THX1138
Paranormal Peria
I am a forty-two year-old, Caucasian Male. I have always lived in the U.S.A., northern New York State, southern St. Lawrence County, in the southern-most St. Lawrence valley, at the nearest geographical point, some 10 miles southeast from the border that splits ownership of the St. Lawrence river between the U.S. and southern Ontario, Canada. The northwestern-most boundary of a major military reservation, Fort Drum (home to the Tenth Mountain Division), lies, no more than 4 miles distant, to the south. With the largest square-milage of any Army base in the country, Fort Drum (today) is a major concern and is expanding. But, it was less than half as busy and had one-quarter of the troops stationed there in 1977 (the year of my sighting) as it does today.
My immediate, surviving, family consists of two older brothers (56 and 57) and an older sister (52). Our Father had, on numerous occasions (most, if not all, before I was born) sighted either strange craft, or peculiar lights in the night sky, and we all heard about these instances over the years. Also, among several others, he possessed a strange talent for "dowsing," which I won’t go into now. My mother was an (at most) casual reader of FATE Magazine, and we (my brothers, sister and myself) we’re all raised to, not at all practice, but rather, to respect the spiritual and, seemingly, otherworldly. My mother’s mother, a deeply religious person of the Methodist Christian faith, claimed mild yet definite psychic ability, though I don’t recollect ever witnessing her self-proclaimed abilities. My father died in June, 1979, when I was thirteen. My mother died in December, 1989, when I was 23.
In mid-to-late August of 1977, at approximately 16:30 hours, in anticipation of dinner, my father shoved five dollars into my hand and told me to go to our neighborhood grocery store, directly across the street from our house, to buy a loaf of bread and a half-gallon of milk. It was warm and the sun was about five-eighths of the way toward the horizon as I walked inside to make my purchase.
Upon exiting the store, minutes later, I noticed before me, and to my left, a small huddle of four children (none of whom I knew personally and whom were all younger than I) that I recognized as being from the neighborhood, but from the far end of my street. They were standing, facing my father’s house (southeast) while pointing at something in the sky, to the south (in the direction of Fort Drum), above and beyond it. I vaguely remember hearing one of them saying something like "what is that?" As I tracked to where this child was pointing, I saw a craft appear (from behind an, approximately, forty-foot tree before me and to my right, growing in the neighbor’s front lawn), moving smoothly and slowly from right to left (west-southwest to east-northeast). It was at, approximately, 45 degrees, seemed to be at, perhaps, 1,000 feet in altitude and at a distance of less than a quarter mile, as it skirted the village. It emitted no sound that my eleven-year-old ears could discern. As there was not a cloud in the waning summer sky and the sun shown brightly upon it, there was a brilliant gleam along the edge of the craft, which appeared to have been "milled" from a solid, visibly seamless piece of "aluminum" in the exact shape and dimension of a "Mentos" candy, if one were to hold it at arms length. I had the impression that this vehicle, what ever it was, measured, perhaps, twenty-five to thirty-five feet in diameter and, roughly ten to fifteen feet thick.
At this very instant, I heard a deep, male voice behind and to my right "chuckle." Upon turning my head only long enough to see who this was, then straight back at the strange craft, I recognized him to be the step-father of a friend and nearby neighbor, who seemed to suddenly "appear," and perform the same basic function of the M.I.B.! I’d not seen him standing in front of, nor approaching as I came out of, the store. He was a tall, gaunt man, a regular "work-a-day-Joe" type, and was well known in our neighborhood. He was hunkered down and smoking a cigarette, upon which he was taking a hard drag. Not averting my eyes from the craft again, I asked "What are you laughing at?" To which he replied "You know what those kids think that thing is, don’t you?" To which I replied "What do you think it is?" He then said "Well, I was in the Air Force for fourteen years, and I can tell ya.... that’s a spy-plane."
My siblings and I were raised very strictly and, therefore I, respectfully, never questioned the word of an elder. If this man said that he recognized this craft to be some sort of perfectly, obviously, exotic (if not extraterrestrial) "plane," then so be it. I, without further discussion or devoted thought, watched this craft continue it’s slow, silent, steady, gliding arc to the east north-east, until the view was obscured by more trees. Perhaps twenty seconds had transpired from the beginning to the end of the sighting, and since my father was such a strict disciplinarian, I went directly home with his groceries.
Now, as I mentioned at the outset, my father was "into" this subject, as he’d had several sightings himself (including a quite dramatic, personally terrifying, though uncorroborated, close fly-over) though I don’t recall his ever saying he’d experienced a daylight sighting, as I had. To me, the very strangest aspect of this story is that I never even so much as mentioned what I’d seen to him, or anyone else for many years. Until, that is, the huge flap over Mexico City began.
