
pattern over and over. We couldn't see any sky as
it moved, but what freaked us out was the absence
of sound. You can hear prop planes and helicopters coming
(17:26):
even from a distance, and this object was completely silent.
We watched as it moved over the trees of the
road to the east of my road, until it had
traveled from the south to the north, always making that
same side to side motion, followed by going straight again.
I was having trouble making out the defining shape, but
(17:47):
the size was as big as three or four baseball diamonds.
The light underneath was not a spotlight, it just illuminated
the underside well. We were flabbergasted the life of us.
We couldn't figure out what it could be. We got
to the end of my street and kept following it north,
and at one point, when it was directly east of us,
(18:10):
I was able to make out that it was round.
It wasn't a blump bow. No blimp couldn't maneuver like that.
We kept watching and following until we lost it in
the trees to our north. We were frustrated and ran
back to my house, and I immediately called the Jacksonville
International Airport tower, nervously trying to hind the fear in
(18:34):
my voice. I said, do you have any airplanes on
your radar coming from Daytona or Orlando or maybe Saint Augustine. No,
he answered, I have nothing on my radar. Why. I
quickly explained everything we had seen and where, being careful
to stress just how oddly silent it had been. And
in turn, he asked me where I lived and if
(18:56):
I had family or friends in the Arlington area. Him
I had an elderly aunt and uncle there, but that
was it. He then told me that he had already
received twenty calls from people who describe the exact same thing.
But I have nothing on my radar, and I can
explain it, he said. Then he asked if I could
(19:16):
give him my phone number in case he needed to
contact me. I'm not going to have any men in
spacesuits show up at my door, am I? I asked? Okay.
I was a sixteen year old, dorky girl, I know,
but I was genuinely afraid of what would happen. He laughed,
and he said, no, sweetie, nobody in spacesuits is coming
(19:37):
to your house. That was forty years ago, and I've
never seen anything like that since. And and I still
talk about it from time to time. It's just something
we cannot explain. To add to this as a bonus,
if you will. Back in nineteen seventy two, my grandparents
were coming home from Tennessee driving down Ice seventy five
(19:59):
to I. Their car was one of only a few
on the road. As the dusk fell across the sky.
My grandfather was driving when he saw what looked like
a plane flying very low in the distance. They were
flying so low he was sure they were going to
crash land on the interstate, and that maybe they thought
I ten was the runway. My grandparents pulled over and
(20:23):
waited for the inevitable crash. Bebop as I called him,
got out of the car, and the first thing that
struck him was the absence of sound. As it got closer,
he could tell it was triangular, but it never did
make any noise. It passed over them at the tree
top high and then took off straight up into the sky,
and just like that, it was gone, no wind, no nothing,
(20:47):
a shot straight up into the sky like a slingshot.
He said. After that, whenever they went to Tennessee, they
took a different route because my poor grandmother was afraid
they would see it again. They took ten. Thanks for
reading my story, Cam. It has stayed with me for
a long time, and it still freaks me out a bit.
(21:08):
I wish I knew who was piloting that aircraft. I
really wish I knew why we couldn't hear it, and
she signs off Anita, Nita, thank you for that story.
It's fascinating. I really do appreciate it. I would love
to see one of those myself.
I was born in southern Ohio in the mid nineteen fifties,
and my parents moved to northern Indiana before I quit
wearing diapers. But my dad was from central Kentucky, just
north of the Daniel Boone National Forest. When I was
nine years old, my dad was injured on his job,
and for reasons that I'm still not clear about, he
(00:27):
went to his parents' house in Kentucky, where he would
soon die. He took five of us kids with him,
and my baby's sister and my mother would follow very soon.
My grandparents' home was out in the sticks, and many
sounds could be heard there. While sitting on the porch
in the evenings, we often heard what was described as
(00:48):
wildcats bobcats, screaming just like the sound of a woman.
