pigfarmer
Paranormal Maven
Well I feel better - thought I was the only one doing that! I remember a grade school teacher telling me "you know that isn't real, right" when I showed her a UFO magazine - it had an image of the Pascagoula critter in it. Still talking about that case years later with zero additional insight.
When I was maybe 10 or so my brother and I had a close range encounter with an advertising blimp which did look damned peculiar. I flipped out. Didn't figure out what it was until much later. A few years later he moved to another state and wrote me a detailed letter telling me he had a very close range encounter similar to Travis Walton with the exact same object. He kept the lie up so convincingly and I took him so seriously I contacted MUFON in New York - a guy named Ted Bloecher. He contacted a member in Wisconsin who tried to get my brother to talk about the case, which of course he never did. Even after it was obvious to all that it was a flat out lie it took years of arm twisting to get him to grudgingly admit it. It certainly surprised him that his little brother could or would follow up on that foolishness armed only with a rotary dial telephone and a typewriter.
Lesson learned there - if you can't trust your own brother about these things who can you believe? I should point it he is otherwise a trustworthy soul, he just likes to screw around with me.
Thing is, not everyone is making up stories and I still want to believe that at the root of it there might just be something really weird at work. Actual physical evidence is awfully scarce so at best it's some sort of hallucinatory phenomenon, and who knows what triggers it. Those two doofus from Pascagoula didn't appear to have any great motivation to make all that up. Wasn't there a tape recorder running secretly that caught them genuinely saying stuff like "they'll never believe us" and "what the hell was that" and so forth. The real story is never as good as the one your imagination provides so I am skeptical, but things like that are the tidbit that keeps me interested.
From the sounds of it, we are probably about the same age. I figured my best chance of seeing a true life flying saucer was when I entered the Navy at age 18. I remember my company commander in boot camp - his reaction when I asked him about the Philadelphia Experiment. He looked at me as if I had 3 heads. But once I got assigned to my squadron, I was excited. My plane could fly long missions 13 hours and make it from Maine to Sicily in one shot. Pretty good for a turbo prop. I spent many a day & night just staring out my window looking for anything strange. At night time I would wear the night vision goggles. I could see every star & satellite there was to see. But I never did see anything. Part of my duties was being the inflight photographer. So I figured if I ever did see anything I'd be the one guy out of a crew of 12 that could take the pics with a 70mm camera. 5 years came and went and I never so much as saw anything :/
