New member here though I'm more into reading at boards rather than posting. I've had two sightings worth mentioning though ('least to me!) But I want to preface my sighting reports with some background that seems related in some way to those sightings.
Though I'd always been interested in paranormal events and UFO tales, I'd never really incorporated them into my belief system until a few years ago. After reading so many accounts of sightings by seemingly credible people, I finally got off that fence and decided they must be the real deal. (Well, as real as the human psyche can perceive.) Only after that initial incorporation did I finally see a UFO, actually about a month later. That aspect of background is what rocked me, not the actual sightings. Does belief create? Was I receiving confirmation? Was the Trickster at work making me just a little more crazy? Whaaat?
So my husband and I were sitting on the porch of a condominum on Lake Travis in Austin, Texas about eight in the evening. The sun was still shining brightly and we were watching cranes, turkey buzzards and planes in the sky over the lake. An old fashioned one propeller plane buzzed our condo twice just before we saw a white, bullet-like cylander flying by in the middle of our 180 degree view of the sky It was perfectly round, probably flying at or under ten thousand feet, had no wings, was silent and had no windows or markings of any kind. More stunning, the portion we considered the "front" of the craft seemed cloaked because it was the only part we couldn't see clearly due to a sort of heat signature. It looked like the mirage one sees on hot day in the country over the road ahead, but the wavy heat lines appeared to show a distorted blue sky rather than the white craft.
We watched it for thirty seconds or more and it finally flew into the one and only cloud in the sky. As a matter of fact, the cloud hadn't been there only a minute before our sighting so it must have formed very quickly. Just before entering that cloud we could see the very round rear of the craft.
Because I was the first to spot the craft and because I'm accused by my family members as being weird, I asked my husband to look up and tell me what I was seeing. His comment after gazing at it was, "I think we've seen our first UFO." We were very calm and I asked him to describe to me what he was seeing. Our versions matched, but since that time, he's nearly completely forgotten the episode or describes a disc rather than the cylander. I'm left to guess that he either didn't incorporate the sighting or he simply doesn't want to accept it. I wrote all of it down so I could report it to Peter Davenport and did so when we returned from our vacation.
On December first of the same year, we were driving back to Houston on a country road in what most people would deem "cotton" country. The fields were bare of course and the land very flat. It was about 6:30 in the evening and completely dark outside as we passed through a small town. The sky was ominous as an approaching cold front was heaving water laden clouds toward it off the nearby Gulf and they rushed by at a low altitude in a constant stream.
There was another small town about 15 miles away from our location and my gaze was drawn to it because something seemed out of place. We should only have been able to barely see the night sky lit up a bit, but instead there were five rows of lights, banked, hanging over the town, mostly obscured by the rushing clouds. I stopped the car to measure the lights and found it was about four inches long at arm's length. That's big. I grew up in this country and knew there was nothing taller than a cotton gin and I shouldn't have been able to see it or any lights on the gin at fifteen miles. But each of the lights was a little smaller than the head of a tack held at arm's length. They were stacked from top to bottom, five, seven, nine, seven and five. Too many lights to be the standard UFO, right?
We tried to imagine a Christmas display, but it was simply too high in the sky. The lights actually made the glow from the town's lighting show up even more. And the low ceiling of cloud cover may have amplified the effect the lights had, I don't know. I just know they didn't move for the entire time we watched which was about ten minutes. I had to wait a long time to be able to count the nine lights because the moving clouds didn't allow for much. All the clouds rushing by were lit by the phenomenon though. That's what drew my gaze in the first place.
So I'm trying to get my husband to describe what he's seeing when I notice a "sick" look on his face. He's obviously very disturbed by what we are seeing and he keeps looking back at the road we're on rather than staring at the lights. In fact, he never answered me so I just tried to describe to him what I was seeing. After that, I drove away and soon trees obscured our view. He couldn't talk about the incident and heaves a big sigh if I mention it today. Looks irritated in fact, and doesn't want to talk. But when we watched Spielberg's TAKEN, my husband said, upon seeing one of the big UFOs in the series, "That's what we saw." I agreed, but the lights weren't right at all. The size, but not the lights.
I corresponded with Peter Davenport about this sighting too, but he thought it was probably Russian rocketry that had streaked across the U.S. on that date. When he told me there should have been tails to the lights I knew we weren't talking about the same phemonenon as my lights were stationery for a prolonged period. But I've never seen them over that town again and I've had several opportunities to be in the same spot at the same time of night, even the same time of year. We made the same trip at roughly the same time of night later that month and the lights weren't there. It was before Christmas. Never saw them beforehand. But I think my husband is the weird person in the family now. I was curious. He was rather devastated.