UFO story — Racine, Wisconsin
When I was 14, my mother and I would walk around the block at night. Nobody else would be out. She was getting exercise. It was a time we could talk about things, and she wouldn’t be alone in the night if Iwas there. Mt Pleasant, Wisconsin was a pretty safe place, but still.
We saw the UFO first at the blue square on Oregon St. It was a white light that moved very fast. It went from horizon to horizon under dense cloud cover that was also horizon to horizon 360 degrees. It took an odd curving path and disappeared in seconds. No sound at all. We figured it had to be a meteor. But we talked about it until we saw it again.
It came back. I saw it and she looked with me as it came back in an S squiggle path. We were at the red square then. We turned around and stopped to watch it. This light stopped above us — without any deceleration. Right above us. It was moving like a bat out of hell, and then — not moving at all. It stopped so fast that I lost track of it, and so did she. Then, we found it again, just below the clouds. we saw it just sit there. It was a dot of light. No red or green light. Not multiple lights. And still, no sound at all.
This next map is a fair rendering of the path. The path was somewhat smoother than that, but I can’t draw it as smooth as it was on my touch pad. Maybe later.
When we initially saw it, we were turned around in our heads, and had our East-West directions reversed. We talked about it, and thought it had started in the West and gone toward the lake and then returned back going inland. But it had come from the direction of Lake Michigan. The light disappeared for a while overland, maybe 3–5 minutes (my mom didn’t walk very fast). Then it became visible again and came to a stop overhead.
The dot just hung there in the sky, near the clouds. How long is hard to say, but we didn’t have any “missing time”. It was long enough that my neck was complaining from looking straight up. My mother blinked, and she said it just disappeared. I didn’t blink, and I saw the dot go straight up into the clouds. I knew this, because the clouds lit up from refracted light. The object was bright.
When we got home, we checked the cloud cover, and it was 8000 feet solid from the lake for miles inland.
When we initially saw this light go horizon to horizon, we thought it must be a meteor, on a strange path. We talked about it as we walked. But when it came back? That was impossible for a meteor to do. And even if we said, well, maybe very strange meteor could turn around and come back, no meteor could stop instantly and hang in the air like that.
We never talked to my father about it. We decided not to together, my mother and I. She didn’t want to deal with it. My father was Director of Communications and Guidance for Apollo. I never mentioned it to him, not even in the last days we had together. Maybe I should have.
The house we lived in was the house of the original farmer who had a big farm there a long time before there was a Mt. Pleasant. The farmer built it out of stone and cinderblock. It is nice to see that the woods behind that house is still there. The house looks just like it did when I lived there. Same big rock next to the mailbox. But the stone bench in the middle of the driveway island is gone.
Goodland was my elementary school, and it was public then, a new and very nice school. The church was next to it, and the church was also new. I have dreams where I am there at the border of the school and the church. I would walk Silver, our Alaskan Malamute, to the park and around. Silver liked to swim in the pond in summer. Across from Goodland was Lockwood park, which Indiana street ended at. So I would walk across the park to school pretty often.
After seeing this light in the sky, I took to going running at night instead of just walking. I thought about it quite often. I would go to the park which was mostly dark after running. I would stand there in the dark and just hang out, hoping that maybe, just maybe, a UFO might come by and pick me up. I would often go to the top of the hill and out in the field grass part of the park and look up, hoping for a UFO encounter with aliens. I was a bit scared they might.
But, they never came. I never lost any time. So disappointing. Aliens would have been so interesting.
