Post by johndyer on Feb 2, 2012 2:01:18 GMT -5
I am a 35 year old man living in Western Suffolk County on Long Island, New York. I work in an industry closely tied to Information Technology. I have seen things, astounding things, that most people would not believe. I have decided that I want to talk about these things, thus I have found my way here.
I remember as a child laying in bed at night and seeing light descend outside and illuminate the area of the side of my parents house through a drawn blind and pulled curtains. The neighbors dog would bark at first but, after a minute or so it would fall silent. The light would remain for only a couple of minutes sometimes. Other times it would stay for much longer. It was only light, though, bright yellowish-white light seeping in around the edges of the window blind. I was so young that I had no basis for comprehending it. I just knew that it was strange and scary.
Years would pass. I was perhaps 8 years old or so looking out the back door of my parents home. It was night. As I looked out at the night, I saw what I can only describe ad a yellowish-white disc on edge with an almost cartoonish yellow flaming tail edged in orange fly at about the speed a bird would fly from the north to the south. This object was about the size of a dime in the sky. It moved beyond my field of view to the south and I immediately started crying and screaming for my mother, who was on the other side of the house. A moment later I again saw this object. Its orientation had changed. It looked like a disc laying flat at perhaps a 35 degree angle. It shot faster that anything I had previously seen from the south to the east gaining altitude until it was out of site. This memory has stuck with me my entire life.
Again, years would pass. I was in maybe 6th grade when I noticed a lump covered in what I would describe as scare tissue on my right knee cap. It's size was about that of a caper or, if you could, a BB sliced in half. I would look at it often wondering where it came from since I had no memory of skinning my knee.
Again, years would pass. I was a senior in high school. Boys being boys, I would go down to the local "make-out spot" with a girl I was dating. This spot, an unpaved road that stuck out into the bay in a particularly dark and poorly lit community where home owners typically could not see their neighbors houses when they looked out their windows, was only a few miles from where I lived. On more than one occasion, we drove down to the end of this unpaved road and parked only to blink and see that hours had passed. On those few nights, we would literally park the car, look at at the time and notice two or three hours had passed during which neither of us had any memories - completely unlike the nights where we got up to the normal things teenage couples often get up to in such places.
In August of 1994, I was off to college. The night before leaving my parents home, I was sitting there looking at the lump on my knee. That's when I did the unthinkable - the closest I had ever come to mutilating anything. I used an exacto knife to remove the lump. There was no blood. The lump felt like skin wrapped around something hard. I flushed it and went off to college a few hours later. I have no idea what it was but, I like to think it was just gravel or something that got embedded in my skin during some bike accident that I didn't remember.
I had a somewhat normal freshman year of college and moved overseas for my sophomore year. When I returned to the US, life was normal for a year and a half. My last semester of college, I again moved overseas, to Central America, where I would participate in a fairly cool internship.
It was in a Cloud Forest in northwestern Costa Rica that I would again experience some high strangeness. I was hiking with a female student who I had become friends with. We started hearing strange noises off in the distance and figured it was coming from some sort of monkey or other. I remember stopping at a very tall and wide tree with roots that stuck over 6 feet in the air at the trunk. That's where my memory becomes... dual? I remember seeing the tree, checking out the roots with the woman I was with, and continuing on our way with nothing remarkable happening. However, I also remember a man standing between two of the roots. He had short sandy colored hair and was maybe 5'9" tall with thin framed round lens glasses. He looked like he was maybe in his early 40's or late 30's and was thin in the same way that some people are just thin. He spoke to us but I don't remember what he said. He seemed like he was trying to be kind and would smile quickly every now and then. He was wearing a dark colored suit with a matching tie. In that line of memory, the man spoke to us for a while and we didn't respond; we then continued on our way. The strange thing is that the man looked familiar. I had seen him before, I was sure of it, perhaps in the village I grew up in when I was a child.
Again, years would pass. They were, in a way, wasted years of my life as I view them now. Sure, I learned new trades and laid the foundation for a successful career but, in those few years I never looked up. I never stopped to look at the world around me. After returning from Central America, I had developed an affinity with rural settings. While I would eventually work in a city, to this day I live in as rural an environment as I can and accept the long commutes.
I moved in December of 2000 and a couple more years would pass where I lived a normal life. Then my memory of such things becomes questionable. I don't remember, or have any notes, of seeing or experiencing anything unusual. But then I woke up one morning, rolled over in bed and was surprised that there was no one there. I remember wondering where she went and as I got up to look for her, there was no sign of her. But I knew this woman. I could picture her in my mind as clearly as if she was sitting next to me. She was short, just over 5 feet tall, in good physical shape and had blond hair that would fall to her shoulders although she always wore it up. I knew things about her. I knew about the things she liked and the things she didn't like. I knew her personality and her beliefs. I knew that I had been spending time with her but, she wasn't there.
Over the next few weeks, I decided to investigate. I had a very strange feeling that I wasn't comfortable with and was unnerved about that feeling. Something strange was going on and I didn't know what it was. So I did what I could. When seeing friends, I would ask if they remembered that cute blond girl I had met. None of them did and I would make an excuse like "Oh, I must have introduced her to someone else". A couple I was friends with went out to eat with me one night not long after this. I remember the dinner well. The three of us had a wonderful time. A couple of weeks would pass and the woman from that couple, we'll call her Milly, ran into me one day and asked about Cora. "How are things going with you and Cora? She seemed so nice". I didn't know who she was talking about and Milly said something along the lines of, "Cora, the girl you brought out to dinner with us a few weeks ago. Did I mix up her name?". I covered by saying something like, "Oh, yes, haha, that was Carolyn". The next time I ran into Milly, she didn't remember "Cora".
All through this time, I was spending more and more time alone partially because of my project load at work and partially because I was always tired and just didn't feel social. A few months after I learned Milly no longer remembered the woman, Cora, who I don't remember as having dined with us that night, I went to a local pizza place to grab a slice or two for dinner. It was night and the pizza place was on a busy road. As I walked in, everything seemed normal. I ordered some food, waited for it, paid, and started heading out the door with it. That's when I saw the man sitting alone in a booth with an empty plate in front of him and reading a newspaper. The man looked up at me and I swear to you that it was the same man I somehow remember not meeting in that cloud forest in Costa Rica. He smiled quickly as our eyes locked. I couldn't help but stop.
