Have you ever seen a UFO?
+ Fiction Friday
When I was around seven or eight years old I saw my first UFO.
It was an octahedron, not too dissimilar to this one, but much smaller.
It had a chrome sheen to it, with a very light blue tint. Inside it I could see a pulsing red light. It moved at the speed of someone running, spinning slowly as it passed my window. It was perhaps 1.5 metres tall.
I remember pressing my face to the window to see it as it flew away.
It left such an impact on me that it showed up in my nightmares, eventually changing the repeating storyline of one recurring nightmare, which I’ll elaborate upon another time.
I would later incorporate the UFO into my stories.
Later in my life I saw ‘ball lightning’ often, sometimes multiple times in a month. They varied from bright yellow to black, and were always about the size of a football. I think it’s important to note I lived near train tracks, and there’s some evidence that electromagnetic disturbances can cause these things for some people.
But that said, one day I had one in my room, and my mum walked in and pointed at it. From that point on I knew at least some of them were real.
My theory is they were caused by the overhead wires for the trains. I never saw them in any other house. Only the one near train tracks.
At another time I was out with a friend and saw a comet in the sky. I pointed it out to him, but just as I did so, this crescent of light stopped in place, then zoomed backwards, moving in a zig zag shape across the sky.
What I want to know is, have any of you seen a UFO?
Before you go, I want to let you know I’ve done another Fiction Friday. This time it’s a fair balance of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and every single book in the offer is free for a limited time. And, because its full name is now FREE FICTION FRIDAY, I will only be sharing free promos with it in the future.
When I was ten I was riding in the back seat with my Dad and Mother riding in the front one time we were going to visit my Mother's parents. It was just after dusk and the country road we were on wound around hills. Suddenly, my dad stopped the car and both of them started exclaiming "it's a UFO!" and to me "Look at that". So looking at the lights that were 'moving' around, apparently up higher than we were... I saw a tractor with poles mounted on the back (on each fender I think) that was up on the hillside moving around and changing course. It was so dark and there were clouds that the hillside and horizon / sky blended into each other but I COULD tell that we were beside a hill. I said "That's not anything in the sky, that's a tractor with lights" and both of them told me no, it's a real UFO and that we were seeing something amazing. They weren't acting, they really believed it and were excited. The tractor turned off the bright lights and left on the regular front lights and went over the hill, I could see it fairly well. We went on to Grandma's and my parents were telling everyone there that we'd seen a UFO. That's when I decided my parents were crazy and for the rest of my life took everything they said with a bit of scepticism Note that my dad was a NASA rocket engineer and my mother was a successful business woman with several profitable companies she'd started along with being a pilot SO BOTH WERE NOT DUMMIES but both were fooled into seeing something that wasn't true.
Very cool. Sadly, no UFOs nor ball lightning for me. But when my mom was a child, ball lightning traversed her father's outdoor shortwave antenna wire and entered their house, an event they found very...exciting.