Sometimes a strange, unidentified flying object can be correctly identified as human with patience … & be distinguished from non-human anomalous objects

We saw a UFO whose appearance and movements stopped us in our tracks. Our little gang stopped in the bushes on the edge of a cornfield to look up past the trees into the sky. An object flew overhead, too slow for an airplane at first, with lights appearing to revolve around it as around the rim of a flying saucer.

Our small group of neighborhood teens were out in the fields and woods exploring and hunting one autumn evening. Was already dark as shortening days slid into lengthening nights. It’s been many decades now, but it was me and two sets of brothers. The two Moore brothers whose father worked on my family’s farm and who lived down in what was back then called the Work House or the Tenant House. The two Vernon brothers accompanied us. They lived nearby over on one of the Gates’s farms where their dad worked for the Gates family network. I don’t think my then-little brother Joe was with us. Often he would be as all 6 of us played together. It was late after dark, however, and our mama was the kind of momma who made sure her little bitties were in bed on time.

The time period was during the mid-1970s. Must’ve been anytime from mid-October to mid-November as the fall colors have already come and gone, and while the air was chilly it wasn’t yet damp and freezing cold. The location was my family’s working dairy farm out in the rolling hills and wooded gullies and ravines of the Virginia Piedmont. Riverview Dairy Farm, as we called it, was in Prince Edward County partway between the town of Farmville and the village of Rice. Little Sandy River and Sandy River flowed thru and around our woods and fields. Those streams flowed into the larger Appomattox River, which in turn flowed into the mighty James. We were in Southside Virginia, the rural counties and small towns that sprawled south of the James River into the upper North Carolina countryside.

The Cold War raged in its own bizarre way as global superpowers threatened each other and the world with thermonuclear annihilation while millions died in their proxy hot wars. Waves of mass UFO sightings, called flaps, swept around the planet. Strange, spooky claims of alien abductions, encounters with beings both enlightened and malevolent, and claims of flying saucer crashes with denials from those in power churned in the background.

My family’s encounter a decade earlier with a gigantic metal sphere over the field behind our house was still fodder for conversation. Wasn’t that long ago an actual saucer-shaped mystery craft was spotted zigzagging at high speeds over the main cow barn on our farm before it tacked out of sight. I missed that particular one. There was also a thunderstorm incident in which swirling orbs that behaved as if alive, conscious, and intelligent zoomed along the electrical wires going in and out of the cow barn and knocked cows down in the process. We assumed these orbs were ball lightning, and they acted differently from what we learned how ball lightning usually performed. It was a ferocious summer thunderstorm, too, with lots of thunder and lightning and torrential downpours, and I saw those particular orbs outside the barn. The cow was down on the ground in the pouring rain. An orb or ball lightning or whatever those things were had touched her and disappeared as it did so. Still don’t know what those glowing plasma things were. So we were abuzz and hyperalert with a sort UFOmania. Continue reading →