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.

Once one sees the real thing, actual craft of unknown origin clearly not of any known human origin, demonstrating physical capabilities far beyond any deemed technologically possible, and clearly under intelligent control, one began to see them everywhere. This, unfortunately, led the debunkers to dismiss all sightings as flights of imagination amplified by mass hysteria seeded by hoaxes. In many cases, sadly, this was true. There were also many others, however, that were true even if the only explanation, the easiest explanation of all, also happened to be the one most resisted and combatted by the authorities: that UFOs, now called UAPs or Unidentified Anomalous Objects, are built and operated by NHIs, Non-Human Intelligences. In some cases or by humans who reverse engineered them.

My neighborhood friends and I were exploring a deep wooded ravine, a giant erosion gully, separating two cornfields. The gully had intermittent springs in it, and it ran like a small river during heavy storms. We were on foot, and a walk across the farmland soon turned into a hike in rugged terrain. The ravine was scoured by deep erosion gashes exposing layers of red clay, sandy soil, crumbly strips of fool’s good with its dirty glitter, streaks of granite and feldspar, and sedimentary rock with embedded pebbles. We were on the worn down old bluffs of the Sandy River stream network below. The intermittent stream of the gully we were in eventually flowed into another, larger ravine and in turn into Big Sandy. We wanted to find the source of this particular branch. It got too dark, however, but we didn’t have any flashlights. Our eyes got used to the dark, however, enough to bumble up the steep banks, clamber over logs and fallen trees, and into the rim of woods and bushes bordering the field. At this point we wanted to go home. We all looked up into the sky at the same time.

“Look, y’all! What is that?” asked one of my buddies.

“Whoa! I don’t know.”

“Is that an airplane? Not making any noise.”

“Flying too smooth to be a helicopter.”

“Is it a UFO?”

“What? You mean a flying saucer?”

“Don’t know what it is, but look at all those lights!”

“Yeah, they’re going around and around.”

Whatever it was flew overhead across the night sky. The skies were mostly clear and full of stars. I don’t remember seeing the Moon at this point in time. What we saw was clearly not a rocket nor a spaceship nor a satellite as it moved too slow. The UFO flew in a steady straight line. So not a helicopter, the planet Venus, marsh lights reflecting on clouds, and don’t get me started on balloons or flocks of birds. Other than some cigarettes the older two Moore and Vernon brothers smoked, none of us had imbibed in any drugs whatsoever.

At first the mystery object appeared circular with lights seeming to revolve around a rim. Then we realized the object was shaped like a cross with lights on opposite sides blinking on and off in such a way to look as if they were revolving around a rim or that the rim was rotating around a central point. We realized the UFO was not circular at all. The lights, while blinking in a pattern that appeared evocative of rolling in a circle, were fixed points on a solid machine moving in a straight direction. We saw at least three different colored lights. A green light glowed on the right edge with a red light on the left side. A white light beckoned from the rear of this craft as it flew forward. These lights seemed to roll around, and they didn’t. They simply appeared to do so. It was an airplane. It was so high up none of us heard any sound. I’m hard-of-hearing and wear hearing aids. My friends were hearing people. It’s possible the vegetation and lay of the land absorbed the sound or deflected acoustic waves. I do not remember seeing blue lights, and there may have been a blue light, too.

“It’s an airplane, y’all,” one of the guys said. 

“Yeah,” we all said and nodded in agreement. 

We still stared up in wonder. It was quite an achievement, a flying machine, a human-made and human-flown machine. The first manned flight, a sustained flight in an airplane, had occurred a mere 70-some years ago or so. Neither one of us had flown yet.

Felt mixed feelings. At first there was group elation we may be staring up at an alien spaceship from some faraway planet in Outer Space. We had grown up on a steady diet of new science fiction shows and old movies either set in Outer Space or with flying saucers landing here on Earth. We were excited! But also an underlying fear, fear of an unstoppable, catastrophic invasion and conquest by extraterrestrial beings far more advanced and united than us squabbling Earthlings. Followed by a sense of relief what we spied high up in the skies was only an airplane. Being in Virginia, there were both military bases and big city airports in several directions not too far away by car from our rural farm country. We kept watching until the aircraft with the blinking lights had flown out of sight beyond the treetops. Then we headed back towards our three homes for the night.

We boys were proud of ourselves for making what we thought was a correct and proper identification of a human machine moving thru the night sky. Our confidence in doing so also increased our confidence in being able to recognize and identify other craft that were not human but of some other species. For they were out there. Over the years I was to witness numerous mysterious objects. Most became clear as human aircraft or satellites. On three more occasions, however, objects witnessed were clearly shapeshifting metallic craft engaged in seemingly impossible maneuvers. So four UFO/UAPs that appeared as flying machines. A fifth incident involved hovering orbs of unknown origin. On a small number of other occasions the moving lights witnessed by myself and others occurred during paranormal events and were associated right or wrong with ghost phenomena as each encounter was associated with long-ago violent deaths.

 

William Dudley Bass
Wednesday 27 March 2024
Tuesday-Wednesday 23-24 April 2024
Shoreline/Seattle, Washington
USA

Resources:

Airliners dot net Forum on Light Configurations (Aircraft Identification): https://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=734865.

Aviation Stack Exchange; “Can this airplane be identified by the exposure pattern of its flashing lights,” https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/63789/can-this-aircraft-be-identified-by-the-exposure-pattern-of-its-flashing-lights.

Pilot Institute. “Airplane Lights: What Each Light Does (Red/
Green, Strobe, Beacon)”: https://pilotinstitute.com/airplane-lights/.

Thrust Flight: “Airplane Lights and What They Mean,”: https://www.thrustflight.com/airplane-lights/.

 

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.