Posts Tagged ‘flying saucer’

Flying Saucers Hiding in Clouds Over the Midwest!

Monday, May 18th, 2009

The following UFO account wasn’t quite as dramatic as the one in the picture, but I’m forever grateful for my experience…

I was aboard a jet cruising at an altitude somewhere between 30 to 35K feet, watching cloud puffs floating above the rural landscape below, casting relaxing, transient shadows on open fields, roads, and farmhouses.  Clearly it was a very “fair-weather” kind of day in Iowa or Illinois, or wherever we were – about halfway between New York and Denver one afternoon in late July of 2000. (updated from original)

According to my Field Guide to North American Weather, if the clouds were Cumulus humilis, which they appeared to be, then they were probably originating a mile or less above ground.  (If you could only run toward them, you’d be there in a matter of minutes….)

Suddenly and very unexpectedly, I saw directly below us, in the top layers of the puffy clouds, a disk, apparently “hiding” – at least from those on the ground – among the cloud tops.  I could hardly believe what I was seeing from the vantage point of a jet window:  an apparent extraterrestrial vehicle hovering over Midwestern farmland on a summer afternoon!

Appearing flat but still 3-dimensional, the disk resembled a horizontal coin – and indeed I remember quickly noting that it was about the size of a coin at arm’s length.  As we continued past it over the span of several seconds, I finally managed to draw back and give the window to my travel partner Lyn, who luckily caught a brief glimpse of the UFO.

There was no question it was a fairly flat, disk-shaped object.  No discernible reflection bounced off its topside that would indicate it was domed.  It was, in fact, pronouncedly discreet.

What was it doing?  I mean, why was it there?

Now if I knew the likely height of those cloud tops, the real size of the UFO could be correspondingly approximated.  The only problem is that I don’t know how wide the cloud bottoms were, which means I also have no real sense of how high the cloud tops were – where the disk was hanging out.  All I really know is that Cumulus humilis are low-level clouds that, in any case, are no taller than they are wide.

I’m missing a critical piece of the puzzle!  As mentioned, fair weather cloud bottoms tend to be a mile or less from the ground.  Going off memory of many summers growing up in the rural Midwest, I’m estimating that the type of cloud in which I saw the disk was about a mile wide – perhaps larger.

By itself, the memory that the disk was the apparent size of a coin at arm’s length doesn’t tell us much about the real size of the craft, nor can I say with any certainty how large it was in comparison to the cloud.   Was the disk a hundred feet in diameter?  Five hundred?  A thousand feet?  Any of these numbers may be close.

For some reason, I really want to know the approximate diameter of the disk!  To get a better idea, I need to figure out the distance between the disk and me.

My “best guess” may be skewed, but it’s all I have to work with for now.  So if the cloud bottom was a mile off the ground, and if the cloud was a mile or two wide and perhaps a mile tall, that would put the cloud tops – and the disk – at around 15K feet in altitude.  If the jet were cruising at 35K feet, that’s a difference of about four miles between the jet and the UFO.

With all that in mind, what would be the real size of an object appearing to be about the size of a coin at arm’s length at a distance of four miles?  Anybody with a formula to figure this out, please feel free to share your calculations….

STACE TUSSEL

NOTES:   Obviously, the picture accompanying this article is not specifically representative of my sighting.  The picture is simply shared for two basic reasons:  1) it depicts a UFO partially obscured by clouds, and 2) it’s just a really, really groovy picture.

Also, for reference, unless you’re a Sasquatch, if you hold a dime at arm’s length it will just about cover the full moon.  Try it.

Cosmic Driving Lessons

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

So it’s late spring, early summer, somewhere in the mid-1990s.  I’m driving from Kansas City to Emporia – and I shouldn’t be driving.  Sonja’s up front with me in my 1980 BMW, and Sky’s in back.  Sonja is asking “How do you know when you see a UFO?” and “What does it feel like?” and “Do you think I’ll ever see one?

I must be playing it pretty cool because I’m being allowed to drive, even though – like I said -I shouldn’t be.  I’m trying to keep the car on a straight path.

It’s getting pretty dark, so it’s well after sunset, and I see an orange light near the horizon ahead of us. Figuring it’s a plane heading for KC as we drive west, I say to Sonja, “That could be a flying saucer.  So it’s a technically a UFO, but only because we can’t tell from this distance what it is.  We don’t know if it’s a real flying saucer, so it’s an ‘unidentified flying object.'”

Then, some time goes by…

…and the next thing I know this craft of unimaginable proportions is flying diagonally across the median from left to right, passing directly overhead while I continue focussing on keeping the car on the road, and at the same time quickly noting that this thing is HUGE and tilted – and Sky leans forward and she and Sonja are looking up through the windshield screaming, “It’s a flying saucer! Ohmygodthatsaflyingsaucer!!!!” as I grip the steering wheel and pull to the side of the road, looking back through the rear passenger window to see the thing rapidly disappear into the distance.

Both Sky and Sonja are hyperventilating, breathing in an entirely different world than they’d ever seen before.  They had just watched a huge disk, low overhead and bigger than they could explain, rotating and revolving, tilted to reveal its underside – which they both described as a display of many small, white lights flashing in a synchronised pattern.

I missed it. I suppose I was being punished for driving when… well, like I said, I shouldn’t have been driving.  I do regret that, more than I can say.  Apparently our conversation may have been “overheard,” and a saucer moves in so that Sonja can see one – and she does, her first! – and Sky gets quite the visual treat, too.  But me?  I’m taught a hard lesson.