The man lowered his newspaper and, greeting me by name, said something along the lines of "these are interesting times we live in". He said other things but, I had no memory of them as soon as I walked out the door. The man looked like he hadn't aged a day and again he was wearing the same suit and tie.
I went back to the apartment I rented at the time, at and sat there thinking. My lease was coming to an end in a couple of months and that night I decided I would move to a different town. All through those few months and the following two months before I would move, my knowledge of this blond woman, this Cora, grew. Every so often my mind would flash part of a memory with her in it. I thought I was buckling under the stress at work even though I didn't find my work particularly stressful.
I moved two months after seeing that man in that pizza place. And as I type this, I fought the urge to write "... after meeting that man again in that pizza place". I moved out of that apartment a month before the lease was supposed to end. I moved in less than a week after signing a new lease in a new town almost 30 minutes away by car.
I became very interested in photography when I moved into my new apartment. I bought a DSLR and would spend a lot of my free time traveling around the island taking photos of seascapes and landscapes. I always traveled alone. Except I didn't. When I thought back to a trip I took on a previous weekend, I would sometimes remember the blond woman, Cora, being with me. Things became strange in the summer of 2007. You see, that's when I was spending a tremendous amount of time with Cora. I would get home from work and we'd spend a lot of evenings each week hanging out together. None of it seemed strange. It was as if she was always there and as if my uncertainty about whether or not she was real vanished. Sometimes I would have a moment of what I think of now as "clarity" and I would wonder if I was going crazy but, there was physical evidence of her in my home and in my car. I would find a loose hair here and there. There was an apricot colored lipstick in my car. While visiting me one day, my brother in law pointed out a pair of her shoes. She had clothing in my home and people at places I would frequent - the coffee shop, a local restaurant we ate at all the time, a cashier at a candy store out east that we always stopped in, would always ask about her when I was alone. She owned a sail boat - I knew specifically what kind it was, a MacGregor 26 - and we would spend weekends living on it. I have photos of the boat sailing past Shelter Island that I know I took from the shore when she dropped me at the pier in Greenport specifically to take photos of the boat as she sailed it. Cora was real. She was a physical living human being with mass and original thoughts, she had a job and I met her coworkers, she met some of my coworkers. We had been seriously dating since February 2007. But in September 2007, things became weird again.
In September of that year, her parents retired to Florida. I had met her parents. She wasn't comfortable with the distance and announced that she was moving to live near them. She sold the boat. I helped her pack her truck, a blue Expedition. I pleaded with her to stay but she couldn't. She said she knew in her heart that she had to go. I watched her leave in early September 2007. She got in touch with me when she arrived in Florida and that was the last time I remember hearing her voice. It was a turning point in my life. The woman who didn't exist proved that she did exist. Other people remember her. And I wasn't insane and had a clean bill of health.
Later that month, the sightings started. The first few things I saw were strange flashing lights that seemed to dance in the night sky at a distance. I wrote them off as airplanes or helicopters. A month or two later, though, my eyes were pried open.
I was sitting in my office with a guy I was friends with at work. It was around noon maybe. We were looking out at a building across the street that had just opened after a very long construction when we both saw something, something I will describe as a squared metallic orb, bob in the air above the tall tree's across the street. It was small but gauging its size against the trees it bobbed over and trying to estimate its size, it seemed like it would be large enough for 1 person, maybe two if they were crammed in. The object literally bobbed into view with movement that looked like a rock skipping across water in slow motion. It hovered for nearly a minute before shooting straight up at blistering speed. We bit our tongues and said nothing. We just looked at each other. Corporate offices for your employer is no place to shout about a ufo sighting.
I began looking upwards. I would pack my telescope and cameras and head out to vacant places at night simply to sit under the stars and look up. The more I looked up, the more things I would see. Things that I couldn't explain. I felt as if I was going through some sort of awakening. I started keeping a log of sightings.
In early 2008, I would see a black triangle flying from north to south, about the size of field mouse in the sky near Huntington. I started taking a different route home only to have a series of sightings of a very bright light night after night in the same spot. I wrote it off as a light on a radio tower "or something" until the 4th or 5th night, when I saw two lights in the sky about 50 degrees off the horizon spiraling around each other. Looking to my right, I realized I was in that same stretch of road. There was the bright light yet again. Only this time, I couldn't write it off as a light on a radio tower. It shot off to the south east disappearing from sight within a heartbeat.
A few weeks later, in Spring of 2008, I was out walking around my apartment complex at around 10pm looking up at the sky trying to decide if it would be a good night to take photos of the moon. I saw a man sitting on a bench. When I drew close to him, he looked up and greeted me by name. It was the same sandy haired man. He looked exactly like he did the other times I saw him. He smiled at me and said, "Change can be good. You should consider moving. Not far, but you should consider moving". I don't know why but, when he finished speaking I just walked away back to my apartment. The thought of questioning him, or of going back to confront him, simply did not cross my mind.
All through this time, I would think about Cora all the time. I missed her desperately but, she didn't answer e-mail and her mobile phone was disconnected. For some reason, I was looking for apartments. A few weeks passed. It was late May 2008. I was sitting alone in my apartment thinking about her, thinking about all those nights we spent on her boat, remembering laying there in the bunk with my arms around her as she slept listening to the water slap the hull. I missed her so much I ached.
A few weeks passed. Again, sitting in my apartment alone, thinking about her, thinking about places I could move to, my phone rang. The caller ID told me it was an unknown caller. I always ignore calls that the caller ID couldn't identify. No one ever left a message. But for some reason, I answered the phone that time. Her familiar voice greeted me. She told me that she missed me. She told me that she loved me. She didn't mention how her life was going. I don't remember saying much of anything. The call was very brief. The last thing she said to me was "I think change can be good. You really should find a new place, move". I remember asking her why she said that, I remember telling her I missed her. She said, "We will e together again". Her voice sounded certain, absolute.
