People who really saw them always sound the same when they tell the story. They know how it sounds. They know what people think. But this is what happened.
I’ve never actually said this out loud to anyone outside my family. I’m keeping the time and place out of it because I’m still scared of what might happen if anyone figures out who I am. One night when I was eleven, I snuck out with two friends. We were supposed to be sleeping, but instead we crept through the neighborhood around midnight, heading for the next block over where some girls were having a sleepover.
We turned a corner, and there it was, a giant black thing hanging in the sky. It looked like a blimp, like those old pictures of the Hindenburg, but bigger, and it was so close and so low I could have believed it was sitting right above the rooftops. It was completely silent. No lights, no sound, no nothing.
It was just hovering there, dark and polished like gunmetal. At least four or five football fields across. No exaggeration. We all froze.
We kept asking each other, over and over, “Do you see that? You see it too, right? ” And we all agreed we did. We just stood there, staring, completely locked in place.
And then the next thing I remember, it was gone. There was no transition. No moment of it floating away. Time just jumped.
I remember a tiny white glowing bubble in the sky, like a soap bubble, slowly falling to Earth with thin wisps of smoke coming off it. Then two brand new black trucks came speeding down the street through the residential neighborhood, going about seventy miles an hour. They had silver gearboxes on the back, like F-150s, but nicer, and they came out of nowhere. The next thing I remember, I was walking back to my friend’s house and going to bed.
The sun was coming up. It must have been five or six in the morning. We all promised we’d tell my dad in the morning because he worked for the city, like he might know something. But we never did.
None of us ever said a word about it to anyone. One of those friends I eventually lost touch with. The other stayed my best friend for years, and we made an unspoken pact never to talk about it. I don’t know how that happened or why.
We just never brought it up. We reconnected on Facebook years later, but there was always something between us, some wall neither of us wanted to touch. Looking back now, there’s no way we were the only ones who saw it. That thing hovered above a heavily populated suburb of a major city just after midnight on a summer weekend.
Hundreds of houses were right there. But nothing ever showed up on the news, nothing in the paper, nothing on TV. Nobody ever said a single word about it again. That idea scares me more than any abduction story ever could, that there were others who saw it and we’re all just voluntarily carrying around this collective amnesia.
Except we’re not, because I remember every second of it. I thought about hypnosis once. But that scares me too, and I’m not sure I’d trust the results. I was just a kid.
I probably couldn’t trust the hypnotist either. What I know for certain is that it couldn’t have been just the three of us. Another time, back in Ed, West Virginia, my friend was driving his girlfriend home and decided to take the long way back. I was in the passenger seat, zoning out, staring at a blinking red light off in the distance on this deserted back road.
I thought to myself, “Huh, I wonder when they built a cell tower all the way out here. ”
Then it blinked, and it was dramatically closer. My friend pointed at it and stopped the car right in the middle of the road. The light blinked once more, and then it was directly in front of us, right over the car.
The red glow was so bright it flooded the whole interior in a deep scarlet color. I leaned forward so I could look straight into it. For that one brief moment, I felt a flood of pure negativity wash through me. The closest I can come to describing it is being naked under a giant microscope while every single pore gets thoroughly examined.
I looked away from the light, over at my friend, and asked him to drive. He barely responded, like he was in some kind of trance. Then he snapped out of it and floored it. We got a little way down the road and I realized the red light wasn’t fading.
The inside of the car was still lit up by it. I looked out the window, and there it was, following us. It followed us for a mile or two. Then it veered off to the left and dropped down to ground level in a patch of trees near the road.
My friend stopped the car again and just stared at it. Then he said he was going to get out and look at it, like he was talking in his sleep. He opened the door. I grabbed his arm and told him if he got out, I was getting in the driver’s seat and leaving him there.
We had to go, right then. He looked at me, and whatever spell had been on him broke. He hit the gas so hard the tires spun. The light stayed where it was as we drove off.
I’ve never looked at the night sky the same way since. I was driving home from Indiana University one weekend. It takes about two hours to get home from Bloomington, and I left around ten p. m.
At exactly 10:53, I was on a rural stretch of two-lane highway when I noticed flashing lights behind me. I figured I was getting pulled over. I turned onto the next county road, about a quarter mile from where I’d first noticed the lights, and came to a stop. I opened my glove box to grab my registration and proof of insurance, and then the lights disappeared.