But several times we would hear unusual sounds from the
mountains surrounding their home. These were just described as boogers
by my uncles who lived with my grandparents. When we
heard these screams or sounds, it meant it was time
(01:08):
to go inside the house and stay there. If a
privy trip was kneaded out back, it was done by
several at a time, but it was done really quickly.
A few times they would speak with quiet reverence about
bookers and how they had, and still at times would
enter the home and eat whatever the leftovers were in
(01:28):
the bean pot or the slot bucket for the hogs.
The next day. I once heard them say that you
could hear a booger scraping the bottom of a bucket
with a spoon or its nails. We were told to
lay still and keep quiet if we heard anything entering
the house late at night, and on a couple of
nights I could hear the adults talking in whispers about
(01:50):
seeing something outside near the window. One night, as my
brother and I were laying on a couch in a
sitting room just off the kitchen, I heard a no,
he's at the kitchen door, and my brother said he
saw something looking in the window. I could not see
the window, but I heard whatever it was slam the
door open, and we could hear the heavy breathing and
(02:12):
the smell, Oh, what a terrible smell, like all the
privy had just been brought in with this thing. We
heard what was later discovered as a slot bucket being scraped, slurped,
and even thrown firmly against the cast iron wood stove
and then subtle on the floor. After a little snooping
(02:33):
around the kitchen, we finally heard this thing leave and
most of the smell went with it. Soon after, my
grandmother came out of her in Grandpa's curtain covered bedroom doorway,
and she gently closed the kitchen door. Nothing was ever said,
but I could hear her praying under her breath. The
(02:54):
next morning, I got up early and went out to
the privy, passing a small shed where the big black
angus bull spent his nights. I noticed the bull was
lying down and he wasn't breathing. I ran back to
tell Grandpa, and when he finally believed me, he came
out and discovered the big bulls and neck had been
broken by being twisted three hundred and sixty degrees, which
(03:17):
was a devastating blow to my grandfather, as his bull
supplied an extra income in breeding fees. Grandpa and my
uncles had to quarter the bull just to get it
loaded for burying. My father died a few days later
at almost forty years of age, and we left soon after,
heading back to Indiana and away from what was a
(03:40):
strange world to us kids. Later in life, in the
mid nineties, I went to Kentucky to go deer hunting
with my cousin on some property adjacent to the Daniel
Boone National Forest. We scattered out a good ridge that
even had a couple of caves to access in bad weather.
I chose to hunt in a creek bottom while my
(04:02):
cousin hunted the ridge, and just as day was breaking,
I heard a noise that sounded like something crashing down
from the ridge in my direction. I mean trees being
broken repeatedly, and like a dozer without an engine was
putting in a new road. When whatever it was got
to the bottom near a trail, it stopped and gave
(04:23):
a loud growl that nearly made me wet my pants.
At the same time, this thing stopped about forty or
fifty yards away, and several deer were trying to step
gingerly over my head while I remained in position on
a tree route in a creek bank. After maybe fifteen
(04:44):
seconds and it felt like twenty minutes, I could clearly
smell the stench of this beast, and my mind went
back to the mid sixties and what had happened at
my grandparents' house, which was only about twenty minutes away
by the curvy country road. Then the beast chose a
path leaning away from me, in a different direction from
(05:05):
the deer that it was possibly chasing, but between my
cousin and myself. I waited about twenty minutes and left
to find my cousin, and I found him examining a
newly built path coming down the mountain. I ask if
he heard all the commotion, and he simply replied, it's
time for us to leave now. And we spoke nothing
(05:26):
about that hunt to each other or anyone else since,
perhaps not as much concerned with anyone not believing us
as to worry about having the beash return to us
in greater anger. Later, on a cold winter night in
nineteen seventy three, my friends and I gathered our ice
(05:48):
skates and headed for the pond. It had recently frozen,
and we wanted to be the first to skate it
with our thermoses full of hot chocolate and our snacks.
We walked a river track that would take us to
the pond. It was a little over a mile away.
