UFO SIGHTING

picture found at google images taken a month ago

This is the night of the Super Moon. Eleven something it's supposed to be at Perigee, the closest in its elliptical orbit to earth. Fourteen percent bigger. That's not a whole lot bigger. The only time to see it will be when it rises. In relation to foreground, the horizon, trees, buildings, mountains, ocean, it appears bigger than up in the sky. If the ufo I saw in the sky SW of my location is there again tonight, a lot of people will see it. I've been seeing several, though it might have been the same one, over the last months. Driving home from Justin's Thursday night after putting the picture frame together. I was on Hwy 18 in Ennice and it looked to be over the Piney Creek part of the county. It was 3 white lights. The one last night looked to be over maybe Laurel Springs or maybe Wilkes County. Thursday night the sky was overcast and no stars were visible. This cluster of three white lights was below the cloud.


I don't recall how many years ago, at least 15, maybe a few more, I was visiting with my friend Carole who lives out in the Stratford region of the county. We were at her neighbor's house, half a dozen of us together. We were sitting around in the living room talking. We heard a jet engine going over, a common thing in the mountains, but it was going awfully slow. It lingered in its slow traverse across the sky. We all looked at each other at the same time and without a word all of us jumped and ran to the door. On the deck we looked up and saw the shape of one wok on top of another and a dome on top with a light inside it. It sounded like an F-15. It went in a straight line and looked like it was going to pass over my house and Bullhead. I knew the direction of my house from there and that was its path. I talked with Winfield in the next day or two. He lives beside Bullhead. I asked if he heard a loud, slow jet fly over. He remembered it, thought it odd it went so slow. I asked if he went outside to see what it was. No. I told him what I saw. End of subject.


It confirmed my ignorance for him, once again. I knew it would, which is why I brought it up. It's a curious tic we have in human nature, when we know somebody is judging us, we automatically have to confirm for them that their lopsided interpretation of themselves in a mirror is right. Or it might be my  own psychological construct. Anyway, I do it over and over. Have done it since childhood. It amuses me in a nerdy kind of way. When somebody looks down on me, I want to confirm for them I'm as ignorant as they suppose, worse. Then they stay away and don't bother me any more. I don't have to avoid them; they avoid me. :D 


Last year, driving to Woodlawn, Virginia, on Hwy 18 one Friday night to a show at the Front Porch, I saw a cluster of three lights, one of them blue, over Galax. I drove under it in Galax and couldn't see it again until I stepped out of the car in Woodlawn. There was a parade on another road in Galax and I wondered if it might be the goodyear blimp hovering as part of the show, but it would have lights on itself advertising goodyear. Not a blimp. Driving home, three hours later, I saw it over the landscape I was driving toward, home. The closer I came to home, I could pinpoint it better over Cherry Lane, 5-10 miles to the east by crow. Guessing the lights to be ten miles or so away and not very high in the sky, it gave me a rough sense of size, not little and not huge. That night was overcast cloud too, no stars. The three lights, again, were below the cloud. I guestimated the distance from Galax to Cherry Lane, divided that by three and roughly guessed it might have been moving around 10 mph. It appeared to be still, but evidently was in motion. I didn't watch the one last night and the one Thursday night long enough to determine if they might have been in motion.


I got a picture of the the one with the blue light when driving on Air Bellows Gap Road, just a half mile from the house, where the view includes Bullhead, Cherry Lane and Glade Valley all the way to Sparta to Twin Oaks Gap. Big span of the southeastern quadrant of the county. I stopped and got a photo of it through the door's open window. Didn't want windshield specks in it. I have to enlarge the image all the way until just before the colors turn into square pixels. Just in that moment before the blur of big pixels I see it as I saw it. Couldn't use the zoom on the camera, because I'd have never found it looking through the camera zoomed as close as I would want it. Not a star in the sky. I don't need a photograph to confirm for myself that I saw it or to convince anyone that I saw it. I know what I saw and have seen so many by now, it's just another sighting. These are just the closest and the most obvious one's I've witnessed.


In the late 90s when I was painting in a little building separate from the house, walking one way or the other at night, a couple hundred yards, fairly often my eye would follow what I took to be a passenger jet going from Atlanta to DC or NY or anyplace. I see it in the sky, a dot of light moving in a straight line. I've been inside them. A lot of seats, a lot of people, strangers on their ways to different destinations. The tray on the back of the seat in front of me down, a pepsi can and and clear plastic cup with pepsi in it, delivered by the stewardess. The wing out the window, clouds in the distance, highways below like lengths of thread lying on the floor. From the ground, a light in the sky. It's things like that I think about when I watch a plane fly over. I'm in it listening to Sade on headphones singing, "crown you with my heart," reading Norman Mailer's Armies Of The Night, talking with the  human in the next seat with a Sprite can on the tray. A capsule of people that don't know each other, all on their own particular journeys like cars on the interstate, using this transportation mode from this point unto that.


Walking to and from the little building I was using for a studio under the stars, I learned the constellations in that time and knew which stars were the planets because I saw them almost every night and felt like it was time to learn the constellations at least of the zodiac. Outside the ecliptic path I knew Orion, big and little dipper, and that was about it. One night a jet I was following stopped. It stayed in place awhile. Then it moved straight up, stopped, straight line to the left, stopped, straight down below where it started and stopped. I stood fixed in place watching this dancing light. Eventually it went behind the tree line and I didn't see it again. Several times I saw a light in the sky dance like that. I'm not afraid to call them ufos, but I don't like so general a name that could include somebody in a parachute at night holding a flashlight. Like the crop circles could be from two old boys from an English pub stepping on a board. Now, with YouTube we can see a lot of interesting "craft" in different contexts, like seen by a pilot in a plane, or seen close to the ground by somebody with a camera. They're all over the place now. Wouldn't it be fun if this turns out to be the year they choose to come down from the sky and save us from ourselves.


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