In the beginning - a UFO over Ohio
PART ONE
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(C) Steve Douglass |
By Steve Douglass
It was in the wee hours of the morning when I was awaken by
the buzzing of my phone.
On February 28, 2022 I received the cryptic text:
"Mark is gone. Time to go public. Are you prepared?"
I was stunned. Mark was gone? What does that mean? Was he dead? What
happened? I had so many questions but all I could do was delete the
text.
I wasn't prepared. There was so much to do and precious
little time to do it in. "Where do I start?" I asked myself.
A voice within my head that sounded much like Mark's said,
"At the beginning - idiot."
MARIETTA, OHIO 1964
The first time I saw a UFO I was six years old.
At the time I had no comprehension of what I was
witnessing nor that it would unconsciously shape the course of my entire life.
It was late summer of 1964. We lived in south-central Ohio.
My mom, myself, my older sister and our neighbor named Georgie were driving
back home on a Saturday night in late August after spending the last few hours doing
the family laundry.
To everyone else in our large family (six children) going
on the weekly laundry trip was a chore and a bore, but I liked it. We listened
to the radio, sang Beatle songs and if there was change left over I got to get
something out of the gumball machine, plus, it was good to get away from my
father.
I’m not afraid to admit I was a mama’s boy and although she
loved all her kids, I was treated different. You see I was more like my mother,
warm, creative, open-hearted and happy as opposed to my older brothers who were
more like my dad, aloof and cynical and especially my oldest brother who
seemingly was always looking for a fight.
I didn’t have that mean streak in me that they all seemed to have and especially my dad.
Pardon the digression but some backstory is needed for proper context.
As the years went on he would
grow more and more abusive and not just to his wife. That abuse
extended to the entire family and too many times I found myself curled in a
ball, a defensive posture to protect myself from his attacks. I never
understood why he was so angry, even though I would grow to forgive him.
Later as I grew taller and bigger than him, I became her
protector and because of that my mom always called me her gentle giant.
I was also big for my age, hitting six feet in the sixth grade. Most people thought
I was older than I was and so they treated me that way.
But on that night in 1964 I had never felt so small and
have never since. The Ohio River Valley UFO Incident would become my life story's seminal moment,
planting in me the seed for the need to know, shattering all my perceptions of
what I thought made up my universe.
Filtering it through the perspective of someone in the last quarter of his life, taking into account all my experiences and all the knowledge I've packed into my three pound brain, one fact remains, I was not only witness to something that was so far beyond what my first-grade mind couldn’t even begin to grasp, but also created something lying dormant in me that would awaken decades later that put me on a path to partial understanding of UFO the phenomenon.
If that wasn't enough, my (this) narrative of my truth goes completely against
the grain of the popular narrative of what UFO's (now known as UAPs) are - in
particular what really happened near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.
That said, I'm still having trouble understanding all of what we experienced on that night in 1964.
From my unique perspective, Roswell and Ohio seem unrelated
with the only common denominator being the 1964 incident would propel me on a
start of a journey through a labyrinth of discovery and disclosure of a secrets
known to only a handful of people and forces that have covertly shaped all of
our lives.
With the news that Mark was gone" (more on this later) now came the time for what every true believer has been waiting for disclosure, although it comes from the most unlikely sources, not a dedicated UFOlogist but a normal work-a-day journalist in Texas far removed from the suddenly socially acceptable and popular circles of self-made UAP experts.
I remember when the initials UFO meant you were a nutcase. Now it's practically a given that we aren't alone although the whole truth has yet to be revealed. Let the following be my personal UFO account before I get to the point of this story, what I believe is the real truth about Roswell.
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We had left the laundromat in Devola, Ohio around ten o’clock PM
with the ride home usually taking 45 minutes on a twisting turning road through the
hilly countryside of Ohio. Georgie was driving our 1957 Chevy Bel Air. My mom was in the front passenger seat, my older sister was on the left side passenger
side and I was on the right.
I loved looking out the window as the world passed by.
August nights in Ohio were particularly lovely. With the windows open I could
hear the steady chorus of crickets that would come and go in waves. The
fireflies were out in droves and they delighted me.
Back then there weren't many road lights except at
intersections so the edges of the byway were marked with little reflectors. I
remember how much they intrigued me. They would seemingly light up as we
approached a curve and turn them selves off as we passed. I asked my mom how
they worked. Instead of trying to explain the physics of light reflection she
told me a very small but fast elf ran from light to light turning them on and
off. To a small boy from Ohio it sounded plausible and it was kind of fun
imagining the little man running from light to light. Later when I learned how
they really worked it was kind of a let down.
