Sightings
UFO Sighting
Around 2000, from the driveway of a house on Densley Dr in DeKalb CO. Georgia, I saw a UFO. The time was late afternoon, the weather was clear and calm. The object was moving west quite slowly - I had time to get binoculars. It looked like a shrub, and was tumbling as if rolling. Just after it passed overhead, it turned to about WNW. My sister saw it too.
Any estimate of size would depend on the estimate of distance, hard to make in the clear air. If it was 500 feet up, it must have been 40 feet across. My only guess is that it was a collapsing balloon - but I don't see how a balloon could tumble - what torque would overcome air friction?
Strange Lights, UFOs
This happened in the summer of 1978, I'm not sure of the date. My wife, three children and I were camping on a grassy area at Crooked River Ranch in central Oregon. It was a warm dry evening far from any city lights and the area where we were camped was also unlighted except by dim orange lights on the signs which marked the restrooms about 300 feet away. The girls were sleeping in the tent and my wife and I were lying on a blanket on the grass watching the bright stars against the pitch black sky and talking of family matters.
As we talked I was watching a point of light which moved through the star field and I pointed it out to Teddie (my wife). After watching it together we decided that it was either a satellite or a high-flying airplane. It was traveling South to North at several degrees per minute and as it approached the point directly overhead it suddenly executed a turn to the right. This was not a banked turn with a noticeable radius: it was a true 90 degree change of direction with no observable loss of speed. I was utterly incredulous as I watched the event. And yet I knew what I had seen and my wife agreed with my observation. An object in motion in the sky had changed direction by 90 degrees in a perpendicular movement. According to the physics I was taught it could not be done. And yet, I saw it happen. Since then I have always known that there are things happening for which we have no explanation.
Ball Lightning
This is something that has been only recently called into question in my mind as to what the explanation for the event might have been. When I was a child we lived in a house in the San Joaquin Valley in California. My bedroom window faced due east. About 20 feet away from the window was a fence built of cottonwood limbs cut to 8 foot lengths and set about 2 feet into the ground.
The posts were connected (crossed?) by 4 strands of barbed wire. On the other side of the fence was a pasture wherein lived a few head of cattle which were our neighbor's milk cows.
The fence was (on the N-S leg) about 600 feet long. Pretty ordinary stuff. The thing which raises the flags seemed pretty ordinary to me as a child too. A fairly common occurrence was that on rainy days (there weren’t all that many of them) I would see, out my bedroom window, a form of lightning rolling north (always) along the fence-line.
The wire would be glowing and a ball would roll along the top strand sparking and glowing in very bright white, orange and yellow with blues and reds mixed in. The ball appeared to be about 10 inches in diameter and moved pretty slowly taking, perhaps, a second to traverse the width of my window. As a child I never felt this was remarkable. I saw it often: several times a year. Only later did I learn that "ball lightning" was controversial.
We had a pretty electrical storm season, in the days (nights?) before television we used to move out onto our front porch (10 feet by 12 feet and well roofed) to watch the lightning in the North sky. I remember one night particularly well, I'm not sure of the year, about 1953 when we had a dry lightning storm in the fall of the year. It was cool but not cold and we had hot chocolate and popcorn to accompany the electric show. The lightning was high in the sky and forked in jagged profusion and was colored a light violet. The thunder was awesome. The show lasted for hours and finally we were hit with a hailstorm which left us with about six inches of pea sized hailstones. The question is: is ball lightning real? And if not, what did I see when I was a child?