The railroad was a line that ran back and forth
to the coal mines. They delivered coal to the Pittsburgh
(06:11):
Steel mills. The tracks were surrounded by forests, and after
dark it was a bit creepy, but even so we
enjoyed the walk. When we arrived at the pond, our
group was excited to be the first to arrive. Others
would arrive later, but for now, we have the whole
pond to ourselves. My friend Larry carried an old tire
(06:33):
with us, and he used that to start a fire,
adding wood to it. After it was burning, we were
having a wonderful time, and then my friend Joyce yelled
that something was wrong. She had seen a yellow light
glowing under the ice where she skated. Everyone stopped to
hear better. We looked like mannekins frozen on the ice
(06:54):
for a minute. I skated toward the fire. I had
an uneasy feeling about this. I could see the light
getting brighter until half of the pond turned from blue
and white to a glowing orange. It wasn't long until
everyone was near me by the fire, and we watched
as the disk that I would estimate to be twenty
(07:15):
feet around and a few feet thick, broke upward through
the ice and hovered for a few seconds. The ice
and water blew all over us. Thank goodness, everyone had
gotten off the ice or someone could have been drowned.
The disk covered above the ice for a minute and
then accelerated up into the sky until we couldn't see
(07:36):
it well after that, we talked about it every day
on the bus going to school for a long time,
and then this subject grew distant until we stopped talking
about it. There is no way to know what we observed,
who would ever be able to explain it. But I
remember it well. It feels fresh in my memory, and
I'm glad no one was hurt. In July of twenty fifteen,
(08:03):
my son was on a seven day, fifty mile backpacking
trip with his Boy Scout troop between Yosemite National Park
and Mammoth Lakes, California. He has since achieved Eagle Scout
and graduated high school. He was honor rolling First Lieutenant ROTC.
I'm sorry I had to brag. I'm a real proud dad.
(08:24):
Well you should be proud. That's those are great achievements.
Eagle Scout is a phenomenal achievement. I have a good
friend of mine that was an Eagle Scout and he
went on to be a doctor, and he was and
he lives in Nashville, and I went and visited him
about two months ago and stayed the night there. And
he's a single guy. He's got this huge house. He's
(08:47):
fifty nine, fifty nine or sixty years old, and he's
already retired. He's done really well. So Eagle Scouts tend
to be achievers. Okay, let's get moving here. His scout
troop completed the fifty mile every year. In twenty fifteen,
eight boys and two adult leaders started the trip, and
I was no longer able to go along because of
(09:08):
issues with my knees. They quickly realized that one of
the boys wasn't quite prepared for the journey, so they
decided to alter the route to go through easier terrain.
Their first day out, they ran into a group of
free range goats and cattle. My son said that of
the livestock had bells around their necks and it was
(09:29):
annoying as hell listening to them bang and clank around.
They decided to make camp under some small trees there.
No open fires were allowed in California outside of designated campgrounds,
so they went to bed shortly after dark, which would
have been around nine pm. They hung their packs in
(09:50):
the trees to keep the wildlife out. My son settled
into as one man coffin tent. At two thirty am,
he woke to the sounds of cat clanging in the livestock,
mewing and bleeding as they were upset and moving quickly
away from wherever they were. The sound was interrupted by
(10:10):
what my son described as the strangest cry or scream
he had ever heard. Even more disturbing, it was answered
by by another strange howl from the opposite direction. He
was now fully awakened, sitting up in his tiny tent
with only a four inch survival knife, and he listened
to the yells or perhaps communications, and they got closer
(10:33):
and grew louder. Then there was a terrified ball from
a cow, along with a loud clanging of its bell,
as if it were running away from a predator. Then
it cut off suddenly, like someone had turned off a switch. Well,
that was followed by complete silence. My son spent the
(10:53):
rest of the night holding that small knife and jumping
at every sound, And the next morning he asked his
friend and if he had heard anything, but he hadn't.