Most of the drive was through thick wooded areas but
occasionally we’d round a curve, crest a hill and the scenery would open up and
I’d see the Ohio River Valley lit by a full moon. The lights of
small towns and cities flickered below and the glow of the moon momentarily
reflecting off the rivers and streams looked like the golden branches of an enormous tree.
The radio was playing in the background at a low volume. My sister waited patiently for a Beatle tune or one by her other favorite rock group, Herman’s Hermits. She was a boy-crazy pre-teen. Fireflies and tall-tales of
fast elves were of no interest to her.
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Many years later my mother would ask me how I remembered
everything in such great detail.
I thought about it and answered. “I just do.”
I couldn't
define it but it was a trait that would serve me well throughout my life.
I don't remember everything, and on most days I can't remember where I put my
car keys, but I do remember life-altering-events, in wicked detail. How could I not?
However there are some things I wished I couldn't remember so well, such as my mother's death for one and what we'd experience that night in Ohio. These memories are something that would always return to me in my dreams time and time again.
I
still don't know if that is a good or bad thing.
Unbeknownst to me (what was minutes away from happening) would implant itself firmly in my consciousness and subconsciousness and would
always be there like a footprint in concrete. I had some trouble convincing my mother of my total recollection of the incident.
I would be a young man in my twenties before my mother and I would talk as adults about what happened in 1964. That date was November 16, 1977. She was stunned about how vividly I remembered this night..
My mother tested me by asking me what my earliest memory was. I told her I was watching her working in her Iris garden from when we lived in Bountiful, Utah.
Her garden, which she took great pride in, stretched up a slope that led to a view of the mountains. On those mountains a forest fire was raging although it wasn’t threatening Bountiful. I remember seeing the huge pillars of smoke and the fire-bombing aircraft making desperate drops on the fire. Big droning planes came in right over our house as they flew up the mountain, their noise shook everything. I remember not being scared by the noise, just fascinated by these flying things that were not birds. It was a fascination that has followed me ever since.
Later my mom found old photos of the fire that I had never seen. I was probably two years old at the time, two and a half tops. I even told her the names of the kids who lived next door, names she had long forgotten.
More on what prompted the conversation in a later post.
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With the warm summer breeze, the moonlight and (for me) the late hour I became drowsy.
I was slipping in and out of sleep when I heard my
mother say, “Slow down Georgie! Slow down! What’s that?”
It wasn’t what she said that woke me but the sound of her voice. It had suddenly changed from light-hearted lady-chatter to one of considerable alarm.
“That’s got to be the moon!” Georgie said shouting, near panic showing in her voice.
My mom turned around and looked behind us. When I saw her
expression it jolted me from half asleep to fully awake. This was the first
time I had seen fear on her face but she was not scared. It could best be
described as an expression of alarm and exhilaration.
She pointed past my head and said loudly and firmly, “No – the moon is
behind us Georgie! That's not the moon!"
I couldn’t figure out what was going on for a few seconds. I looked over at my older sister. She was leaning forward trying to see out the front windshield.
“What is it mom?”
“Slow down and pull over.” My mom told Georgie.
“I don’t think we should stop.” Georgie replied. “I don’t
know what that is. I’ve never seen anything like it.’ She said trembling.
All I could see was a bright light shining through the
front windshield, my mother, Georgie and my sister blocking most of the view. I
struggled to get a better look.
“I’m scared mom!” my sister said. “Don’t stop Georgie!” she
pleaded. She was in a panic and on the verge of tears. Georgie was too. The
station wagon slowed and came to a stop. She turned to my mother and said,
“Peggy, you need to drive. I’m too scared.” She was visibly shaking.
My mom thought for a moment and said, “Fine, Georgie, get
in the back. Steven you up front - you have to see this.” She only
called me Steven when she was mad at me or wanted my full attention.
My mom slid over and took the wheel as Georgie got out and
quickly climbed in the back. I opened my door and stepped out onto the road
waiting for my mom to open the passenger side front. I was only six and could
not yet open it even though I tugged and tugged on it.
I suddenly became aware of the oddest thing. My shadow was moving, in fact all of the shadows were moving. The shadows of the open car door, the trees and my own were moving slowly from left to right, much like how I had seen a single swinging lightbulb changing the position of my shadow in our basement, except the light source causing the shadows was much brighter.
I
recalled watching how the shadows in the thickly wooded countryside shifted and
twitched in response to a super bright source of light coming from the
direction our car was facing.
This is the part that has been indelibly etched in my consciousness...
I turned and saw it. It was totally silent and from what I
could see was hovering over the road maybe a quarter of a mile away and a 100
feet above. At first it looked like a solitary blue-white light almost too
bright to look at. It moved as if in slow motion, slipping sideways and back in
a fluid pendulum sway and glide that can only be described as precise.
I don’t know how long I stood there staring at it. I think
I was too young to be frightened. It was more mesmerizing than scary. I also
had not developed any frame of reference yet to classify this light as either
good or bad. To me it was just bright, flowing and beautiful.