I was sitting with my wife one evening watching "Sightings," when video of an identically-shaped craft appeared on my T.V. screen. I instantly leaped to my feet, memory rushing in, pointed and exclaimed loudly "THAT’S WHAT I SAW!!" After shushing my wife and finishing the rest of the program, I clearly recalled and recounted to her the story that you’ve just read.
My next-to-eldest brother has had some strange experiences/sightings, which he has, over the years, related to me, including one that he accidentally, unwittingly, recorded on video (nothing "spectacular," only "interesting"). His daughter and wife have also indicated that they have experienced some strange things in their home that may, or may not, be related to the U.F.O. phenomenon. It is, of course, at best, difficult to pry things from people (family or not) that they are unwilling to talk about to start with, and though I’ve tried, I believe that there’s more to hear.
Strange "Hudson Valley sighting-style" lights were sighted in late 1997, in the immediate vicinity of the St. Lawrence valley. This was a mass sighting, and though it has nothing to do with my sighting, I know some people that were witness to this event.
Here is a newspaper article/report:
Published: December 21, 1997
Page: A1
Edition: Both
Section: Local
Copyright (c) 1997 Watertown Daily Times
STRANGE LIGHTS IN THE NIGHT CAUSE MANY TO WONDER
By Darcia R. Harris Times Staff Writer
Fowler, N.Y.
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 5 p.m.
Carl W. Jones is driving his pickup truck northeast on River Road in this St. Lawrence County town when an intense flash of light in the sky catches his attention.
"I looked up and there was this bright, round light that seemed to be about 20 miles ahead of me in the sky, and then a second light split off from the first, then a third and then a fourth," Mr. Jones says later. "They just hung there perfectly parallel to each other - and that's what really caught my attention."
The 44-year-old tries to keep an eye on the strange lights in the sky while navigating his truck along the dark country road. They don't move up or down, he says, but simply hover against the clear, starry night in a perfect line.
"They were there for about a minute to a minute-and-a-half and then they just disappeared," he says. "They just went out without a sound, like somebody turned the switch off."
So begins what seems a perfect case for Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the fictional FBI agents who investigate UFO sightings and reports of paranormal activity on the popular television show "X-Files."
Scully, the pragmatist who puts her faith in the hard facts of science, would insist there is a logical explanation for the lights Mr. Jones and others across the county saw Tuesday evening. Nothing unusual, she would tell her partner, in an area that borders a military base.
But Mr. Jones laughs.
Living in the town of Gouverneur, just a few miles from Fort Drum, he knows what the lights of helicopters and other military aircraft look like in the night sky. And he's seen the strange flash of flares shoot up from the base and fall back to earth.
"What I saw doesn't fit with any of that," he says. "These lights didn't move. They didn't make a sound. And they just disappeared."
Fort Drum had nothing in the air at about 5 p.m. Tuesday, base spokesman R.F. Murphy says.
"We might have had something going on right close to the base, but nothing that far north," Murphy says. "So these lights just went poof, huh? Doesn't sound like anything we'd have. Did you ask this guy what he was drinking?"
Now television's Mulder, the believer who always insists "the truth is out there," would say the military is either covering up secret test flights of alien-type aircraft - or the lights in the sky belonged to a real UFO. Scully would remind him he has no evidence to support either theory.
But there are others.
Canton, N.Y.
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 4:56 p.m.
St. Lawrence University sophomore Cory L. Haynes steps outside the school's campus center and looks up at the already dark sky. He wonders what the weather will be like.
What he sees stops him in his tracks.
"There were between six and eight circles of light that were quite bright," the 19-year-old St. Regis Falls native recalls later. "They seemed not too far away, maybe a quarter-mile to a half-mile, and together were about the length of a football field."
Mr. Haynes says the circles lit up one by one from right to left "like a string of pearls" and then in succession back to the left-hand side. "Then they moved into a V-formation and then back into the string of pearls once more, lighting up left to right," he says. "Then they disappeared."
After witnessing the lights, Mr. Haynes looks around to talk to someone about it. But he is alone.
"Of course there wasn't another person around to back me up on this," he says. "I wasn't going to tell anyone about it, but I thought Professor Elberty would be the one person who would listen to me without thinking I was crazy."
William T. Elberty, chairman of the university's Geography Department, finds the student's story interesting but can't come up with an explanation to make sense of it.
