High Strangeness in the Skies too close to the Ground
Soon after men working on my Dad’s farm swore they saw two “flying saucer” UFOs with colored lights zoom between the two silos attached to the outside of the cowbarn, ball lightning knocked down all the cows. At least we think those orbs were ball lightning, but we weren’t completely certain. These events occurred on Riverview Dairy Farm near the village of Rice in Prince Edward County where we lived in the rolling Piedmont region of Virginia.
This was sometime during the mid-1970s. My brother Joe and I played with the three Vernon brothers and the two Moore brothers. Their fathers worked the local dairy farms milking cows, fixing machinery, and throwing hay. Recently we thought we had seen a flying saucer UFO while out exploring in the woods one evening. The more we studied the machine and its light patterns high in the sky, however, we realized it was a common, small airplane viewed upon the steep angle of the land as we climbed out of a steep gully into the field. One can read about that incident in my article here, “The UFO that wasn’t.”
Apparently the farmers, hardened men not incline to make up nonsensical stories, saw two small UFOs. They were described as little flying saucers, silver or aluminum-colored, with a ring of colored lights around the outer rim of their discs. The saucers flew over the farm from the south somewhere. Then they turned quickly on a hard right turn and shot thru the narrow gap between the two silos over the high, tin roof of the cowbarn. Those two machines behaved as if they were performing, indeed, as one man declared, “showing off.” Once thru, both accelerated and vanished. They were so fast it wasn’t clear if they disappeared because they flew on out of view or winked out of visible existence. Was daytime and the sky was clear with a few clouds.
To be clear, I did not see these two UFOs. Yes, have seen several others before and since, but not these particular ones. I do not know what they were or are. I share this story as it happened on my parents’ working farm, because I knew the people who saw them, and because I trusted the veracity of their statements. In fact, I was a little upset to have missed out on seeing these flying saucers myself. What I did do was amuse these men with “too many questions” to discover all I was able to learn. As I write this some 45-50 years later, I can recall all this as if it happened yesterday, and yet somewhat fuzzy with the passage of time. Yet the story still stands as true. We just do not know what it was we saw. Except we do know those two flying saucers were not airplanes, stars, jets, the Moon, balloons, the planet Venus, rockets, ducks, floating blobs of swamp gas, a flock of geese, helicopters, or cartoon superheroes. Drones didn’t exist back then. Maybe they were secret human weapons of some kind. We simply didn’t know.
Sometime after this another wild event occurred on the farm, and I missed this one, too. The cows were in the big barn for the evening milking. A central runway, edged by gutters, divided the cowbarn into two sides. A long row of stanchions stretched along each side. The milk cows were trained to walk into their places in the stanchions so we could close them up to keep them still while we could feed and milk them. In front of the stanchions ran a long feeding trough, and next to each stanchion was a drinking bowl. The cow would press down upon a metal float with her snout to release water into the bowl.
Above the rows of stanchions ran multiple lines of metal pipes, electrical wiring, and a thick glass tube thru which the milk surged towards the milk tank. A major set of lines “up there” were the water pipes providing running water for the cows to drink. This whole setup with the vacuum milking machines demanded a lot of electricity, especially the enormous compressor. Thick electrical cables fed between the cowbarn, the milk house with the compressor, and two utility pole which connected all to both the regional electrical power grid and to the farm’s backup generator.
A violent thunderstorm blew in. Rain poured from dark, churning clouds as winds gusted. Thunder boomed and echoed thru the hills, and lightning cracked apart the world with flashes of violence. According to my father and two other dairymen I’ve known for much of my life back then, orbs appeared out of the storm and rolled along the electrical cables connecting to the barn. They then appeared inside the cow barn. People were busy working, trying to milk frantic cows and keep them calm during the storm. Dad was preparing for the power to go out and had already backed his big John Deere tractor up to the emergency backup power generator. Said he was drenched. No one seemed to remember the orbs entering the barn. They were seen along the cables outside. Now they floated inside the barn.
Those orbs didn’t just float. They rolled. People described them as balls of glowing fire as big as baseballs. Some rolled along the pipes and wires along the rows of stanchions. Others moved among the cows. One by one the cows were shocked. Stunned, the big animals collapsed against each other as they fell to the floor. Their heads were locked inside the stanchions. Dad later said his black and white Holstein cows went down like a line of black-and-white dominoes.
They weren’t down long. After a moment of stunned silence, the cows thrashed their way back into standing positions. They were spooked and the milking regimen was in chaos. The orbs floated or flew out the big, open barn doors.