I moved two months later. I didn't move far but, I did move. I've lived in that new apartment ever since. Again, for a while nothing happened. I grew into even more of a loner. I kept to myself. I went to work, did very well at my job, came home and spent all of my free time pursuing hobbies. I kept friends and family at arms length. Only a few months passed before I once again started seeing things in the night sky.
Set up on an ocean beach in Hampton Bays in the fall of 2008, I saw a brightly lit orb dance above the ocean water at night before firing off into the sky. I would see lights in the night sky, steady unblinking lights, moving along before making a sudden right turn without losing speed. I would put myself in situations where I was completely alone, late at night, often on beaches, taking long exposure photos of the night sky and I would see things moving around in ways that airplanes simply can't. These minor incidents continued for some time - about a year. It seemed that whenever I went out at night to photograph the sky, to capture ambient lighting in a single frame that made the photos I was taking look like they were taken in daylight. That's when I saw something very strange close up.
I was on a beach named Long Beach in Smithtown, New York. It was around 11pm and early in 2010. I watched as this object, I wouldn't call it a cylinder... it looked like a metallic craft similar to the shuttles on Farscape with windows running around the entire circumference, came in low over the beach. I was set up not far away however, I was far enough down the beach, to the west of the pavilion, where the parking lot was well out of sight and the street lights stood no chance of illuminating the beach.
On the horizon were the towers from the Northport LIPA plant to the west. Fireworks were going off a little earlier. Anyway, the craft. It came in low casting light, a non-directional light, around the beach. I was maybe 500 feet from it and I could see silhouettes inside it. One of them waved. This thing then moved off down the beach to the west and extinguished the light. My mind flashed to Cora. For the first time since she left New York, I felt close to her. I began jogging down the beach, leaving my camera and lenses behind, in the direction this object moved in. I went perhaps a half mile but, there was no sign of it.
My mood was killed. I packed up my gear and went home. I remember stopping at a gas station in Saint James. Oddly enough, there was no one there, the little store that was part of it was closed, but the pumps were still on. I filled up my gas tank and drove to the far side of the station to throw garbage in my car away in a trash can. As I dug through the car, clearing out papers that had accumulated over the weekend, my hand came into contact with a cylinder under the passenger seat. I saw that it was a tube of apricot colored lipstick when I pulled it out.
The site of that lipstick and the overwhelming... emotion... that I felt for Cora turned my stomach. I wound up tossing it into the trash can and continuing on my way home.
Again months would pass. I temporarily gave up my photography hobby. 2010 crept by and slipped into 2011. It was again Spring. I was heading out in the late afternoon with my camera gear for the first time in a very long time. As I drove, I wandered along roads weaving through Stoney Brook. I had no clear destination in mind. My car or my subconscious, whichever you wish to name as the culprit, brought me again to Long Beach in Smithtown.
It was late afternoon. I sat on the beach waiting for sunset. I watched as a group of kids came, horsed around and left. I watched as the few beachcombers who were out get in their cars and leave. Night fell. The water of the Long Island Sound were still, almost like glass near the shore so I set up near the high tide line. As the sun set, I shot photos of it. When darkness fell, I took some long exposure photos of the lights on the shore of Connecticut. At around maybe 9pm, the fireworks started to the west. I recognized the flashing lights on the towers at the Northport LIPA power plant, the fireworks were to the north and perhaps a little further west than those towers. I watched and took photos of them. After they ended, I sat on the beach for a while looking up at the night sky. I wondered if those fireworks were in celebration of some event that happens every year, if I was on that beach on the same night the previous year.
My thoughts drifted to Cora. I wondered where she was, if she was doing well - the same thoughts I always think about her. On that beach that night, nothing else happened.
I stopped at a diner in Smithtown on my way home for a quick burger. As I turned onto the road my apartment complex sits on, the clock in my car read 10:56. A moment later I slowed to turn into my apartment complex. Something in the night sky to the east caught my eye. I turned my head to see a formation of three orangish lights in the sky. The one thought that ran through my mind was, "Why am I always seeing these things?!".
I sped into my apartment complex and parked my car. Jumping out of the car with my camera in hand, I ran into the road and looked up. A huge triangular dark object hung low in the sky and was creeping towards me. Just then, a group of 4 young men exited the apartment building next to mine. Three of them continued walking to the corner while the 4th called out for me asking for a cigarette. At this point, this huge object was starting to pass overhead. I pointed up at and and shouted something like "That thing is right above us and you're asking me for a cigarette?!". The young man looked up and started shouting all sorts of profanities. His three buddies, who were about 20 feet away from him, turned to look at him. They then looked up and all three of them also began spewing a color array of profanities. I aimed my camera up and shot a picture. As soon as the shutter clicked open, I knew it was a waste of time. The camera was still set up for long exposure photos and it was far too dark to try to change the shutter speed and aperture.
An orange light sat in each of the three corners of this object. The light was a bright orange with a darker orange... halo... around each of the three "bulbs". There looked to be a "U" shaped light in the center of each one. This thing had physical mass. It blocked out the stars as it passed over head and it was maybe only 100 - 200 feet up, if that. As we watched and as those four young men swore and hooted, the first light, the one under the point at the "front" (or, rather, at the point in the direction this thing was moving in) went out. Suddenly the four young men stopped. I looked over at them. Almost robotically, they lowered their heads and quietly walked around the side of that apartment building in the direction of the other parking lot. I looked back up and watched as the other two lights went out. I could see this thing moving by watching in blocking out stars. I watched as it moved on towards high tension power lines on the far side of the apartment complex.
That's when I had what I like to call my "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" moment. I got back into my car and began chasing after it. However, I lost sight of it when it moved beyond those power lines.
For the record, I had never seen those four young men before and have never seen them since.
I started going out after dark with my camera gear regularly. For a week or two, nothing unusual happened. Then one night I was driving on a north bound road and came over a rise that was high enough where, on a clear day, you could see the Long Island Sound in the far distance. There were cars on the side of the road and people standing around. For some reason I pulled over. I got out of the car and walked over to the maybe 8 - 10 people who were standing in the shoulder of the road. The were all looking north. I turned and looked. There, above the ground in the distance, at a point that I would judge to be about where the shore would be seen in daylight, were four immense bright white lights. I stood there for an unknown amount of time - minutes certainly, maybe less than 10. We all looked at each other and got back in our cars. They were all quiet except for one or two hushed "what is that"'s. I got in my car and started driving north towards these lights.
