by Irena Scott
The first incident (7/4/50-52) I recall of seeing an unusual object was when my sister and I watched a lighted object flying in our bedroom (IUR 3/4/88). It was unlike ball lightning, e.g., we awakened at about the same time with it in our room, watched it for several minutes, but don't know how long it had been in the room. Ball lightning lasts for only a few seconds, so this phenomenon wasn't ball lightning.
Another oddity was the appearance of circular areas in my parents' yard. (They recognize "fairy rings," a fungus, and these were different.) They found several of these areas in the summers during the 1940 and 1950's. A big circle of grass would turn white overnight, as if it had been frozen or frosted. After a day or two the grass would appear normal. They specifically recall one in particular to the north of the house and one near the barn, but don't remember the dates. They didn't know the cause, have seen nothing else like them, and haven't seen any since. I didn't know about this until about 1988, when they described them to neighbors who had fairy rings in their yards.
My family returned from a trip (summer, around 1950) to discover our chicken house (a heavy building that could not be blown away by the wind) intact, but upside down, by our house with healthy chickens still in it. It had moved over 100 feet between its new and old location were two other buildings and three rows of pine trees around 30 feet tall. This area was unaffected. There was evidence of wind (some scattered branches), but none of a tornado. Although we don't know how it moved, perhaps such events are related to the crop circle phenomena: "...the circles are formed by a previously unrecognized type of whirlwind, which he refers to as a plasma-vortex, electrically charged and rapidly rotating on a stationary vertical axis (MUFON Journal 8 /91)" or to "Phantom Holes in the Ground" activity (John Keel, FATE 9/91).
Each night after dark we took turns locking up the chickens in this house to protect them from predators. One night my mother returned from this chore looking white and terrified. After a while my father asked her if she had shut up the chickens. She said no, because she had seen red glowing spheres floating behind the windbreak. Dad and I went out with a flashlight, but we saw nothing unusual.
On a hot, clear night (summer, 1950's), I was sleeping out-of-doors. I awakened and, looking north, spotted a soundless object having the appearance of orange incandescent metal and close to the angular diameter of the moon. It traveled north to south. Unlike a meteor it was large, slow-moving, and did not change its appearance. When it was overhead, I heard the dogs in the neighborhood (a farm community) begin to bark. Our dog, in the kitchen where she couldn't have seen it, began to bark and sound as if she were jumping, or knocking things over. I didn't hear dogs to the north bark as it approached, and thought that it might have just then turned on sound waves of a frequency that only dogs could hear. I listened for our other animals, but didn't hear anything unusual; however, all except the chickens may have been in the pasture. After the observation, I heard and saw a plane pass over.
My sister and her future husband saw an object (from my parents' place) over a cousin's house that suddenly disappeared (fall, evening, possibly 1967): "We saw lights like a big plane was over ---'s house, like a big plane. Two big lights. It wasn't quite dark and we should have been able to see the big plane but the lights suddenly disappeared, and nothing was there."
My sister and I made an (approx. 90 minute) observation outside Boston of a soundless object that had brightly lit square windows along its sides 7/13/68 (description IUR 7/8/88, and photograph 9/19/90). I also remember seeing a lighted ball on the ground. When we drove near this ball, the interior of our car appeared green. Green can be emitted by energized oxygen atoms. Right before the sighting, we had been driving in New Hampshire on Route 3. The Betty and Barney Hill (The Interrupted Journey) sighting had occurred on this highway. I mentioned this sighting to several co-workers, and was surprised when they didn't ridicule me. They said that information (around 1/68) about a dome - or Kecksburg-like - shaped object near the Black or Caspian Sea (I don't remember which sea is correct) had been reported to the CIA. The CIA said the information was bad; other experts said the information was good.