No car ever passed by. That’s where it gets weird. The electronics in my car went haywire. The radio started changing stations on its own while the volume went up and down.
The dome light and the headlights began flickering and turning off and on. I thought my battery must be failing, or maybe I had a short somewhere in the electrical system. So I leaned down to pop the hood and check the battery. That’s the last thing I remember doing.
The next thing I knew, I opened my eyes to nothing but night sky full of bright stars. It was a cold night, and I don’t think I’d ever seen stars that bright in my life. I sat up and looked around. I was in the middle of a field surrounded by corn stalks left over from the harvest.
No car. Nothing. Just me and this empty field. I started to freak out.
Where was I? How did I get here? Where was my car? I got up and started walking toward the distant headlights I could see on a road about half a mile away.
When I finally reached the intersection, I looked at the signs, which read 350N and 50W. I was half a mile away from my car, just off the main road. I started walking toward the headlights. It took me maybe ten or fifteen minutes to get there.
When I arrived, my car was sitting there with all the lights off. The battery was dead. That struck me as odd, because I couldn’t have been gone that long. I looked at my phone, sitting on the passenger seat.
The time was 2:10 a. m. Over three hours had passed since I’d pulled over because of those flashing lights. I sat in my car completely dumbfounded, wondering what the hell had just happened.
After half an hour, I remembered my battery was dead and called AAA. It took them about an hour to reach me, and I just sat there in silence, running through every possible scenario in my head. To this day, I can’t explain why I woke up over half a mile away from my car in the middle of a cornfield more than three hours after stopping. I’ve only ever told one person, my uncle.
I know people would think I’m crazy or making it up. I can’t blame them. If someone told me a story that closely mirrored the stereotypical encounter story, I probably wouldn’t believe them either. When I was a kid, my family had a Boy Scout camping trip that turned into something I’ll never forget.
We were in a cabin with windows on the front and back, doors on both sides, wooden tables scattered around. There were twenty to thirty of us. The adult cabin with the bathroom was about an eighth of a mile down a gravel road, through the dark. It was around midnight.
We’d spent the night telling scary stories like everyone does on camping trips. I had to go to the bathroom, so I asked my friend to come along. He said sure and grabbed our knives. We knew there were bears in those woods, and it made us feel safer.
We went to the bathroom and started walking back. Halfway there, I felt this instinctive fear hit me. I looked at my friend, and he had the same look on his face. We started walking faster and unfolded our pocket knives.
I turned around and saw it. It looked like a cat, but it was about six feet tall, standing on its hind legs, kind of hunched over. I freaked out and started running. My friend saw it too, and we sprinted back to the cabin.
Behind us, it started making this moaning, howling noise, somewhere between the two, and it followed us slowly. We pounded on the door, and the guys let us in. We told them what we saw, and they actually believed us. We locked the front door, but the back door had no lock.
We shoved a table against it and put a kid there with his knife, just in case. We pulled down the blinds on all the windows that had them. There was one window with no blinds, and we sat there with every light in the cabin on. Then we saw the eyes outside that bare window.
We were all losing it. The thing slowly walked to the back door. We heard it bumping against it, maybe trying to get in. Then it left, or at least we think it did.
None of us slept the rest of the night. When the adults came to wake us up in the morning, we told them. They laughed and said we were making it up. We know what we saw, even if they don’t believe us.
Another time, I was on a wildfire just south of Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah. We were in fire rigs, driving in a close convoy to the incident area, when we heard helicopters. Eight black military choppers escorted us, flying off and on for about ten miles. We figured they were just doing drills, using us for fake target practice or something.
A little while later, we parked and were about to start hiking to the fire line when a thin column of smoke shot about two hundred feet into the sky, a good mile away. The concussion from it hit us pretty hard, and the noise was ridiculously loud even at that distance. We thought it was probably no big deal, since we knew we were near a strike zone. About five minutes later, an aircraft like nothing I’ve ever seen flew past us at maybe five hundred feet.
It was flat, black, sort of rectangular, with fins and wells on the underside. Moving pretty slow, dead silent. I assumed it was some kind of stealth glider. It sounds ridiculous, but it immediately reminded me of a huge flying Batmobile, the Tim Burton one.
Then military personnel got on our radio frequency and ordered us to leave the area immediately. Our crew chief asked who it was and why. They signed off. The incident commander came on and said we were evacuating.