While everyone of the farmers felt tingling sensations at some point, none of them were injured or touched by the orbs. There was no agreement among them how many orbs were involved in the incident. “Several” seemed to be the most common answer. Everyone said they’ve never experienced anything like this before. No one seemed to comment upon what colors the orbs were, simply they look like “balls of fire,” meaning shades of orange and yellow. No one said those orbs were the color of lightning, or bright blue-white, just “fire-like.”
I happened to be away on a trip when this happened, and, once again, I was amazed and yet upset to have missed this experience. We all agreed it was ball lightning, it must have been ball lightning, a natural phenomenon still mysterious in origin and explanation. Balls of plasma floating along, following metal and wires and cables and such, floating thru the air, as tiny as tiny can be and as large as basketballs. Most, however, seem to be around the size of softballs or grapefruit.
No one quite knew what to make of such a weird and spooky event. Ball lightning is the most logical explanation, yet even science isn’t clear as to exactly what it is. How do balls of rolling plasma disconnect from a storm and roll around along metal pipes and wires? They were not accompanied by lightning bolts in or around the barn. In hindsight, no one mentioned if any of the cows were burned or if anyone smelled scorched hair and flesh. None of the livestock seemed injured other than being shocked. Maybe some were burned a little bit, but no one seemed to notice any burn injuries conspicuous enough to mention or medically treat.
One thing that puzzled my Dad and his workers afterwards was those balls of lightning plasma sometimes behaved with a certain trickster intelligence, more prankish than malevolent. They showed up like fairies or goblins from out of nowhere, from out of whatever rip in reality the storm tore open, and gathered themselves together. Then these ball lightning things entered into the barn, floated and rolled around, wreaked havoc, caused chaos, but didn’t hurt anyone, then floated off and disappeared. Isn’t ball lightning the same color of lightning bolts, usually bright blue-white flashes? Were these small, round UFO things really ball lightning? Or more in the categories of intelligent or intelligent-operated orbs associated today with UFOs/UAPs and even so-called faery entities? The Phenomena has become thought of as a large umbrella of interrelated mysteries once thought unconnected. Or is all this simply anthropomorphic projection colored by fear and superstition?
A few years later, in the early 1980s, during my final years working on the family farm, I did experience what seemed to be real ball lightning. It was a unusually ferocious thunderstorm with terrifying thunder and lightning bolts cracking down nearby with incandescent electrical currents whipsnapping thru the air around us.
A particularly feisty and difficult cow had broken out to escape the barn. She refused to go into her stanchion to be milked. Spooked by the violent chaos of the storm, she dashed down the corridor in front of the feeding troughs and darted out the side door. It was the same door at the corner of the barn where the power cables fed into the electrical system. I raced outside into the rain to block her escape and herd her back into the barn. Looked up to notice glowing balls of plasma as big as softballs gathering up in the air along those electrical cables. Thing is they were also more orangey-yellow in color than blindingly blue-white. Don’t recall blue or green or red colors. Funny, I remember seeing the orbs move around more than recall their colors. They didn’t fly around like birds and bats would fly about as they didn’t have any wings but bobbled along wires as if crawling without limbs. They attached themselves briefly to the electrical wires as if feeding off it – and that’s my anthropomorphic projection but that’s what they resembled.
These orbs quickly dropped down as if with intention, touched the cow, and knocked her down. They did not cling to the cow but simply touched her. Then those orbs floated back up into the air and disappeared. They winked out of visible existence.
Don’t remember them zooming around in the air or returning afterwards. Was too focused on helping the knocked-down cow to note if those orbs shot off into the distance, went inside the silo, or winked out of visible existence. Any sounds those orbs could have made were drowned out by the storm. Rain poured down in heavy sheets of liquid bullets. Thunder boomed and lightning crackled and flashed. We were scared of being electrocuted, terrified of the flickering jagged crackles of electricity, and wondered what those strange orb ball lightning plasma things might do next. Didn’t matter, however, as we had work to do. So we buckled up our courage and dealt with the cow down on the ground.
The poor cow couldn’t get back up. It was as if her pelvis had split somehow and she could not bring her hind legs together under her to stand up. Her legs splayed out with her hooves pointing in opposite directions. It must’ve felt agonizing. And, hey, where did those orbs actually go? Were they a threat to the rest of us there? Heck, we were afraid of being struck dead by regular lightning!