My sister and another missionary viewed an object: "This incident happened in Brazil in 1971. It was late at night, maybe 11:00 P.M.. on a hot summer night...He was driving our jeep and we were going north on an isolated country road. Ahead of us we saw what we thought to be another car, so Marvin pulled over to the side so we could meet the car (there were no driveways or turn offs where a car could go). We both realized something was strange and I asked Marvin if he had seen a car coming and he said he had. So I asked him where it was and he said, 'Let's get out of here.' So he really stepped on the gas and we returned to our homes...Usually at that time of night there would be no traffic of any kind." Also in the early 1970's, at a neighbor's home something exploded above my head (7/3). My father took apart a lamp that was near my chair, but this was not where the explosion was. He couldn't find anything wrong with the lamp. Also my parents told me about a sound (10/11/73) they heard that extended over a ten state area and was associated with UFO sightings. A UFO flap seemingly began with this sound (Oh. Jr. Sci. 87(2):11 1987).
On 14/2/83, after watching the movie Dark Crystal, I dreamed that UFO entities were collecting egg and sperm from people and breeding whatever they wanted to. The dream paraded all kinds of genetic experiment people in front of me. These people were miserable, they were bred to do whatever the entities wanted them to, but they still had human feelings. The dream kept telling me I was to report this. I kept arguing with the dream, because even if I knew it were true, no one would believe me. Even after I woke up, I was still arguing with the dream. Late in the evening around 11:00, 27/11/83, l watched a little light moving around on the floor in the hall in front of the bedroom door. I didn't have my glasses on and couldn't figure out what it was.
Because of the dream (and because I began to have other UFO nightmares around that time) I eventually reported our old sightings to CUFOS (Lima, 2/10/84). They sent report forms and on the day I began to fill them out (2/23/84) at Ohio State University (OSU) at 4:00 P.M, as I glanced out a window, I saw an object almost overhead. It was shaped somewhat like a group of girders, with a fog around it. This sighting (MUFON Journal 5/86; FATE 4/85) lasted 20 minutes and I was lucky enough to get five well-educated (all Ph.D.'s--four have been/are university professors) witnesses, none of whom could identify the object. All of them filled out reports. During most of the sighting th.e object looked like either a solid rectangle or a rectangle sitting on top of a light. It would repetitively in a regular cycle (about 60 seconds), not in the random pattern of a windblown object, disappear and then reappear. I contacted a UFO investigator, who called Port Columbus (it was headed in this direction). They were unable to detect it on radar or visually. It seemed like a coincidence that I would see a possible UFO on the day I began to make out the report forms, and I was certainly glad that I had witnesses. The investigator told me later that he had other UFO reports that day one from a "highly credible witness" who tried to photograph the object. He considered this a flurry, because he had received few other reports during this period of years. I reported this object with the witnesses' drawings/descriptions (Oh. Jr. Sci. 88(2):23 1988). It is still unidentified. (Although this probably has nothing to do with UFOs, that night the electricity went off in our house. Some of the lights wouldn't come on for about an hour. None of the neighbors had electrical trouble then.)
On 2/29/84 at 3:27 P.M., I had a close encounter at OSU (FATE 4/85). I looked out a window from the top floor of the same building and hovering over the building across the street was a black-brown, roundish, dull, rough-textured, object around one to two feet in diameter. It was spherical, but amorphous, and seemed to change shape as it moved around. It moved up/down and around over the same spot for around two minutes, then seemed to "tighten-up," become blacker, and flew away rapidly to the southeast. I watched it recede until it disappeared by about 3:30. I couldn't believe that I was seeing it and tried to see if the window glass were distorting anything, but did not notice this. Afterwards, I watched birds flying in the same area. The object was larger than and did not fly like birds (no wings or movements associated with wing flaps). The only odd thing in the papers around that time was the controversial Columbus Poltergeist activity, which made headlines (3/3/1984).
On 8/24/84 at around 10:30 A.M., I again had a sighting at OSU. This was of five objects, each similar to a bright planet. At first I thought they must be helium-filled balloons; however, such balloons, normally are asymmetrical, reflecting light differently as they gyrate. These shone steadily. They sometimes moved slowly, would dart and then hover, and would sometimes appear to merge, or come apart. I finally decided they were not balloons, because one would move so fast that it would be one place, disappear, appear at another place, then disappear and reappear at the first place. It did this repetitively for around a minute or two (this could have also been two objects that kept the same relative positions as they drifted along, but one turned off whenever the other turned on). I was standing outside part of the mental hospital and, thus, didn't try to get a witness.
