Every year or so, my Dad would take me down to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to do some day hiking and camping. The car trip was usually long and tiring, and I would often drift in and out of sleep by the time we arrived after sunset. It was on just such an occasion when I saw my first UFO.
We had passed Gatlinburg and taken a road into the foothills of the Smokies. The night was pitch black. Suddenly, my Dad woke me up crying out, “wake up!!! I see a UFO!!!”. My heart leaped in shock as I smashed my face to the window and looked up. Sure enough, there was a floating sphere with swirling lights moving silently above us. My imagination ran wild. I was sure that we would soon be abducted and probed, and I was truly frightened out of my mind.
My Dad must have taken great pleasure in my panic. The “UFO” was an aerial tramway trolley suspended on a cable, one of those sightseeing lifts that took people from Gatlinburg straight up the side of the mountain. For some reason, still unknown to me, it had blinking colored lights (maybe it was christmas?). As an irrelevant aside, two other events happened after the UFO scare; we saw a wildcat crossing the road and a bat hit our car. I’m guessing that I had trouble sleeping that night, still terrified about the threats, both real and imaginary.
During my fantasy-prone teen and college years, I was very impressionable about aliens. I even had an autographed copy of the book about the (since debunked) Majestic 12 conspiracy by paranoid UFOlogist Stanton Friedman. One day, on my way back home from a rehearsal at a theatre in Fort Knox, my friends and I saw a low-flying object hovering above us with swirling lights, much like that aerial tramway I had seen years earlier. Except this time, there were no cables. We opened the windows and there was no sound coming from the craft. We drove to a field, got out of the car, and I took a picture, but by that time, it was too late. To this day, I can’t definitively explain what I saw.
Even though I can explain the first UFO, but I can’t explain the second, doesn’t mean that the second proves the existence of aliens. In fact, it would be quite a leap to guess that I saw an alien spacecraft. You might notice that the second event happened near a militairy base. I was also near a hospital, and my best guess at the time was that it was a helicopter taking off from the hospital’s roof.
In any case, I highly doubt that aliens travelling light years from their home planets would want to take a pleasure cruise over Elizabethtown, Kentucky. In fact, I highly doubt that any advanced alien civilization would have the ability to travel that far at all, given the limitations of the laws of physics. Beyond my own incredulity, there has yet to be any concrete proof of aliens, other than the unreliable anecdotes of people like myself.
There are people who will tell you that they’ve seen a UFO with their own eyes. When they say UFO, they usually imply an alien spacecraft, but ask them to describe the details of the mysterious object and they have nothing to offer except that they saw lights in the sky. If my father had never told me the truth about the aerial trolley, I would have grown up convinced that a trolley lift was an alien space craft. How many other folks out there are witnesses to ordinary objects that they’ve transformed, via their own imagination, into an interstellar craft?
How about you? Are there times when you were convinced about aliens? Have you ever seen a UFO? Let me know in the comments.
January 15, 2009 at 8:16 am |
From the age of nine until about fifteen, I was a hardcore true believer. I read any book about aliens (or ghosts or bigfoot…) that I could get my hands on, watched tabloid news shows like ‘A Current Affair’ in hopes of catching a report on aliens or UFOs, and would sit out at night watching for UFOs.
I still get a little tingle from a good UFO picture (are there good UFO pictures).
Weirdly, I credit my early interest in aliens with my current skepticism. Interest in UFOs and aliens led me to read Carl Sagan and eventually I found his book ‘The Demon Haunted World,’ and the rest is history.
January 20, 2009 at 2:50 pm |
I too fell prey to adolescent hysteria about UFO’s and the supernatural. From the TV show Project Blue Book and the movie Close Encounters to all of the so-called scientific tomes about the mysterious and unbelievable. I drank it all. I have personally seen 2 UFO’s, but labeling them as extraterrestrial I have to stop short of. I’m with Sagan in believing the probabilty of extraterrestrials, but as my home state motto proudly proclaims “Show-me.” I would love to be more like Mulder, but usually end up more like Scully (without the body), sigh.