They sent us to a completely different fire about a hundred miles south. They never told us why, except that it was “higher priority,” which was nonsense. The fire was already out when we got there, and we just helped with mop-up. What confuses me to this day is this: if the army didn’t want us to see whatever that was, or if it was dangerous, why didn’t they keep us clear of the area in the first place?
Either there was a communications breakdown, or they had a real mess going on and had to get us out without warning. When I was a kid, about ten years old, I went on a field trip with my fourth grade class to a summer camp. Typical experience, rafting, bad food in the mess hall, hiking, campfires. We were supposed to be there for four days, but I only lasted about two.
Late one night, after I finished my trash duty and cleaned the mess hall, I walked to the showers. Halfway through, I heard a loud shuffling sound outside. I stopped and listened, but it stopped too. I figured it was my friends pranking me, like they always did, and got out of the showers.
The showers and the boys’ cabins were a good walk apart, with no way to light the path. That’s why everyone showered in groups, before dark. But I was alone, and the flashlight I’d brought was back at the cabin. I had to find my way through the woods with a piece of junk lantern that barely gave off enough light.
About halfway back, I heard this ungodly loud moan coming from right in front of me. I panicked, dropped the lantern, and ran in the opposite direction. I couldn’t see anything, and in my haste I fell over something. I reached down to see what it was.
It was squishy, and soaking wet. I heard the moan again, this time behind me. I booked it toward the cabins. I ran straight into three flashlights and a bunch of concerned faces.
The other campers had heard the moans, and the counselors had come to investigate. They found me covered head to toe in blood. They brought me back to the cabins, and I got bombarded with questions about what I saw. My friends shut them up after a while.
The next day, I went home. Can you blame me? I was not going to stay there after what I’d been through. I almost forgot about it entirely until years later, when I was reminiscing with one of the friends who stayed at the camp.
I asked what happened after I left. What he told me sent a shiver up my spine. The moans at night got louder, and closer to the cabins. It freaked everyone out.
And that big mound I’d fallen on, the counselors found it while investigating the source of the moaning. It was a deer on the trail I’d been running on. Its head had been torn off, and its insides were scattered nearby. To this day, that’s the scariest experience of my life.
Everyone I’ve told thinks I’m making it up, but my friends who were there always defend me. I still don’t know what was in those woods that night. I’ve seen three things that could be called UFOs. The first time, I was at a park with friends, being typical teenagers.
We saw a series of red, blue, green, and white lights spinning slowly in the sky. We couldn’t see the actual aircraft, but the way the lights moved gave the impression of a plate-shaped object. We stared in silence for about forty-five seconds until it just disappeared. The second time, I was by myself, lying in my backyard.
I saw a silver disc in the sky and thought it was a weather balloon at first. Then it started moving very quickly in a triangular pattern, pausing at each point. I watched for about a minute until it vanished. The third time, I was at a party in a garage.
I stepped out to the end of the driveway to make a call and saw a slightly reflective black plate-shaped object hovering in the sky. At that point, I was basically annoyed. Like, how many times am I going to see these things? I watched it for about three minutes, and then the sky flashed blue, like heat lightning but blue, and it was gone.
I asked the partygoers if they saw anything weird. They just said, “Yeah, that random lightning. ”
It’s been four years since the last one. I’m pretty convinced I live near some secret military testing site.
Seeing a UFO once is crazy. Three times is almost unbelievable. I saw a series of UFOs for about a week once. That’s all I could talk about.
They looked like satellites but moved in a way I can’t even explain. The best way to describe them is fireflies, but that doesn’t do it justice. I got labeled the UFO guy. People made a lot of jokes at my expense.
A couple weeks later, at our family reunion camping trip, the UFO humor started up around the fire. Two minutes into the jokes, a UFO exactly like the ones I’d been talking about flew directly overhead. With as much smugness as I could muster, I pointed up and said, “Just like that, right there. ”
Dead silence.
Vindication. No more UFO jokes. I’m skeptical of most UFO sightings. Ninety-nine percent of the time, they can be explained by something boring.
But I’ve seen probably hundreds of satellites in my life, and what I saw that week wasn’t that. The objects swarmed like bees or fireflies, and they accelerated and decelerated at phenomenal speeds. There was intelligence behind the movements. I’m not saying aliens.