In April on a trip through Indiana, I stopped at my sister's home. Her son told me about a light he had seen. He seemed disturbed about it, talking for about an hour, and calling it "not a lightning bug." My sister said he had seen it in February, 1984. It was a small, blinking, yellow light, that he said had been on the ground under her bedroom window during one entire night (she wasn't sure about the date, because she thought he told them about it about a week after he saw it). He had gotten up several times that night to watch it out of his window. They live in the country and had no idea what it was. They didn't know of anything that would blink all night. He gave the same description when I asked him several months later.
A newspaper article (8/84) told of a neighbor's reporting a close encounter (4/84) to the police. When I asked around the neighborhood about this, another neighbor told me there had been so many UFO sightings that spring everyone was joking about them. I later surveyed the neighborhood (Oh. Jr. Sci. 87(1):24-26, 1987; MUFON Journal. 5 1986; IUR 7/8 1990).
I found during this survey that several neighbors reported objects near my parents' house. A couple on an adjoining farm reported a green, glowing, dirigible-shaped object, hovering near my parents' property line, that was about six times the apparent diameter of the full moon. They watched it about fifteen minutes before returning to bed, and had a newspaper clipping about other reports. Two other neighbors reported, "a large, round, bright orange object in the sky," that they watched for about an hour and estimated to be four times the apparent diameter of the full moon (which they saw at the same time, 8/26/80). The object may have been near the east side of my parents' property. My aunt on the farm west of my parents' place had a close encounter in Spring, 1984. A close encounter with an object flashing down beams of light (7/85) occurred on their farm (MUFON Journal 8/86). A trace appeared (6/84) on another uncle's property adjoining my parents' place (MUFON Journal 9/91). People in the house to the Northwest of their place had spent around an hour watching a large fire from their balcony, around 4/84. They had called people in the direction of the fire, but no one else saw it. They never did find out where it was. The same spring, other neighbors reported possible extremely odd people or poltergeist activity (MUFON Journal 5/86).
The family, over whose home my sister had seen an object in 1967, also reported close encounters. There was no way to check whether they and my sister might have all viewed the same object, because no one knew the date (except it was at dusk in the fall around 1967-68). Our relative (who works in aircraft manufacturing, had Federal government security clearances, and aircraft identification training) saw an object land in a field around 300 feet from the house. He said it appeared to have a hard body (silvery, metallic), was disc-shaped with portholes emitting white light, and it made a whirring sound. The lights in the house went off while the object was on the ground, but the telephone worked. He was terrified and phoned his parents. After about five minutes, the object rapidly flew away. The next day they found crushed grass there, but didn't know whether the grass had been mashed beforehand by cattle. He had told his family and grandparents, but had not officially reported the object. His parents had previously had a close encounter (6/55) with a lighted object that hovered near their house which made a whirring sound.
Although the following information probably has nothing to do with UFOs, two close ball lightning sightings occurred in our immediate family; my mother had one roll into and around her room (McConnelsville, Ohio, 1927) and I saw one at a neighbor's (3/47). There had also been UFO sightings close to my sister and me that we didn't know about until later. One example occurred on a farm about a mile from my sister's place near Indianapolis. It included a power failure and a 44-foot diameter imprint (The Daily Reporter, 11/14/78). The only missing-time-like experience I know of during my childhood took place (4/47) a day before my brother was born. My mother and an aunt were talking to a magazine salesman and decided they couldn't afford any magazine subscriptions. The man became angry and left. Soon thereafter, my mother and aunt, both careful people who would not loose a child, discovered I was missing. My mother ran all over the farm looking for me. They didn't have a phone. After several hours they found me in a pasture field across a fence and some distance from the house where a not-very-tame horse team roamed. I remember nothing about where I had been.
Since 1984, I have been receiving numerous phone calls where the caller leaves the line open for 45 seconds to a minute and then hangs up. This might be important, particularly in light of similar reports involving UFO witnesses and investigators as noted by John Keel in his book The Mothman Prophecies.