Again my mind went to Cora. I don't know why. I went less than half a mile down the road when I saw the four lights traveling up into the sky one by one. At that point I again pulled over. I sat there in the dark on the side of the road for a few minutes and then went home.
I celebrated my birthday with my parents. Early May, 2011. When I got home, I looked up and saw how clear the sky was. I made a quick decision: I would grab my telescope and cameras and go to Robert Moses for some stargazing.
When I got to Robert Moses, I drove to the far end of the field where I would be alone. I set up my telescope and cameras and spent some time gazing at the moon through my reflector. There's something about seeing the moon close up that is quite simply humbling. When the moon finally set, I trained my cameras upwards for some long exposure photos. I keep my telescope in a huge Pelican case that's so large that it has, in its time, doubled as an improvised bench and table. While my cameras recorded the sky, I laid back on that case, tipped my head a little over the end so that all I could see was the night sky from one end of the periphery of my vision to the other.
By this point in my life I had decided that I really needed to do something about myself to get my act together. I couldn't explain a great many things I had seen or experienced but, maybe that wasn't so unusual. Maybe that is the mystery of human existence that you here people prattle on about every so often. And while I could retell what happened next in a more engaging and interesting way, I wont.
As I laid there on that huge Pelican case with my arms and legs hanging off it and my head tilted skyward, I quite simply fell asleep and had a truly unusual dream. I dreamed of Cora.
In my dream, I saw a figuring walking towards me across that field at Robert Moses. Nervous because of all the crazies who hang out in dark areas at night, I kept an eye on this figure as it drew closer. When it drew close enough, I immediately recognized Cora. She looked great. We ran to each other and embraced. I held her as tight as I could. We stood in silence for a while just enjoying each others embrace. We started saying much we missed each other, how we never thought we'd see each other again, how we couldn't believe we would allow anything to come between us. We were both teary eyed. The conversation was at the same time frantic and chaotic. I felt as if something inside me had finally come unclenched, that everything from that point forward would be alright.
But in this dream, she took a step back. She looked up at me and told me that she couldn't stay and that she didn't know if she ever could. She said to always remember her, to never forget. And then she ran off into the night. I woke up. It was a dream. Hours had passed. I looked around, all my stuff was still there undisturbed. It was some time around 4am. I didn't want to be there anymore so I packed my things and drove home. I thought about her on the drive home, any many times since. I still feel for her but, the pain is gone. I haven't used my telescope since.
My life became... normal. I started becoming less of an introvert. I started spending a lot more time with my siblings and parents. Life was *normal*.
But it didn't end there.
In late summer of 2011, I went on a trip to Maine with some friends. We were camping out near the coast. We decided that on the last night of our trip, we would build a huge bonfire in our campsite and have a big party. As we were setting up, I noticed that the camp site next to ours was taken. Just before dark, the man who was camping there camp over to our campsite and offered us some fish he had caught that day. We gladly accepted. I wasn't paying attention at first but, when I looked at the man he had my full attention. The same familiar sandy haired man who I had encountered several times over the course of something like 13 years quickly smiled at me. I was stunned as he headed back to his campsite without saying anything else.
As the night drew on, people from other campsites came and joined us. There must have been 30 or more people there each bringing food and drink to share. I was sitting in a camping chair near the fire facing the camp site next to ours that the sandy haired man had apparently come from. I felt out of place as a pretty fun sounding party raged around me. I needed to find that man and confront him. My life had finally become normal and I found that I liked that normality but, I had questions.
Then the man sat down in the chair next to mine. He greeted me by name. This time, I had full control over my actions. I asked him who he was and why he was there. One of the guys I was camping with took notice and said something along the lines of "I can't believe you two know each other! We're hundreds of miles from home" before going back to whatever it was he was doing before he noticed me speaking with the sandy haired man.
The sandy haired man seemed quite normal. He spoke about seeing Portland on his way up the coast and, creepily enough, how he knew I stopped to see the lighthouses there, too. He went on about tourist things he claimed to have done since arriving and just seemed to blather on about nonsense as if he was a regular guy on a camping trip.
As the party began to wind down, the other people went back to their camp sites and my buddies turned in for the night. I sat there with the sandy haired man for some time waiting for him to offer me something in the way of answers. I still don't know if what he said was an explanation or not.
As the fire began to die down, he put a hand on my shoulder and told me how good it was to see me again. He said he knew things were going well. But then he said something that stuck me. He said that just because you dream something doesn't mean its true. He said that there's a whole universe of experiences out there to enjoy. He told me that change can be a good thing and that sometimes when we let someone we really care about go, they come back. He stood, turned to me, pointed to the sky and said, "Don't stop looking up". He then walked off in a direction that lead him away from the campsite I figured was his. I haven't seen him since.
When I got back home, life continued to be normal. I listened to the sandy haired mans advice and haven't stopped looking up. Sometimes I'll catch a glimpse of something in the sky but, the things I see these days always seem rational. I've done a bit of traveling since then and plan on doing quite a bit more this year.
For those of you who didn't find this too long to read, I would imagine that you're sitting there doubting every word of this. Maybe some of you are wondering if I was just drunk or stoned - in fact, I've never done drugs and rarely have alcohol. This story is, to the best of my ability and knowledge, representative of my strange experiences in life. While I offer you no proof, no evidence, I also have no reason to make something like this up. I also cannot offer you any explanation for any of the objects I've seen in the sky, for the sandy haired man or for Cora. But, I do know that both the sandy haired man and Cora were real. Other people met them, saw them, accounted for their presence and existence.
I considered opening up about these experiences several times in the past but always chose not to because, and I openly and freely admit this, my story is too fantastic to believe. With that said, you either believe it or you don't. Nothing I can say will sway anyone's opinion. But, at the very least, by cataloging my known experiences here, I am able to enter it into some sort of record where you, the public, are free to consume it, analyse it, and either take my word for granted or chalk me up as a crackpot.