We've listened to sasquatch cries and sounds on the web,
and he says some are similar, but not exactly what
he heard. I know we live in California, the land
(11:14):
of fruits and nuts, but we have spent a lot
of time outdoors, backpacking and camping. We know what most
of the wildlife in the southwestern deserts in Sierra sound like.
My son won't come right out and say that it
was bigfoot, but he will say that it sounded like
nothing he had ever heard before or since. I just
(11:35):
thank God that he still loves the outdoors and refuses
to get spooked by this experience. He has the right attitude.
He believes these creatures do exist, and if they do,
they have been out there for a long time and
probably don't want anything more to do with us than
we do with them. I was a college student in
(11:57):
rural Tennessee in the mid nineteen eighties. The campus is
on a plateau in the Blue Ridge Mountains and has
been there since the Civil War. There are ten thousand
acres of woods, with the buildings all clustered together, and
we were thirty minutes from the nearest wal mart and
hours from a big city. There are lakes and caves
(12:20):
and waterfalls and I had grown up in a congested area,
so this place was a dream come true. I attended
one session of summer school in nineteen eighty five. Class
was over at noon most days, and it was hot
at lunch. On one of those days, my friend Jane
and I decided to go swimming out at a lake
(12:42):
where we didn't have to wear bathing suits. We did
it partly to cool down because it was so hot,
but mostly to be wild, free and brave in our
own little way. No one ever went to this lake.
Jane and I discovered why as we stepped in and
sunk deep into the monkey bottle. We were standing there
(13:02):
up to our knees in the murky water, swatting it flies,
trying to pull our feet out of a suctioning mud,
and laughing at the gigantic failure our swimming venture had become.
When a silver craft appeared over the treeline across the lake.
It looked like the classic nineteen fifties flying saucer. It
(13:23):
moved from right to left, neither fast nor slow, and
then stopped right in the middle of my field of view.
It hovered in place for what was probably only a minute,
but it felt much longer. I remember it seemed to vibrate.
It's hard to describe. It was just almost imperceptible vibrations,
(13:44):
but with absolutely no other noise. Well, Jane and I
were dumbstruck. We were naked and afraid, but without the
camera crew to film it. The bottom of the lake
was the closest thing to quicksand I hoped to ever
stand in. We snapped out of our shock and started
clumsily trying to get back to the bank. I was
(14:06):
trying to keep my eye on the saucer without falling down,
while at the same time pulling each foot from the
deep muck and then sinking it back in another step
closer to the bank. As we tried to run away,
the saucer zipped off in the direction it was already heading,
and then it accelerated to an incredibly high speed and
(14:26):
disappeared from sight. We were in such a hurry to escape.
We jumped into Jane's car, still covered in mut from
our knees down. She was and still is, such a
tidy person. We kept saying how weird it was and
that it was a UFO, and we agreed not to
tell anyone because they wouldn't believe us, and worse, they
(14:49):
would gossip about us being crazy or weird. I recently
learned that Bigfoot has been spotted in that area. I've
talked to Jane about that day. They both get white
eyed thinking about it. The hovering maneuver, the silence, and
the high speed at which it left convinced us that
it was no normal technology. We both feel like it
(15:11):
was going about its business when it spotted us and
observed us in naked earthlings for a minute, and then
made up for lost time getting out of there. It's
funny because we picked that lake hoping no one on
earth would spot us, and in a way, I guess
we succeeded. Twice more in my life I have seen UFOs.
(15:33):
Both were in northern California, and both times I was
sober and with a friend. The sightings were three years apart. Sadly,
it's been decades since I've seen one. One UFO chased
my friend and me as we sped off in our
rental car. There was no Bigfoot connection there, but if
you're interested in the story, let me know. Of course, ma'am,
(15:56):
of course we're interested. Please send him. Thanks for there
were a great resource for all of us who are
curious about and open to the strange possibilities of our galaxy.
During the summer of nineteen seventy five, about a month
before my seventeenth birthday, I was hanging out in front
(16:17):
of my house with my friends Anne, Bob, and Wayne.
