I won't even go into my dad's World War II stories. Just know that he and the men he served with — they saw things you and I can never imagine.
I was maybe nine years old. Old enough to follow the conversation, but young enough that the adults didn't think twice about talking in front of me. My dad and the other officers — both high-ranking, career military — would sit around discussing things they'd tracked, things they'd closed on, things that didn't behave like anything in our inventory. I heard all of it firsthand.
Not from some magazine. Not from some TV special. From military professionals, talking shop.
So I'll say this much: I was already a believer before I ever saw one myself.
Back when I went to college, they had separate dorms for boys and girls. And when you hear what I'm about to tell you, you're probably not going to believe me.
We had curfew. Strict curfew.
Friday and Saturday nights, you had to be back by one o'clock. Every other night of the week? Ten o'clock. If you left the building, you signed a book — your name, the time you left, when you expected to be back, and who you were going with. And when curfew hit, the front door was locked. I'd imagine there were fire doors if you absolutely needed to get out, but that was it. You were in for the night.
And of course, I was a typical student. I didn't study all semester long, which meant I had to learn an entire course in five or six hours instead of sleeping. If any of my kids had done that, I would have scolded them and shamed them. But there I was.
The dorm was one long hallway — maybe twenty rooms on each side. The girls on the other side of the hall came to our rooms that night. It was two, maybe three o'clock in the morning, deep into finals, and nobody was sleeping. They came and got us and said, Come look out our window.
So we did.
Across the street, past the parking lot, there were woods. Thick woods, tall trees — I'd guess fifty feet, maybe more. And just above the treeline, not far above it at all, almost touching the tops of the trees — there it was.
A sphere.
A perfect sphere.
It just hung there. No drift, no wobble. It wasn't tilting this way or shifting that way. No visible propulsion. No sound. It was maybe forty, fifty feet in diameter, illuminated from within, and it was simply suspended in the air.
I stood at that window and stared. We all did. It didn't move. Not an inch. I stared and stared, and it just hung there, glowing, perfectly still — like it had nowhere to be and all the time in the world.
But I had to study.
After maybe twenty minutes, I made a decision I will regret for the rest of my life: I walked away from the window and went back to my books. I remember thinking, I'll never see anything like this again, but I cannot fail this exam.
By morning, it was gone.
We reported it. To anyone who would listen. We were very active — total pains in the ass about it, honestly. We told campus security, we told administrators, we told anyone with a phone and a title.
Nobody took us seriously.
And I want to be clear: we were sober. We didn't do any of that business. It was finals week. We were studying. We were wide awake and stone-cold sober.
But nobody wanted to hear it.