I will come back to this post periodically, at least in the near future, is case any of you ask for me to clarify any of this. However, given how these experiences seem to have dissipated completely, I'm interesting in moving on with life. That is the point of human existence, is it not? To stand at the summit of a body of experiences, survey the landscape and move on to a new horizon.
I remember as a child laying in bed at night and seeing light descend outside and illuminate the area of the side of my parents house through a drawn blind and pulled curtains. The neighbors dog would bark at first but, after a minute or so it would fall silent. The light would remain for only a couple of minutes sometimes. Other times it would stay for much longer. It was only light, though, bright yellowish-white light seeping in around the edges of the window blind. I was so young that I had no basis for comprehending it. I just knew that it was strange and scary.
Years would pass. I was perhaps 8 years old or so looking out the back door of my parents home. It was night. As I looked out at the night, I saw what I can only describe ad a yellowish-white disc on edge with an almost cartoonish yellow flaming tail edged in orange fly at about the speed a bird would fly from the north to the south. This object was about the size of a dime in the sky. It moved beyond my field of view to the south and I immediately started crying and screaming for my mother, who was on the other side of the house. A moment later I again saw this object. Its orientation had changed. It looked like a disc laying flat at perhaps a 35 degree angle. It shot faster that anything I had previously seen from the south to the east gaining altitude until it was out of site. This memory has stuck with me my entire life.
Again, years would pass. I was in maybe 6th grade when I noticed a lump covered in what I would describe as scare tissue on my right knee cap. It's size was about that of a caper or, if you could, a BB sliced in half. I would look at it often wondering where it came from since I had no memory of skinning my knee.
Again, years would pass. I was a senior in high school. Boys being boys, I would go down to the local "make-out spot" with a girl I was dating. This spot, an unpaved road that stuck out into the bay in a particularly dark and poorly lit community where home owners typically could not see their neighbors houses when they looked out their windows, was only a few miles from where I lived. On more than one occasion, we drove down to the end of this unpaved road and parked only to blink and see that hours had passed. On those few nights, we would literally park the car, look at at the time and notice two or three hours had passed during which neither of us had any memories - completely unlike the nights where we got up to the normal things teenage couples often get up to in such places.
In August of 1994, I was off to college. The night before leaving my parents home, I was sitting there looking at the lump on my knee. That's when I did the unthinkable - the closest I had ever come to mutilating anything. I used an exacto knife to remove the lump. There was no blood. The lump felt like skin wrapped around something hard. I flushed it and went off to college a few hours later. I have no idea what it was but, I like to think it was just gravel or something that got embedded in my skin during some bike accident that I didn't remember.
I had a somewhat normal freshman year of college and moved overseas for my sophomore year. When I returned to the US, life was normal for a year and a half. My last semester of college, I again moved overseas, to Central America, where I would participate in a fairly cool internship.
It was in a Cloud Forest in northwestern Costa Rica that I would again experience some high strangeness. I was hiking with a female student who I had become friends with. We started hearing strange noises off in the distance and figured it was coming from some sort of monkey or other. I remember stopping at a very tall and wide tree with roots that stuck over 6 feet in the air at the trunk. That's where my memory becomes... dual? I remember seeing the tree, checking out the roots with the woman I was with, and continuing on our way with nothing remarkable happening. However, I also remember a man standing between two of the roots. He had short sandy colored hair and was maybe 5'9" tall with thin framed round lens glasses. He looked like he was maybe in his early 40's or late 30's and was thin in the same way that some people are just thin. He spoke to us but I don't remember what he said. He seemed like he was trying to be kind and would smile quickly every now and then. He was wearing a dark colored suit with a matching tie. In that line of memory, the man spoke to us for a while and we didn't respond; we then continued on our way. The strange thing is that the man looked familiar. I had seen him before, I was sure of it, perhaps in the village I grew up in when I was a child.
Again, years would pass. They were, in a way, wasted years of my life as I view them now. Sure, I learned new trades and laid the foundation for a successful career but, in those few years I never looked up. I never stopped to look at the world around me. After returning from Central America, I had developed an affinity with rural settings. While I would eventually work in a city, to this day I live in as rural an environment as I can and accept the long commutes.
I moved in December of 2000 and a couple more years would pass where I lived a normal life. Then my memory of such things becomes questionable. I don't remember, or have any notes, of seeing or experiencing anything unusual. But then I woke up one morning, rolled over in bed and was surprised that there was no one there. I remember wondering where she went and as I got up to look for her, there was no sign of her. But I knew this woman. I could picture her in my mind as clearly as if she was sitting next to me. She was short, just over 5 feet tall, in good physical shape and had blond hair that would fall to her shoulders although she always wore it up. I knew things about her. I knew about the things she liked and the things she didn't like. I knew her personality and her beliefs. I knew that I had been spending time with her but, she wasn't there.
Over the next few weeks, I decided to investigate. I had a very strange feeling that I wasn't comfortable with and was unnerved about that feeling. Something strange was going on and I didn't know what it was. So I did what I could. When seeing friends, I would ask if they remembered that cute blond girl I had met. None of them did and I would make an excuse like "Oh, I must have introduced her to someone else". A couple I was friends with went out to eat with me one night not long after this. I remember the dinner well. The three of us had a wonderful time. A couple of weeks would pass and the woman from that couple, we'll call her Milly, ran into me one day and asked about Cora. "How are things going with you and Cora? She seemed so nice". I didn't know who she was talking about and Milly said something along the lines of, "Cora, the girl you brought out to dinner with us a few weeks ago. Did I mix up her name?". I covered by saying something like, "Oh, yes, haha, that was Carolyn". The next time I ran into Milly, she didn't remember "Cora".
All through this time, I was spending more and more time alone partially because of my project load at work and partially because I was always tired and just didn't feel social. A few months after I learned Milly no longer remembered the woman, Cora, who I don't remember as having dined with us that night, I went to a local pizza place to grab a slice or two for dinner. It was night and the pizza place was on a busy road. As I walked in, everything seemed normal. I ordered some food, waited for it, paid, and started heading out the door with it. That's when I saw the man sitting alone in a booth with an empty plate in front of him and reading a newspaper. The man looked up at me and I swear to you that it was the same man I somehow remember not meeting in that cloud forest in Costa Rica. He smiled quickly as our eyes locked. I couldn't help but stop.