They were all two or three years younger than me,
so they were like my little brothers and sister. We're
all still close to this day. Bob and Wayne had
to be home by eight pm, so Anne and I
walked them to their house. That was when kids played
outside after dark without fear of strangers, and houses were
(16:40):
left unlocked. As we walked back to my house, we
were looking up, as we often did, trying to find
the big and little Dippers and any other constellations we
could identify. I looked over into the southeast and noticed
something dark hovering over the park. Hey, look at that,
I said to Anne, what is that thing? The object
(17:02):
was a big dark mast that wasn't making any sound
at all. It had a light under it. It was
moving very slowly from side to side in a sweeping motion,
and then it would go straight again before repeating the
pattern over and over. We couldn't see any sky as
it moved, but what freaked us out was the absence
of sound. You can hear prop planes and helicopters coming
(17:26):
even from a distance, and this object was completely silent.
We watched as it moved over the trees of the
road to the east of my road, until it had
traveled from the south to the north, always making that
same side to side motion, followed by going straight again.
I was having trouble making out the defining shape, but
(17:47):
the size was as big as three or four baseball diamonds.
The light underneath was not a spotlight, it just illuminated
the underside well. We were flabbergasted the life of us.
We couldn't figure out what it could be. We got
to the end of my street and kept following it north,
and at one point, when it was directly east of us,
(18:10):
I was able to make out that it was round.
It wasn't a blump bow. No blimp couldn't maneuver like that.
We kept watching and following until we lost it in
the trees to our north. We were frustrated and ran
back to my house, and I immediately called the Jacksonville
International Airport tower, nervously trying to hind the fear in
(18:34):
my voice. I said, do you have any airplanes on
your radar coming from Daytona or Orlando or maybe Saint Augustine. No,
he answered, I have nothing on my radar. Why. I
quickly explained everything we had seen and where, being careful
to stress just how oddly silent it had been. And
in turn, he asked me where I lived and if
(18:56):
I had family or friends in the Arlington area. Him
I had an elderly aunt and uncle there, but that
was it. He then told me that he had already
received twenty calls from people who describe the exact same thing.
But I have nothing on my radar, and I can
explain it, he said. Then he asked if I could
(19:16):
give him my phone number in case he needed to
contact me. I'm not going to have any men in
spacesuits show up at my door, am I? I asked? Okay.
I was a sixteen year old, dorky girl, I know,
but I was genuinely afraid of what would happen. He laughed,
and he said, no, sweetie, nobody in spacesuits is coming
(19:37):
to your house. That was forty years ago, and I've
never seen anything like that since. And and I still
talk about it from time to time. It's just something
we cannot explain. To add to this as a bonus,
if you will. Back in nineteen seventy two, my grandparents
were coming home from Tennessee driving down Ice seventy five
(19:59):
to I. Their car was one of only a few
on the road. As the dusk fell across the sky.
My grandfather was driving when he saw what looked like
a plane flying very low in the distance. They were
flying so low he was sure they were going to
crash land on the interstate, and that maybe they thought
I ten was the runway. My grandparents pulled over and
(20:23):
waited for the inevitable crash. Bebop as I called him,
got out of the car, and the first thing that
struck him was the absence of sound. As it got closer,
he could tell it was triangular, but it never did
make any noise. It passed over them at the tree
top high and then took off straight up into the sky,
and just like that, it was gone, no wind, no nothing,
(20:47):
a shot straight up into the sky like a slingshot.
He said. After that, whenever they went to Tennessee, they
took a different route because my poor grandmother was afraid
they would see it again. They took ten. Thanks for
reading my story, Cam. It has stayed with me for
a long time, and it still freaks me out a bit.
(21:08):
I wish I knew who was piloting that aircraft. I
really wish I knew why we couldn't hear it, and
she signs off Anita, Nita, thank you for that story.
It's fascinating. I really do appreciate it. I would love
to see one of those myself.
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