Our cow, previously rambunctious and stubborn but now splayed across puddles in the grass, in great pain, and bellowing in the torrential downpour like a monster in a jungle, attempted to pull herself forward by digging her front hooves into muddy grass. A shallow lake had formed like a swamp across the ground. Dad hollered at me to watch out for electrical shocks from any current traveling thru water. I was cold and half-blinded by bullet rain and fogged-up eyeglasses. My hearing aids were spluttering out in the rain, too. It was a damn mess.
There wasn’t much more we could do. We couldn’t maneuver any machinery in safely to lift the cow up without getting struck by lightning nor was there even room to do so. The cow was in a corner where the barn was connected to the silo and between a drainage ditch, a sawdust pile, and the milk house with the compressor. Those strange orbs seemed to have gone, but at the time their return felt imminent. Would they pop down on us humans, too? We pushed the cow’s legs together, rolled her into a comfortable side position, and brought her food. We left her there in the rain. She seemed strangely calm after all of those twists and turns. Eventually the storm lifted, the cow remained unable to get up, and so we all went home and hoped for the best. We didn’t see anymore orbs either.
The next day was blue sky and sunshine. The cow was up and about. She hadn’t wandered far and was munching grass. She did walk with an odd hobble in her hips. We opened a gate to let her slowly amble back into the herd.
Those orbs were as mysterious as the last ones. Ball lightning? Electrical plasma parasite life forms we are currently unable to understand and even recognize as living organisms? Can living organisms exist without cellular structures on a macro-level? Even viruses and subviral agents have taxonomical structures, but we don’t really know what the interior of a floating, flying ball of lightning plasma is like, do we? Those orbs were probably just ball lightning phenomena, but they did seem to act with strange, perhaps deliberate mischief.
Also during the early 1980s, a group of interested in occult phenomena, thinking it totally unrelated to UFO phenomena at the time, explored hauntings and ghosts. Lots of odd events occurred, none of them particularly significant tho all were bizarre and strange. We did, however, see orbs associated with ghosts. During several visits to the old Civil War battlefield of Saylor’s (Sailor’s) Creek near where I grew up, our group witnessed fuzzy balls of glowing lights inside the old Hillsman House, used as a battlefield hospital during those bloody days of April 1865. So many limbs were amputated they formed a pile that reached as tall as the high window they were tossed from. We didn’t see these lights leave the house, but they would flutter around inside the windows then wink out. Sometimes they may wink back on. On many other occasions we didn’t see anything. Sometimes there were odd orbs of light bobbing slowly across the fields near the edges of woods. They were vague and somewhat formless. We didn’t have night vision goggles or special cameras or anything like that with us back in those days. The battlefield was notorious for ghosts, and it was a small but bloody and fierce clash during the waning days of a horrible civil war.
During the same time, our group went on a hunt for Headless Sally, a ghost who haunted the bridge over Saylor’s (Sailor’s) Creek. In more recent years, a woman once wrecked her car in a sharp curve right at the bridge at the bottom of the valley. She was decapitated in the accident, and people claimed to have seen the ghost of her head floating around looking for her body, or the ghost of her headless body searching for its head. One night, and it was cold, damp, and well after midnight, we saw none of those ghosty things.
What we did see, however, upon calling out for Sally to appear, was a glowing orb of colored light moving slowly thru the swamp towards us. We stood on the bridge, and could see it. We called out in case there were coon hunters, flashed our lights, but there weren’t any hunters around at all. No dogs, either. No swamp gas burned in the dark. We do not know what we saw except we saw a glowing blob floating thru the woods like an orb. It scared us the closer it got, and then it faded out into nothingness. Just assumed it was Headless Sally. We didn’t think of the UFO connection back then, but nowadays all of these are deemed interconnected by consciousness with NHIs, Non-Human Intelligences, as The Phenomenon.
Those “cow knocker orbs” were the only two times these orb UAPs, or intelligent plasma, or natural ball lightning phenomena or whatever they were known to show up on my parents’ farm. They weren’t tied to place as recurring phenomena, then. The lights associated with ghosts from past, traumatic events, however, did seem attached to place. They were clearly at least two different types of phenomena. Both types were baffling. Both remain baffling. We don’t know what they were. Still don’t.
William Dudley Bass
Saturday 1 June 2024
Wednesday 31 July 2024
Sunday 25 August 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA
See also these related articles of mine regarding weird orbs:
“Headless Sally,” https://williamdudleybass.com/headless-sally
“The UFO that wasn’t,” https://williamdudleybass.com/the-ufo-that-wasnt
“UFOs & Windmills: A True Spoof,” https://williamdudleybass.com/ufos-windmills-true-spoof
Copyright © 2024 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.