"I've seen those crazy, hovering flares Fort Drum sends up and they're strange-looking, but what this student described seeing didn't sound like that," Professor Elberty says. "And then, of course, there's the possibility of methane gas, but that seems unlikely as well."
Russell, N.Y.
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 6 p.m.
An agitated woman calls Canton's Watertown Daily Times office and speaks to the editor, Payne Peterson. The woman claims to have seen strange lights earlier while driving home from work.
She describes arriving in Russell, parking her car in the garage and walking back outside to look again. The lights still hovered there, very bright. Then they simply disappeared.
The woman tells the editor she called Fort Drum for an explanation - but they merely asked her if she'd been drinking.
"I'm not drunk, and I've never been considered crazy," she says. "I think maybe it was an unidentified flying object."
The woman refuses to give her name or phone number; she doesn't want people to think she's nuts.
The U.S. Weather Service station in Buffalo picked up nothing unusual in the sky or space last Tuesday night. Perhaps it was the Gemini meteor shower, meteorologist Joseph Pace suggested.
Not altogether unlikely, Agent Scully would say, as meteoric activity has been recorded in the skies recently.
A meteorite's descent to the earth's surface "is slowed down by the increasing resistance the object encounters when it enters the denser regions of the atmosphere and kinetic energy is transformed into heat," according to Encyclopedia Britannica. And the compressed air in front of a meteorite becomes luminous.
But the flight of a meteorite inside the earth's atmosphere lasts only a few seconds, a believer like Mulder would argue, not the minute or longer described by the St. Lawrence County residents. And if the phenomena were as close as these people described, there would have been a terrific noise.
And none of the observers say anything about seeing the trails meteorites leave.
Gouverneur, N.Y.
Dec. 16, 6:30 p.m.
When Mr. Jones arrives home to pick up his family for an outing delivering Christmas presents, he tells his wife, Donna, and daughters, Angela and Brittany, about the mysterious lights.
"You wouldn't believe what I saw tonight," he tells them. "I saw a UFO."
His wife is quiet, perhaps skeptical, but she knows her husband is not a man to make up stories. Angela, however, brushes aside her father's claim.
"Yeah, right Dad," she says.
But Mr. Jones days later learns a co-worker, 40-year-old Ronald A. Shirtz, saw the lights too.
Mr. Shirtz was driving southeast on Route 15 between the villages of Rensselaer Falls and Heuvelton when he saw the brilliant circles hanging motionless in the sky over Canton. They did not resemble any civilian or military aircraft he'd ever seen.
"And they just vanished without a trace," he says.
So the case remains open. Perhaps the truth is still out there.
My immediate, surviving, family consists of two older brothers (56 and 57) and an older sister (52). Our Father had, on numerous occasions (most, if not all, before I was born) sighted either strange craft, or peculiar lights in the night sky, and we all heard about these instances over the years. Also, among several others, he possessed a strange talent for "dowsing," which I won’t go into now. My mother was an (at most) casual reader of FATE Magazine, and we (my brothers, sister and myself) we’re all raised to, not at all practice, but rather, to respect the spiritual and, seemingly, otherworldly. My mother’s mother, a deeply religious person of the Methodist Christian faith, claimed mild yet definite psychic ability, though I don’t recollect ever witnessing her self-proclaimed abilities. My father died in June, 1979, when I was thirteen. My mother died in December, 1989, when I was 23.
In mid-to-late August of 1977, at approximately 16:30 hours, in anticipation of dinner, my father shoved five dollars into my hand and told me to go to our neighborhood grocery store, directly across the street from our house, to buy a loaf of bread and a half-gallon of milk. It was warm and the sun was about five-eighths of the way toward the horizon as I walked inside to make my purchase.
Upon exiting the store, minutes later, I noticed before me, and to my left, a small huddle of four children (none of whom I knew personally and whom were all younger than I) that I recognized as being from the neighborhood, but from the far end of my street. They were standing, facing my father’s house (southeast) while pointing at something in the sky, to the south (in the direction of Fort Drum), above and beyond it. I vaguely remember hearing one of them saying something like "what is that?" As I tracked to where this child was pointing, I saw a craft appear (from behind an, approximately, forty-foot tree before me and to my right, growing in the neighbor’s front lawn), moving smoothly and slowly from right to left (west-southwest to east-northeast). It was at, approximately, 45 degrees, seemed to be at, perhaps, 1,000 feet in altitude and at a distance of less than a quarter mile, as it skirted the village. It emitted no sound that my eleven-year-old ears could discern. As there was not a cloud in the waning summer sky and the sun shown brightly upon it, there was a brilliant gleam along the edge of the craft, which appeared to have been "milled" from a solid, visibly seamless piece of "aluminum" in the exact shape and dimension of a "Mentos" candy, if one were to hold it at arms length. I had the impression that this vehicle, what ever it was, measured, perhaps, twenty-five to thirty-five feet in diameter and, roughly ten to fifteen feet thick.
