A Lifetime of UFO Encounters- Part 1

It was the summer of 1974. I was living in Pensacola, Florida and had become friends with a kid named Roe. We are still friends today, and he scratches his head with strained recollection when I bring up the subject of this encounter. “Swamp Gas” he says, not wanting to believe it may actually have been something significant. I respond saying, “J. Allen Hynek created that term and recanted on it later. The press took that idea and ran with it, but there is no proof to this day that there is any such thing as luminous swamp gas.”

We discuss that night. Both being 7 years old, I understand that we both might have trouble with the details, but the broad facts about this sighting stand out clear as day for both of us. Having grown up as next-door neighbors, both our families saw the luminous disk. In fact both of our families were at the fence talking when I came out of the house. They had already seen it, and I was told to look up by my friend’s mother. It was a blue disk directly over us and appeared to be just behind the veil of misty fog that blanketed our neighborhood that night.

The light coming from this disk was very strong. It was similar to the lasers I would see later in my teen years at rock concerts. The misty fog was seen swirling in the strong blue light. There was no sound coming from the thing, and it was about 25-30 foot across. It just sat there hovering over our group of two families.

I craned my neck looking at it, and was asking all sorts of questions. My parents & my friend’s parents did their best to explain, but as I recall, they seemed to repeat what the debunk-de-jour of the era was: swamp gas.

The part of the sighting that seems the most odd to me is the reaction of us all. We were calm, and serenely having a two family meeting at the fence. We had never done this before or since. Also, the most surprising thing to me is that all at once, myself, my sister, my friend Roe, and his younger brother went to bed. Now, this is even more odd when you consider it was summer, and we were energetic kids. But also the thing I find odd about this is that to my recollection, it was only about 8:50pm. It had just gotten dark, and I can’t remember a time in the summer when I didn’t stay up to watch Johnny Carson.

I remember going to my bed and going to sleep, but that’s pretty much it. Today, thinking back on that experience, I note that the children & the adults were separated for a pretty good amount of time. And I will always wonder if that was simply our choice, or if we were somehow led to do that by something outside our own wills.

This later suspicion would become enhanced later in life when I had a series of encounters that I will touch on in later hubs.

That would be the only UFO I would see as a young man. The debunking on TV and in the culture was so strong at that time, that I actually convinced myself in my later teen years that there was no such things as UFOs, and that it was all made up. Even some friends of mine had implored me to believe them when they said they saw a UFO out at Pensacola Beach one night when they were fishing. I didn’t put much faith into their story.

That attitude would change a few years later when I was in the Marines and had a sighting along with 4 other platoons of Marines.