Fair enough.  Other than being taken aboard a craft, this was the biggest, the closest and clearest and most coherent saucer I’d been near, probably, and it passes directly overhead in plain view, and I miss it.

That’s what I get for being a crazy, stupid-ass driver.

STACE TUSSEL

Sightings of Import – Part Two

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

“They’re Probably Listening Right Now….”

In this post, I thought I’d go back to some memorable UFO activity from many years ago – in my pre-crop-circle days.  First I’ll share a few bits from the 1950s, the decade before I was born.

As an aside, which could indicate mere coincidence, earlier in the decade one of my father’s cousins, one Robert Adcock, was mysteriously lost during a military flight in the Bermuda Triangle. And as a Marine in the mid-1950s, my father once witnessed on radar a couple of blips indicating an unknown object travelling much faster than anything known to man at the time (and perhaps to this day).

But on to the later 1950s…..

My mother and father and sister lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a house in Huntsburg, Ohio. Daddy worked nights, while Mom, just 16 years old, stayed at home.  My sister slept in a crib near the bed. One morning in late 1957 or early 1958, when my sister was about 9 months old, Daddy came home in the pre-dawn dark, and he and Mom lay in bed talking. Cheryl stood up in her crib, so Mom got up to put her in bed with Daddy and then went to get her a drink.

When Mom came back from the kitchen, something exceedingly strange happened – something that was not only witnessed by both of them but which was also confirmed later that day in a series of events I’ll describe next. Bear in mind that this took place over 50 years ago, but the story’s remained essentially the same each time I’ve brought it up with my parents:

Mom was standing in the doorway and Daddy and Cheryl were on the bed when a “laser beam” or stream of light shot straight through the window and hit the crib where Cheryl had been standing moments before, making a “cracking” sound on the wood. Lightning? No thunder. Car headlight? No chance, based on the location of the window. Flashlight? Not coming through a second floor window in a thin beam that resulted in a sound as it hit the crib.

Later that day, a clearly-defined and apparently radioactive circular area was investigated by mysterious men in the field nearby.  The news reported that a UFO that passed over the area, shutting down the electrical systems of cars on the road nearby for a few moments – yes, just like you see dramatised on television these days. Cars all stalled at once, and then a few moments later, they all started up again.

“Flying saucers” were fairly common in that area of Ohio during the late 1950s. Later, when Mom and Dad lived with my paternal grandparents in Windsor, a village just a few miles east of Huntsburg, my father saw actual craft. The farmstead stood on a hill overlooking the river valley between Windsor and Orwell, and more than once my father saw silver disks descending into the trees near the river.

Now fast forward oh, about thirty years – to around 1990. With my mother and father having divorced in 1970 or 1971, Daddy was living in Kansas City and my sister (the one from the crib story) in rural, south-central Kansas. He was visiting one evening, which was a rare occasion since KC is about 5 hours from my sister’s home. I was there, as was my younger brother (by my stepfather) and my sister’s four children. It was a late summer night, we were talking excitedly, and the subject turned to UFOs – probably at my urging.

Daddy started to describe some of his sightings as the family huddled around, listening intently. For some reason I (half-jokingly) said something to the effect of, “they can probably hear us now – they’ve probably been listening the whole time!” and everyone got a good laugh out of that. But in some odd way I meant it – and my brother (around age 15), my sister’s oldest daughter (who must’ve been around 12 at the time), and I decided to go on a walk down the dark, dirt road, flashlight in hand, to look at the stars and see if any “flying saucers” would show up. It was a clear night anyway, so I knew the stargazing would be good.

As we walked arm in arm, Michael started to blink the light off and on up toward the sky (which is a proven way of showing intent to communicate with ET – albeit high-powered spotlights rather than weak flashlights are more commonly used, and at the time I didn’t know the CSETI protocol). I laughed a bit as I playfully chided him, “If they’re up there, they’re not going to see that little light all the way down here!” And what do you know, just a few seconds later, in the exact spot I was gazing – pretty much directly overhead and quite close – a bright yellow-orange light turned on and jetted over as I exclaimed “Look at that!” in time to have both Cis and Michael look up and see, for just a second, this amber light that seemingly appeared in response to the evening’s discussion.

Now I’ve seen many meteors in my time, and tons of satellites too, and this was neither. It was as large as a streetlight from, say, a block or two away, and completely silent. It moved much faster than a starlike satellite, but moved slower and was larger and more defined than any meteor I’ve seen (other than “fireballs” I’ve seen dropping down on occasion). And the timing of its appearance – well, it couldn’t have been better.

Sometimes with ET, all you need to do is acknowledge, ask, and accept. If they’re in range, I feel it’s more likely that they’ll hear and respond, provided the curiosity is real and the intention pure. In fact, they seem to enjoy teasing us with this kind of cat-and-mouse game, although there are more serious and focused ways of instigating contact – CSETI training and practise being one of them. But from my experience, ET does seem to appreciate the innocence – and the awe – of “recognised confirmation” in a first-contact type of way.

In future posts, I’ll go into the more advanced and intentional methods of building meaningful contact with ET that can, and does, happen with practise – and generally only in the absence of fear. Until then, just remember, “they’re probably listening right now.” Indeed, perhaps they are….

STACE TUSSEL