At this very instant, I heard a deep, male voice behind and to my right "chuckle." Upon turning my head only long enough to see who this was, then straight back at the strange craft, I recognized him to be the step-father of a friend and nearby neighbor, who seemed to suddenly "appear," and perform the same basic function of the M.I.B.! I’d not seen him standing in front of, nor approaching as I came out of, the store. He was a tall, gaunt man, a regular "work-a-day-Joe" type, and was well known in our neighborhood. He was hunkered down and smoking a cigarette, upon which he was taking a hard drag. Not averting my eyes from the craft again, I asked "What are you laughing at?" To which he replied "You know what those kids think that thing is, don’t you?" To which I replied "What do you think it is?" He then said "Well, I was in the Air Force for fourteen years, and I can tell ya.... that’s a spy-plane."
My siblings and I were raised very strictly and, therefore I, respectfully, never questioned the word of an elder. If this man said that he recognized this craft to be some sort of perfectly, obviously, exotic (if not extraterrestrial) "plane," then so be it. I, without further discussion or devoted thought, watched this craft continue it’s slow, silent, steady, gliding arc to the east north-east, until the view was obscured by more trees. Perhaps twenty seconds had transpired from the beginning to the end of the sighting, and since my father was such a strict disciplinarian, I went directly home with his groceries.
Now, as I mentioned at the outset, my father was "into" this subject, as he’d had several sightings himself (including a quite dramatic, personally terrifying, though uncorroborated, close fly-over) though I don’t recall his ever saying he’d experienced a daylight sighting, as I had. To me, the very strangest aspect of this story is that I never even so much as mentioned what I’d seen to him, or anyone else for many years. Until, that is, the huge flap over Mexico City began.
I was sitting with my wife one evening watching "Sightings," when video of an identically-shaped craft appeared on my T.V. screen. I instantly leaped to my feet, memory rushing in, pointed and exclaimed loudly "THAT’S WHAT I SAW!!" After shushing my wife and finishing the rest of the program, I clearly recalled and recounted to her the story that you’ve just read.
My next-to-eldest brother has had some strange experiences/sightings, which he has, over the years, related to me, including one that he accidentally, unwittingly, recorded on video (nothing "spectacular," only "interesting"). His daughter and wife have also indicated that they have experienced some strange things in their home that may, or may not, be related to the U.F.O. phenomenon. It is, of course, at best, difficult to pry things from people (family or not) that they are unwilling to talk about to start with, and though I’ve tried, I believe that there’s more to hear.
Strange "Hudson Valley sighting-style" lights were sighted in late 1997, in the immediate vicinity of the St. Lawrence valley. This was a mass sighting, and though it has nothing to do with my sighting, I know some people that were witness to this event.
Here is a newspaper article/report:
Published: December 21, 1997
Page: A1
Edition: Both
Section: Local
Copyright (c) 1997 Watertown Daily Times
STRANGE LIGHTS IN THE NIGHT CAUSE MANY TO WONDER
By Darcia R. Harris Times Staff Writer
Fowler, N.Y.
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 5 p.m.
Carl W. Jones is driving his pickup truck northeast on River Road in this St. Lawrence County town when an intense flash of light in the sky catches his attention.
"I looked up and there was this bright, round light that seemed to be about 20 miles ahead of me in the sky, and then a second light split off from the first, then a third and then a fourth," Mr. Jones says later. "They just hung there perfectly parallel to each other - and that's what really caught my attention."
The 44-year-old tries to keep an eye on the strange lights in the sky while navigating his truck along the dark country road. They don't move up or down, he says, but simply hover against the clear, starry night in a perfect line.
"They were there for about a minute to a minute-and-a-half and then they just disappeared," he says. "They just went out without a sound, like somebody turned the switch off."
So begins what seems a perfect case for Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the fictional FBI agents who investigate UFO sightings and reports of paranormal activity on the popular television show "X-Files."
Scully, the pragmatist who puts her faith in the hard facts of science, would insist there is a logical explanation for the lights Mr. Jones and others across the county saw Tuesday evening. Nothing unusual, she would tell her partner, in an area that borders a military base.
But Mr. Jones laughs.