The man lowered his newspaper and, greeting me by name, said something along the lines of "these are interesting times we live in". He said other things but, I had no memory of them as soon as I walked out the door. The man looked like he hadn't aged a day and again he was wearing the same suit and tie.
I went back to the apartment I rented at the time, at and sat there thinking. My lease was coming to an end in a couple of months and that night I decided I would move to a different town. All through those few months and the following two months before I would move, my knowledge of this blond woman, this Cora, grew. Every so often my mind would flash part of a memory with her in it. I thought I was buckling under the stress at work even though I didn't find my work particularly stressful.
I moved two months after seeing that man in that pizza place. And as I type this, I fought the urge to write "... after meeting that man again in that pizza place". I moved out of that apartment a month before the lease was supposed to end. I moved in less than a week after signing a new lease in a new town almost 30 minutes away by car.
I became very interested in photography when I moved into my new apartment. I bought a DSLR and would spend a lot of my free time traveling around the island taking photos of seascapes and landscapes. I always traveled alone. Except I didn't. When I thought back to a trip I took on a previous weekend, I would sometimes remember the blond woman, Cora, being with me. Things became strange in the summer of 2007. You see, that's when I was spending a tremendous amount of time with Cora. I would get home from work and we'd spend a lot of evenings each week hanging out together. None of it seemed strange. It was as if she was always there and as if my uncertainty about whether or not she was real vanished. Sometimes I would have a moment of what I think of now as "clarity" and I would wonder if I was going crazy but, there was physical evidence of her in my home and in my car. I would find a loose hair here and there. There was an apricot colored lipstick in my car. While visiting me one day, my brother in law pointed out a pair of her shoes. She had clothing in my home and people at places I would frequent - the coffee shop, a local restaurant we ate at all the time, a cashier at a candy store out east that we always stopped in, would always ask about her when I was alone. She owned a sail boat - I knew specifically what kind it was, a MacGregor 26 - and we would spend weekends living on it. I have photos of the boat sailing past Shelter Island that I know I took from the shore when she dropped me at the pier in Greenport specifically to take photos of the boat as she sailed it. Cora was real. She was a physical living human being with mass and original thoughts, she had a job and I met her coworkers, she met some of my coworkers. We had been seriously dating since February 2007. But in September 2007, things became weird again.
In September of that year, her parents retired to Florida. I had met her parents. She wasn't comfortable with the distance and announced that she was moving to live near them. She sold the boat. I helped her pack her truck, a blue Expedition. I pleaded with her to stay but she couldn't. She said she knew in her heart that she had to go. I watched her leave in early September 2007. She got in touch with me when she arrived in Florida and that was the last time I remember hearing her voice. It was a turning point in my life. The woman who didn't exist proved that she did exist. Other people remember her. And I wasn't insane and had a clean bill of health.
Later that month, the sightings started. The first few things I saw were strange flashing lights that seemed to dance in the night sky at a distance. I wrote them off as airplanes or helicopters. A month or two later, though, my eyes were pried open.
I was sitting in my office with a guy I was friends with at work. It was around noon maybe. We were looking out at a building across the street that had just opened after a very long construction when we both saw something, something I will describe as a squared metallic orb, bob in the air above the tall tree's across the street. It was small but gauging its size against the trees it bobbed over and trying to estimate its size, it seemed like it would be large enough for 1 person, maybe two if they were crammed in. The object literally bobbed into view with movement that looked like a rock skipping across water in slow motion. It hovered for nearly a minute before shooting straight up at blistering speed. We bit our tongues and said nothing. We just looked at each other. Corporate offices for your employer is no place to shout about a ufo sighting.
I began looking upwards. I would pack my telescope and cameras and head out to vacant places at night simply to sit under the stars and look up. The more I looked up, the more things I would see. Things that I couldn't explain. I felt as if I was going through some sort of awakening. I started keeping a log of sightings.
In early 2008, I would see a black triangle flying from north to south, about the size of field mouse in the sky near Huntington. I started taking a different route home only to have a series of sightings of a very bright light night after night in the same spot. I wrote it off as a light on a radio tower "or something" until the 4th or 5th night, when I saw two lights in the sky about 50 degrees off the horizon spiraling around each other. Looking to my right, I realized I was in that same stretch of road. There was the bright light yet again. Only this time, I couldn't write it off as a light on a radio tower. It shot off to the south east disappearing from sight within a heartbeat.
A few weeks later, in Spring of 2008, I was out walking around my apartment complex at around 10pm looking up at the sky trying to decide if it would be a good night to take photos of the moon. I saw a man sitting on a bench. When I drew close to him, he looked up and greeted me by name. It was the same sandy haired man. He looked exactly like he did the other times I saw him. He smiled at me and said, "Change can be good. You should consider moving. Not far, but you should consider moving". I don't know why but, when he finished speaking I just walked away back to my apartment. The thought of questioning him, or of going back to confront him, simply did not cross my mind.
All through this time, I would think about Cora all the time. I missed her desperately but, she didn't answer e-mail and her mobile phone was disconnected. For some reason, I was looking for apartments. A few weeks passed. It was late May 2008. I was sitting alone in my apartment thinking about her, thinking about all those nights we spent on her boat, remembering laying there in the bunk with my arms around her as she slept listening to the water slap the hull. I missed her so much I ached.
A few weeks passed. Again, sitting in my apartment alone, thinking about her, thinking about places I could move to, my phone rang. The caller ID told me it was an unknown caller. I always ignore calls that the caller ID couldn't identify. No one ever left a message. But for some reason, I answered the phone that time. Her familiar voice greeted me. She told me that she missed me. She told me that she loved me. She didn't mention how her life was going. I don't remember saying much of anything. The call was very brief. The last thing she said to me was "I think change can be good. You really should find a new place, move". I remember asking her why she said that, I remember telling her I missed her. She said, "We will e together again". Her voice sounded certain, absolute.
I moved two months later. I didn't move far but, I did move. I've lived in that new apartment ever since. Again, for a while nothing happened. I grew into even more of a loner. I kept to myself. I went to work, did very well at my job, came home and spent all of my free time pursuing hobbies. I kept friends and family at arms length. Only a few months passed before I once again started seeing things in the night sky.