I’m saying I have no idea. Black project, new non-public tech, something pretty damn cool. When I was seven, in Houston, I used to climb on top of my mom’s Suburban in the driveway and stare at the stars. One night, I saw an intensely bright floating light over the tree line, about half a mile away.
I hollered, but nobody came. March of 2008, I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I stepped outside a friend’s place at exactly four a. m.
into a bright, starry night. Something caught my eye on my left. A bright, multicolored strobing light floating silently in the air. I stood in awe.
I didn’t want to grab anyone because I didn’t want to miss anything. I watched as it passed in front of the moon, and I saw the outline of the craft. It had a teardrop sunflower-seed shape, with the light coming from the top half, like it was transmitting some kind of pattern upward. It had a dark, thin, smooth line of exhaust trailing behind it, disappearing about fifty feet back.
It was within four hundred yards of me. After it passed the moon, I ran inside and grabbed a friend. He saw it, but by then it was too far away. I went home, a few blocks away, and stood in the driveway looking in the same direction.
I saw two dim white lights slowly rising over the horizon and heading toward me. I ran inside and got my mother out of bed. We stood there for about twenty minutes while five separate craft flew over us. First two, then two more, then one, six or seven minutes apart.
Maybe twenty miles an hour, maybe two hundred feet up, completely silent. From underneath, each had two huge bright white lights, maybe thirty or forty feet across, so bright it was hard to estimate. There was a pulsating red light between them that dimmed and lit back up. Based on the size of the lights, I’d estimate each craft was between a hundred fifty and two hundred feet wide.
The last one flew lower and slower than the others. Then it made a noise. A sound that still haunts me to this day. It sounded digital, and unbelievably loud.
The crafts flew directly over us, and I believe that sound was an acknowledgement. Whatever was piloting it knew we were watching. Kind of like a hello. Back in the spring of 1997, a group of us neighborhood kids were looking up at the night sky, observing the Hale-Bopp Comet.
I grew up hours from any major city, so the view was clear. After a while, we noticed a red and a white dot circling each other, making sudden movements in every direction, unlike any aircraft I’d ever seen. At one point, they merged into one craft. Then they shot out three smaller objects, though we couldn’t tell if they were craft because they just looked like balls of light.
This went on for a couple of hours. Right before they disappeared, they accelerated at lightning speed into the darkness. We all went home terrified. The next day, the front page of our small hometown paper mentioned they’d received several calls about it.
The explanation they gave was that the local airport was testing aircraft. I’m not sure how much I believe that. To this day, when I see those friends, we’ll sometimes talk about it. None of us can say for sure what we saw, and none of us have ever seen anything like it again.
1997, Colorado Springs. I was eight years old, playing alone in the sand volleyball court at the park down the street. I was burying my collection of Happy Meal toys in the sand and digging them back up, over and over. I was looking down, but suddenly I decided I needed to look up, because the world around me had lost all sound.
No traffic from the busy street a block over. No dogs barking. No birds chirping. Nothing.
I looked at the street bordering the park, and that’s when I saw it. It looked like a stealth bomber turned sideways, nose leading, one wing pointing down toward the road, the other up at the sky. Completely shiny black. As tall as a house.
Shaped like an arrowhead. It was cruising down the street at about three miles per hour, gliding over the road. I watched it for maybe twenty seconds. As soon as it passed behind some two-story houses and out of my sight, my hearing came back full force.
I ran home and never spoke a word of it to anybody. My mom and I were driving home from my aunt’s house once on a warm, sunny afternoon, when an object just appeared in the sky a little to our left. We both saw it immediately. It had the classic saucer shape, shining brightly from the sun reflecting off it.
The size of it was the most shocking part. We kept driving, just admiring it for a few seconds. Then it vanished. Disintegrated.
Disappeared. Whatever you want to call it. I looked over at my mom, and I could tell by her expression she’d seen the same thing. She still talks about it with me to this day.
We can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for what we saw that afternoon. It was definitely not a helicopter, an airplane, or a flock of geese. Everyone laughs when I tell that story. That’s fine.
I know what I saw. Since that day, I’ve always been interested in UFOs, in the possibility of other life in the universe. It’s not a hoax, and it’s not a fabrication.
We were two people, wide awake on a sunny afternoon, and we both saw the same thing.