Living in the town of Gouverneur, just a few miles from Fort Drum, he knows what the lights of helicopters and other military aircraft look like in the night sky. And he's seen the strange flash of flares shoot up from the base and fall back to earth.
"What I saw doesn't fit with any of that," he says. "These lights didn't move. They didn't make a sound. And they just disappeared."
Fort Drum had nothing in the air at about 5 p.m. Tuesday, base spokesman R.F. Murphy says.
"We might have had something going on right close to the base, but nothing that far north," Murphy says. "So these lights just went poof, huh? Doesn't sound like anything we'd have. Did you ask this guy what he was drinking?"
Now television's Mulder, the believer who always insists "the truth is out there," would say the military is either covering up secret test flights of alien-type aircraft - or the lights in the sky belonged to a real UFO. Scully would remind him he has no evidence to support either theory.
But there are others.
Canton, N.Y.
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 4:56 p.m.
St. Lawrence University sophomore Cory L. Haynes steps outside the school's campus center and looks up at the already dark sky. He wonders what the weather will be like.
What he sees stops him in his tracks.
"There were between six and eight circles of light that were quite bright," the 19-year-old St. Regis Falls native recalls later. "They seemed not too far away, maybe a quarter-mile to a half-mile, and together were about the length of a football field."
Mr. Haynes says the circles lit up one by one from right to left "like a string of pearls" and then in succession back to the left-hand side. "Then they moved into a V-formation and then back into the string of pearls once more, lighting up left to right," he says. "Then they disappeared."
After witnessing the lights, Mr. Haynes looks around to talk to someone about it. But he is alone.
"Of course there wasn't another person around to back me up on this," he says. "I wasn't going to tell anyone about it, but I thought Professor Elberty would be the one person who would listen to me without thinking I was crazy."
William T. Elberty, chairman of the university's Geography Department, finds the student's story interesting but can't come up with an explanation to make sense of it.
"I've seen those crazy, hovering flares Fort Drum sends up and they're strange-looking, but what this student described seeing didn't sound like that," Professor Elberty says. "And then, of course, there's the possibility of methane gas, but that seems unlikely as well."
Russell, N.Y.
Tuesday, Dec. 16, 6 p.m.
An agitated woman calls Canton's Watertown Daily Times office and speaks to the editor, Payne Peterson. The woman claims to have seen strange lights earlier while driving home from work.
She describes arriving in Russell, parking her car in the garage and walking back outside to look again. The lights still hovered there, very bright. Then they simply disappeared.
The woman tells the editor she called Fort Drum for an explanation - but they merely asked her if she'd been drinking.
"I'm not drunk, and I've never been considered crazy," she says. "I think maybe it was an unidentified flying object."
The woman refuses to give her name or phone number; she doesn't want people to think she's nuts.
The U.S. Weather Service station in Buffalo picked up nothing unusual in the sky or space last Tuesday night. Perhaps it was the Gemini meteor shower, meteorologist Joseph Pace suggested.
Not altogether unlikely, Agent Scully would say, as meteoric activity has been recorded in the skies recently.
A meteorite's descent to the earth's surface "is slowed down by the increasing resistance the object encounters when it enters the denser regions of the atmosphere and kinetic energy is transformed into heat," according to Encyclopedia Britannica. And the compressed air in front of a meteorite becomes luminous.
But the flight of a meteorite inside the earth's atmosphere lasts only a few seconds, a believer like Mulder would argue, not the minute or longer described by the St. Lawrence County residents. And if the phenomena were as close as these people described, there would have been a terrific noise.
And none of the observers say anything about seeing the trails meteorites leave.
Gouverneur, N.Y.
Dec. 16, 6:30 p.m.
When Mr. Jones arrives home to pick up his family for an outing delivering Christmas presents, he tells his wife, Donna, and daughters, Angela and Brittany, about the mysterious lights.
"You wouldn't believe what I saw tonight," he tells them. "I saw a UFO."
His wife is quiet, perhaps skeptical, but she knows her husband is not a man to make up stories. Angela, however, brushes aside her father's claim.
"Yeah, right Dad," she says.
But Mr. Jones days later learns a co-worker, 40-year-old Ronald A. Shirtz, saw the lights too.
Mr. Shirtz was driving southeast on Route 15 between the villages of Rensselaer Falls and Heuvelton when he saw the brilliant circles hanging motionless in the sky over Canton. They did not resemble any civilian or military aircraft he'd ever seen.
"And they just vanished without a trace," he says.
So the case remains open. Perhaps the truth is still out there.