Set up on an ocean beach in Hampton Bays in the fall of 2008, I saw a brightly lit orb dance above the ocean water at night before firing off into the sky. I would see lights in the night sky, steady unblinking lights, moving along before making a sudden right turn without losing speed. I would put myself in situations where I was completely alone, late at night, often on beaches, taking long exposure photos of the night sky and I would see things moving around in ways that airplanes simply can't. These minor incidents continued for some time - about a year. It seemed that whenever I went out at night to photograph the sky, to capture ambient lighting in a single frame that made the photos I was taking look like they were taken in daylight. That's when I saw something very strange close up.
I was on a beach named Long Beach in Smithtown, New York. It was around 11pm and early in 2010. I watched as this object, I wouldn't call it a cylinder... it looked like a metallic craft similar to the shuttles on Farscape with windows running around the entire circumference, came in low over the beach. I was set up not far away however, I was far enough down the beach, to the west of the pavilion, where the parking lot was well out of sight and the street lights stood no chance of illuminating the beach.
On the horizon were the towers from the Northport LIPA plant to the west. Fireworks were going off a little earlier. Anyway, the craft. It came in low casting light, a non-directional light, around the beach. I was maybe 500 feet from it and I could see silhouettes inside it. One of them waved. This thing then moved off down the beach to the west and extinguished the light. My mind flashed to Cora. For the first time since she left New York, I felt close to her. I began jogging down the beach, leaving my camera and lenses behind, in the direction this object moved in. I went perhaps a half mile but, there was no sign of it.
My mood was killed. I packed up my gear and went home. I remember stopping at a gas station in Saint James. Oddly enough, there was no one there, the little store that was part of it was closed, but the pumps were still on. I filled up my gas tank and drove to the far side of the station to throw garbage in my car away in a trash can. As I dug through the car, clearing out papers that had accumulated over the weekend, my hand came into contact with a cylinder under the passenger seat. I saw that it was a tube of apricot colored lipstick when I pulled it out.
The site of that lipstick and the overwhelming... emotion... that I felt for Cora turned my stomach. I wound up tossing it into the trash can and continuing on my way home.
Again months would pass. I temporarily gave up my photography hobby. 2010 crept by and slipped into 2011. It was again Spring. I was heading out in the late afternoon with my camera gear for the first time in a very long time. As I drove, I wandered along roads weaving through Stoney Brook. I had no clear destination in mind. My car or my subconscious, whichever you wish to name as the culprit, brought me again to Long Beach in Smithtown.
It was late afternoon. I sat on the beach waiting for sunset. I watched as a group of kids came, horsed around and left. I watched as the few beachcombers who were out get in their cars and leave. Night fell. The water of the Long Island Sound were still, almost like glass near the shore so I set up near the high tide line. As the sun set, I shot photos of it. When darkness fell, I took some long exposure photos of the lights on the shore of Connecticut. At around maybe 9pm, the fireworks started to the west. I recognized the flashing lights on the towers at the Northport LIPA power plant, the fireworks were to the north and perhaps a little further west than those towers. I watched and took photos of them. After they ended, I sat on the beach for a while looking up at the night sky. I wondered if those fireworks were in celebration of some event that happens every year, if I was on that beach on the same night the previous year.
My thoughts drifted to Cora. I wondered where she was, if she was doing well - the same thoughts I always think about her. On that beach that night, nothing else happened.
I stopped at a diner in Smithtown on my way home for a quick burger. As I turned onto the road my apartment complex sits on, the clock in my car read 10:56. A moment later I slowed to turn into my apartment complex. Something in the night sky to the east caught my eye. I turned my head to see a formation of three orangish lights in the sky. The one thought that ran through my mind was, "Why am I always seeing these things?!".
I sped into my apartment complex and parked my car. Jumping out of the car with my camera in hand, I ran into the road and looked up. A huge triangular dark object hung low in the sky and was creeping towards me. Just then, a group of 4 young men exited the apartment building next to mine. Three of them continued walking to the corner while the 4th called out for me asking for a cigarette. At this point, this huge object was starting to pass overhead. I pointed up at and and shouted something like "That thing is right above us and you're asking me for a cigarette?!". The young man looked up and started shouting all sorts of profanities. His three buddies, who were about 20 feet away from him, turned to look at him. They then looked up and all three of them also began spewing a color array of profanities. I aimed my camera up and shot a picture. As soon as the shutter clicked open, I knew it was a waste of time. The camera was still set up for long exposure photos and it was far too dark to try to change the shutter speed and aperture.
An orange light sat in each of the three corners of this object. The light was a bright orange with a darker orange... halo... around each of the three "bulbs". There looked to be a "U" shaped light in the center of each one. This thing had physical mass. It blocked out the stars as it passed over head and it was maybe only 100 - 200 feet up, if that. As we watched and as those four young men swore and hooted, the first light, the one under the point at the "front" (or, rather, at the point in the direction this thing was moving in) went out. Suddenly the four young men stopped. I looked over at them. Almost robotically, they lowered their heads and quietly walked around the side of that apartment building in the direction of the other parking lot. I looked back up and watched as the other two lights went out. I could see this thing moving by watching in blocking out stars. I watched as it moved on towards high tension power lines on the far side of the apartment complex.
That's when I had what I like to call my "Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind" moment. I got back into my car and began chasing after it. However, I lost sight of it when it moved beyond those power lines.
For the record, I had never seen those four young men before and have never seen them since.
I started going out after dark with my camera gear regularly. For a week or two, nothing unusual happened. Then one night I was driving on a north bound road and came over a rise that was high enough where, on a clear day, you could see the Long Island Sound in the far distance. There were cars on the side of the road and people standing around. For some reason I pulled over. I got out of the car and walked over to the maybe 8 - 10 people who were standing in the shoulder of the road. The were all looking north. I turned and looked. There, above the ground in the distance, at a point that I would judge to be about where the shore would be seen in daylight, were four immense bright white lights. I stood there for an unknown amount of time - minutes certainly, maybe less than 10. We all looked at each other and got back in our cars. They were all quiet except for one or two hushed "what is that"'s. I got in my car and started driving north towards these lights.
