I will forever be grateful for the mechanical malfunction that caused my Honda motorcycle to be unavailable for my paper route one evening in the winter of 1969 or the spring of 1970. My mother took me in her car, and she witnessed everything. My mother was the rock of our family and scrupulously honest in every respect, so whenever I told the story to someone who knew us both, I did so in the presence of my mother so that she could verify all the details is accurate.
I’ve been around aircraft all my life. My father owned them when I was young and flew us on trips. He was a civilian contract flight instructor for the Army during the Vietnam War and I spent endless hours listening to his beer buddies tell stories of their service in bombers and fighters in World War II, or other buddies who were active duty Army instructors tell of their flying experiences in the Vietnam War then ongoing. I was steeped in airplane history, and read countless books from the Army Aviation Library at Fort Rucker, Alabama.
I knew what airplanes could do, and what was beyond their capabilities. I am a licensed commercial pilot with thousands of flight hours in everything from fabric covered tail draggers to supersonic military jets.
On that evening in 1969 0r 1970, in the skies above Enterprise, Alabama, I saw two, small, silver craft flying across the skies. They were high up and traveling at a very high rate of speed. They left a trail of blue phosphorescent gas that looked much like a contrail does. Every few seconds there would be a tiny spot of light on the trailing end of the flying craft, and a dot of red phosphorescent gas would appear, then the blue trail would resume. It looked like sky writing except it was a blue trail interspersed regularly with red dots.
Both craft followed roughly parallel tracks, drawing figures in the sky that looked like letters or numbers, but nothing I could recognize. As with sky writing, the trail slowly faded as new figures were drawn. After about 15 minutes of this ‘sky writing’, both craft started emitting white trails and then both zoomed off at the speed so fast the eye could not follow. When this happened I heard a “Whoah” voiced by other people watching this display from their lawns. I approach them and we discussed in detail what we just seen. This neighborhood was primarily occupied by Army pilots, at least one of whom said he had previous service in fixed wing jet fighter aircraft in the USAF. Neither they nor I could find a rational explanation for what we had seen, based on any kind of aircraft that existed.
When these objects flew around the sky, you could tell they were high up and traveling very, very fast. Yet they reversed directions 180° like a ping-pong ball bouncing off of the wall. Aircraft could not do that in 1970, nor can they now. How quickly an aircraft can reverse directions and fly the opposite heading is a factor of angle of bank, rate and radius of turn, and G factor. Some super-manuverable jet fighters can appear to slow, stop, and change direction in airshows, but they do so at very low speed, not at the speeds we witnessed that night.
If you are at the same altitude as a turning aircraft, it may appear to slow down, stop, and move in the opposite direction as the helicopter might do. But your impression is an illusion based on you viewing the turn from the side. A jet aircraft traveling at speed is limited in its ability to reverse direction by the limits of G factor on the pilot. Even an un-piloted aircraft would be limited by the physical structure of an aircraft being unable to withstand catastrophic G forces an instantaneous, 180° turn would exert upon the physical structure of the aircraft travelling at speed.
As I chatted with other surprised people on their lawns, the two strange craft returned. They repeated their previous behavior, tracing figures in the sky with a blue translucent trail interspersed with red dots, and after 10 or 15 minutes, they again traced the white trail for a few seconds and then zoomed off with impossible speed, faster than the eye could track them. Again, people watching uttered a surprised “Whoah” as the craft zipped off and disappeared.
Again we discussed what we’d seen with people watching from their lawns. Again the craft reappeared, and for a third time drew figures in the sky in the same manner, again trailed white, before disappearing for the last time at impossible speed.
I watched the 10:00 news that night. The Dothan television station spoke of “strange sights people had seen in the skies of the Wiregrass” (southeast Alabama). The next day the news reported that Tyndall Air Force base had released a statement, explaining the strange sights in the sky as US Air Force weather rockets that had released gas into the upper atmosphere to measure the jet stream winds. I knew this to be false. I’d seen the football-shaped blobs in the sky from Air Force weather rockets before. Yes, they were glowing phosphorescent gas, but they were just roughly football-shaped blobs that appeared and remained for a while. They neither moved, nor had any of the characteristics of what we had seen that night.
The next night, a couple blobs of gas appeared in the sky, obviously from Air Force weather rockets. The following day the news stated that the Air Force had said they did not know what caused the sights in the previous night’s sky. This was ridiculous. The Air Force had explained the un-explainable as simply weather rockets, and then when they fired off weather rockets, they denied knowing what it was.
In my lifetime of flying experience, backed up by a lifetime of reading about every aspect of high-performance aviation, I know what my mother and I witnessed in 1969 or 1970 was not only beyond the capabilities of aircraft, what we witnessed was beyond the limitations of physics. The limits of technology and physics would not allow a high-speed craft to instantly reverse directions 180°. Our current understanding of physics would not allow the instantaneous acceleration to astronomical speed.
I’ve told the story a few times, and was highly interested when the US government finally released testimony and footage from Navy F-18 pilots who observed craft visually and on their sensors doing exactly the sorts of things I’ve described above, including zipping off at unbelievable speed, covering dozens of miles in an instant.
I do not know what UFOs are. I don’t know who or what might be piloting or controlling such craft. I don’t know how technology allows a manned or unmanned aircraft to do things impossible under our current understanding of physics. I do know those things exist, for I have witnessed them, as did my mother. After a lifetime of experience in a wide range of aircraft, and a lifetime of study, primarily of high-performance military aircraft, I am convinced that what I saw was beyond the performance of any manned or unmanned aircraft. It was beyond both our technology, and what is physically capable under our understanding of physics and flight, both in 1970 and today.
Start Where You Stand 