Next thing I knew I was sitting in the passenger seat next
to my mom who was cooler than anyone else in the car. Georgie was looking
through her fingers like someone watching a horror movie and my sister was
crying, scared out of her wits.
Not my mom though. She was large and in charge. This
housewife from Utah with six kids was fearless. In modern parlance,
she was stoked.
As we watched the light she turned to me and said, “It's
beautiful Steven – isn’t it? That’s a UFO! That’s a UFO!” She said over and
over. "I always hoped I would see one!"
I had no idea what a UFO was but apparently that’s what I
was seeing. The way my mom acted is was as if we were tourists on safari and
she had just spotted a lion.
We watched the object slowly drifted away from us. It then
passed behind some trees which only enhanced the mesmerizing appearance of the
object as it cast long shadows and iridescent beams passing between the trees
hugging the curve of the road.
My mother (always being the adventurous one) decided
to follow it. Slowly she inched up the road and turned the wheel to the right.
It moved toward us. There it was again practically floating above us.
My sister pleaded with my mother, “I don’t like this thing.
Let’s turn around please.”
My mom turned and said, “It’s not going to hurt us, I
promise.”
I don’t know how she knew this, but her reassuring words
and confidence had the effect of calming everyone in the car.
Slowly it floated away staying perfectly centered on the
twisting road. Again my mother's sense of adventure got the best of her. She
stepped on the gas and moved forward - but it slowly floated away.
It became a game. The closer we got, the more it moved as away from us. It
was kind of like chasing a rainbow. When it picked up speed my mom tried to
match it. In no time my mom was following it at close to 50 mph, as fast
as she safely could on the winding road.
I remember looking intensely at it, not at all scared. I
noticed my mom holding up her hand up to the windshield like you do when you
are driving into a glaring sunset. She said, “Block the object with your
hand, not all of it - you can see the shape.”
I mimicked her, my thumb acting as a sort of a natural
eclipse trying to block the brightest part. She was right. I became aware
it was made up of more colors than just bright white light. It had a blue-to
purple aura surrounding it. As it moved further away I could see the shape more
distinctly. From what I could tell it was a shape inside a shape, a glowing
sphere of light rotating inside a glassine like cube.
When my mom passed way in 1997, in her things she left to me I found a small gift. It was a small globe of the earth embedded in a cube of Lucite. Every time I see it, it reminds me of our close encounter. It was also a shape I unconsciously drew many times whenever I doodled in my notebooks or on my school book covers. I’ve seen this shape in my head ever since. It seems to be always present in the back of my brain.
There was no sense of scale but it didn’t appear to be huge. The only indication of size was how localized the effect was of its brightness on the landscape.
The only thing I could compare it to was like
the instant daylight caused by a very close lightning strike, except this light
wasn't momentary.
As it slowly bobbed up and down with a silky smoothness (I
have yet to see in any device designed by humans) I could see the shape casting
long shadows through the trees. Another odd thing, I remember seeing the trees
on the surrounding hillsides moving, no - more like bending as if being blown about
by an unseen gale.
There was a heaviness to the object as well.
It's hard to
describe but it felt like it had it's own gravity. It also seemed like it
generated its own weather. When the object moved closer the atmosphere could
best be described as under pressure.
When it moved away it got windy. Closer in, very dead air,
farther away it was like being inside a dust devil.
I can't recall any sound but I do remember my ears felt
like they were stuffed with cotton or like I was under water. Everything sounded
muffled, my mom's voice, my sister screaming in the back seat and Georgie pleading
for my mom to "Backup! It's too close."
Sometimes it would stop like it was waiting for us. We
rounded a curve and there it was practically on top of us for the second time -
and then it would float away again.
My mother emboldened by her amped-up curiosity kept pushing the limits of how close the object would let us get.
It rounded a curve again and disappeared from site although we could still see the effects of it lighting up the countryside but as we rounded the turn it rocketed straight up at an unbelievable speed.
I watched it as it became a small dot and vanished.
There was no noise, it just left. I had this strange feeling like it had been
toying with us and got tired of the game.
My mother and the others had not seen this. It's departures
was impossible to see from the backseat and my mother was busy negotiating the
tight curve and missed its launch.
"Where'd it go?" she asked searching.
"Up." I answered pointing 90 degrees into the sky.
My mother stopped the car in the middle of the road. We all got out, even my sister who was quite relieved the thing was gone. All of us looked up at the sky.
Nature abhors a vacuum and the sound of crickets and normal summer night filled the void left by the object once again.
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The ride back home was a long one. We had taken so many
turns following the thing that we had gotten lost. As we backtracked my mom and
Georgie talked about what we had just witnessed. I found myself watching the
sky looking for the whatever it was to return.
