About Me: My “Sighting”

Now, the story you are about to read is a real story from my childhood. This is a story that I have not discussed publicly about for many years. What was observed that night remains a mystery and I make no attempts to suggest what may have been. It has been over 3 decades since the events were witnessed but the event left a mark in my memory that has allowed it to remain as vivid today as it was that night.

It was the mid-80’s. I was in the 2nd grade. My dad had transferred from his position as General Manager of popular fast food chain store in my hometown to one that was being opened in a town about an hour away. Rather than make the long drive every day, it was decided that it would be better, easier, and safer for us to move closer to the where the new restaurant was being built.

My parents rented a nice 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom brick house on the edge of town. My school was only 2 blocks away allowing me to walk to and from school daily while my older brother had to ride the bus to his school several miles away. It was the first time we had lived in town and had to attend different schools. In our hometown, our school was K-12 all in one campus while my new school had 5 different 2nd grade classes. The number of students in the campus I attended which was only K-4th grade had more students than my entire other school had.

The house and school have no real factors on the events of that particular night but just are included to give some sense the environment I was in at the time.

My brother and I shared a bedroom and slept in bunk beds. Despite the house having 3 bedrooms and there being only 4 of us living in the house, Mom, Dad, me, and my brother, the third bedroom was used for storage since our time in this location was only temporary while my dad worked to open the new store. We took turns sleeping on the top bunk and would rotate every week. One end of the beds were next to a window that looked out into the backyard. Whoever was on the bottom bunk could routinely see out the window.

One night while it was my turn on the bottom bunk, I laid in bed unable to go to sleep and stared through the window. Going from the country to the city was a bit of a change for me and I would often look up at the sky and notice the differences between the number of stars I could see in the country versus the muted number I saw in the city. Well, on this particular night, I saw something that was neither star or anything recognizable to my young eyes.

There were two objects, almost triangular in shape. One appeared orange and the other bright green. Their actual size was completely unknown to me. They appeared to be way up high in the night sky and obviously too far away for me to make out any real detail. Our old house was near an airport so I knew what airplane lights looked like at night but these two triangular-shaped lights were unlike the typical lights one might expect to see on a plane, mostly because the two lights did not move in unison as if they were attached to the same fuselage and they appeared more to be chasing one another more than anything else.

To me, it looked like what one might expect to see when watching a dogfight between two planes. The shapes made a variety of independent course and elevation changes. I never saw anything that looked like explosions or whatnot to suggest that the two shapes were actually fighting or attacking one another. I can’t say what the two objects were doing. Were they enemies? Were they practicing? I don’t know. I can’t even say for sure what “they” were to begin with, much less speculate about their actions.

I watched for several minutes as the two objects continued to dart around in the sky. Their movements were fast, sharp, and impossible for airplanes or helicopters to perform. The best comparison I could think to make would be two insects flitting around one another. The motions were that quick, that jerky, that unpredictable. Then, after several minutes, the two objects shot off into the distance in a matter of seconds and were gone from view.

My brother and I were sometimes at odds and he did not appreciate me bothering him at night and my mother was somewhat strict about us not talking or playing after bedtime. Whatever the reason, I sat in silence and watched the events in the sky unfold but never said a word to my brother. It was an experience that I alone had that night.

Or so I thought.

A few weeks later we made a weekend trip back to our hometown. This is a common thing that we’d do every few weeks to see family that lived there and to let me and my brother visit our friends. On this particular weekend I went to visit my friend Bryan who lived just down the road from our old house. I stayed the night at Bryan’s house and during that night we started talking and I mentioned seeing something string in the night sky a few weeks earlier.

Bryan shocked me by making his own admission of seeing something strange in the sky a few weeks before. He pointed up into the night sky toward the direction he saw the bizarre sights which just so happened to be in the direction that would have been visible from my bedroom window in our new house. And if that wasn’t uncanny enough, Bryan went on to describe the event he witnessed which turned out to be almost an identical recollection to my own.

It didn’t take long before we both started talking about the event and were finishing each other’s sentences with perfect details. We were fairly certain that we had seen the same event from the same night only from different vantage points. Neither of us had any ideas of what we saw but we were both pretty sure it wasn’t anything typical. We both chose not to really talk about it with anyone else, mainly because we thought they’d just make fun of us and outside of retelling that story during another time Bryan and I were hanging out together, I’ve never really discussed it with anyone else. I can’t say if Bryan ever talked about that night again but I know I didn’t because I didn’t know what to make of it.

So what made me decide to post about this now?

Nothing really but if I’m going to make blog posts about myself as a way to introduce myself to readers then why not tell interesting stories about myself than just the standard stuff. Sure, I went to school and had friends who did stupid stuff on the weekends. I attended college classes and worked “normal” jobs. I could tell you all the boring stuff about myself but I think these stories are far more interesting and just as true. That’s why I posted about that night from so long ago that I’ve not really told many other people in over 30 years.