Again my mind went to Cora. I don't know why. I went less than half a mile down the road when I saw the four lights traveling up into the sky one by one. At that point I again pulled over. I sat there in the dark on the side of the road for a few minutes and then went home.
I celebrated my birthday with my parents. Early May, 2011. When I got home, I looked up and saw how clear the sky was. I made a quick decision: I would grab my telescope and cameras and go to Robert Moses for some stargazing.
When I got to Robert Moses, I drove to the far end of the field where I would be alone. I set up my telescope and cameras and spent some time gazing at the moon through my reflector. There's something about seeing the moon close up that is quite simply humbling. When the moon finally set, I trained my cameras upwards for some long exposure photos. I keep my telescope in a huge Pelican case that's so large that it has, in its time, doubled as an improvised bench and table. While my cameras recorded the sky, I laid back on that case, tipped my head a little over the end so that all I could see was the night sky from one end of the periphery of my vision to the other.
By this point in my life I had decided that I really needed to do something about myself to get my act together. I couldn't explain a great many things I had seen or experienced but, maybe that wasn't so unusual. Maybe that is the mystery of human existence that you here people prattle on about every so often. And while I could retell what happened next in a more engaging and interesting way, I wont.
As I laid there on that huge Pelican case with my arms and legs hanging off it and my head tilted skyward, I quite simply fell asleep and had a truly unusual dream. I dreamed of Cora.
In my dream, I saw a figuring walking towards me across that field at Robert Moses. Nervous because of all the crazies who hang out in dark areas at night, I kept an eye on this figure as it drew closer. When it drew close enough, I immediately recognized Cora. She looked great. We ran to each other and embraced. I held her as tight as I could. We stood in silence for a while just enjoying each others embrace. We started saying much we missed each other, how we never thought we'd see each other again, how we couldn't believe we would allow anything to come between us. We were both teary eyed. The conversation was at the same time frantic and chaotic. I felt as if something inside me had finally come unclenched, that everything from that point forward would be alright.
But in this dream, she took a step back. She looked up at me and told me that she couldn't stay and that she didn't know if she ever could. She said to always remember her, to never forget. And then she ran off into the night. I woke up. It was a dream. Hours had passed. I looked around, all my stuff was still there undisturbed. It was some time around 4am. I didn't want to be there anymore so I packed my things and drove home. I thought about her on the drive home, any many times since. I still feel for her but, the pain is gone. I haven't used my telescope since.
My life became... normal. I started becoming less of an introvert. I started spending a lot more time with my siblings and parents. Life was *normal*.
But it didn't end there.
In late summer of 2011, I went on a trip to Maine with some friends. We were camping out near the coast. We decided that on the last night of our trip, we would build a huge bonfire in our campsite and have a big party. As we were setting up, I noticed that the camp site next to ours was taken. Just before dark, the man who was camping there camp over to our campsite and offered us some fish he had caught that day. We gladly accepted. I wasn't paying attention at first but, when I looked at the man he had my full attention. The same familiar sandy haired man who I had encountered several times over the course of something like 13 years quickly smiled at me. I was stunned as he headed back to his campsite without saying anything else.
As the night drew on, people from other campsites came and joined us. There must have been 30 or more people there each bringing food and drink to share. I was sitting in a camping chair near the fire facing the camp site next to ours that the sandy haired man had apparently come from. I felt out of place as a pretty fun sounding party raged around me. I needed to find that man and confront him. My life had finally become normal and I found that I liked that normality but, I had questions.
Then the man sat down in the chair next to mine. He greeted me by name. This time, I had full control over my actions. I asked him who he was and why he was there. One of the guys I was camping with took notice and said something along the lines of "I can't believe you two know each other! We're hundreds of miles from home" before going back to whatever it was he was doing before he noticed me speaking with the sandy haired man.
The sandy haired man seemed quite normal. He spoke about seeing Portland on his way up the coast and, creepily enough, how he knew I stopped to see the lighthouses there, too. He went on about tourist things he claimed to have done since arriving and just seemed to blather on about nonsense as if he was a regular guy on a camping trip.
As the party began to wind down, the other people went back to their camp sites and my buddies turned in for the night. I sat there with the sandy haired man for some time waiting for him to offer me something in the way of answers. I still don't know if what he said was an explanation or not.
As the fire began to die down, he put a hand on my shoulder and told me how good it was to see me again. He said he knew things were going well. But then he said something that stuck me. He said that just because you dream something doesn't mean its true. He said that there's a whole universe of experiences out there to enjoy. He told me that change can be a good thing and that sometimes when we let someone we really care about go, they come back. He stood, turned to me, pointed to the sky and said, "Don't stop looking up". He then walked off in a direction that lead him away from the campsite I figured was his. I haven't seen him since.
When I got back home, life continued to be normal. I listened to the sandy haired mans advice and haven't stopped looking up. Sometimes I'll catch a glimpse of something in the sky but, the things I see these days always seem rational. I've done a bit of traveling since then and plan on doing quite a bit more this year.
For those of you who didn't find this too long to read, I would imagine that you're sitting there doubting every word of this. Maybe some of you are wondering if I was just drunk or stoned - in fact, I've never done drugs and rarely have alcohol. This story is, to the best of my ability and knowledge, representative of my strange experiences in life. While I offer you no proof, no evidence, I also have no reason to make something like this up. I also cannot offer you any explanation for any of the objects I've seen in the sky, for the sandy haired man or for Cora. But, I do know that both the sandy haired man and Cora were real. Other people met them, saw them, accounted for their presence and existence.
I considered opening up about these experiences several times in the past but always chose not to because, and I openly and freely admit this, my story is too fantastic to believe. With that said, you either believe it or you don't. Nothing I can say will sway anyone's opinion. But, at the very least, by cataloging my known experiences here, I am able to enter it into some sort of record where you, the public, are free to consume it, analyse it, and either take my word for granted or chalk me up as a crackpot.
I will come back to this post periodically, at least in the near future, is case any of you ask for me to clarify any of this. However, given how these experiences seem to have dissipated completely, I'm interesting in moving on with life. That is the point of human existence, is it not? To stand at the summit of a body of experiences, survey the landscape and move on to a new horizon.