Right there and then, watching the skies would become an
almost involuntary reflex that has followed me all my life. Before doing
anything outside, I find myself looking up. It's something I noticed 99 percent
of humans hardly ever do. It has served me well and has been the basis of many
adventures some of which will be documented in this blog.
When we finally returned home, my mom was still pretty exhilarated and
told my father what we had encountered. He couldn't have cared any less. He
made it clear that it was just probably a airplane, a helicopter of a meteor,
nothing more and she was better off keeping it to herself less someone think his wife was crazy.
But she didn't.
The next week there were reports in the newspaper and on
the TV news, proof positive for my mom that she hadn't hallucinated and that
others had seen it. My father remained unconvinced. He had many explanations for what it was, all manmade and logical. Enough of the UFO nonsense. He wasn't having any.
My mom decided to take the next step. She placed a call to nearby Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton Ohio. She had read that Project Blue
Book was headquartered there and decided they needed to know about our sighting
or see if they already had. Most of all she wanted vindication, something to
show her husband that she wasn't crazy.
I wasn't unaware of any of this. I was still just a small child and had returned to doing child things. The first time I would hear her side of it and the rift it would cause in her marriage was in November of 1977.
She told me the Air Force operator switched her to an extension almost immediately when she said she wanted to report a UFO. She then then talked to someone (she doesn't remember who) who asked her multiple questions.
She said it sounded like he was reading form a prepared script. The questions were straight and to the point. She said she felt like whoever she was talking to wasn't interested in the story but just the technical data, time, direction, speed, physical effects, etc. She tried to expound but the questioner just went on to the next item. After several attempts she gave up and stuck to just the details. She said it was much like filing a police report.
My mother recalled that each question seemed to branch to another set of questions clearly designed to filter out genuine sightings from those of UFO kooks who wished to or thought they had seen something. "Did it have blinking lights? Was there engine noise? Were there any other flying aircraft in the area? Were you close to any airport or air force base? Did you feel heat? Was there any physical effects on you, others with you or to the area?"
The list of questions was a long one, each answer leading
to another question. My mother tried her best to answer to the best of her
recollection. She wasn't a technical person and answered some questions with
"I don't know what that means." or "I have no idea."
She told me the man on the other side of the phone for the most part seemed to be taking her seriously which made her feel better but he was a bit curt.
The next question, however really set her off.
"Ma'am - at any time were you or those with you under
the influence of alcohol or any medication?"
This made my mother angry. She basically read the
questioner the riot act. She was incensed. She told the man she was the mother
of six, was not a drinker and would never drink and drive with her children in
the car.
The man apologized and said it was a question he had to ask. She calmed down realizing they probably did get calls from drunks, but then came the next question (to me a logical one) and it was a taken as a total insult.
"Ma'am - at any time have you recently been under the
care of a physician for a mental disorder or being treated with medication for
a mental disorder?"
My mom was beyond anger now. She remembered how aghast she was that the man would even suggest such a thing. Again she read him the riot act and shamed him for even daring to ask such a thing, but the man said it was a standard question and not to take it personally.
But for my mom, this man was echoing the comments from my father who had made it clear to everyone that my mother made the whole thing up because she was a bored housewife trying to get some attention.
My mom said the questioner tactfully explained it was something they had to establish before assigning a investigator to look into her claims. She also recalled he said "If we sent out an investigator on all UFO sighting reports, we'd never have enough people or time to do justice to them all."
This calmed her down a bit. She finished the survey and the man said they would file her report but didn't make any promise of investigating it further.
A month passed and one day while I and everyone else (except for my infant brother Dicky) were in school two men came to visit my mother.
They flashed some sort of I.D. and said they wanted to talk to her about her UFO sighting. She remembered inviting them in and making them coffee. They took notes, excused themselves and left. She said she couldn't recall the particulars of the conversation except at first she thought they were Mormon missionaries by the way she was dressed. My mom saw them pulling up, but she was perplexed because missionaries usually don't drive cars. My mother thought it was quite odd, because she was from a Mormon family.
Funny thing, she always panicked when she saw the young missionaries canvasing the block because she was a smoker back then and that was something good Mormon's don't do. There was always this big scramble to hide the ashtrays and the coffee pots whenever a missionary knocked on our door. Her biggest fear is that the local it bishop would find out and make an unannounced visit, chide her for smoking and drinking coffee and it somehow would get back to her parents, her father having once been a bishop in her home town in Logan, Utah.
She told me told my father about the visit from the two men in hopes he would see she was not crazy and at least someone was taking her seriously. He questioned her account and said she had probably imagined that too.
About a year, later another visit but this time by one of the few UFO investigators of the time, Frank Edwards.
(C) Steve Douglass
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