Somewhere in the Skies - UFOs, the Mantis Man, and Shades of Death Road

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

On episode 162 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we welcome Patrick to the show to recount some of the strange and surreal stories of a lifetime with the unknown. First, Patrick and a friend find themselves lost with an unstable conspiracy theorist in the backcountry of Northern Montana in the winter of 1996. With all bets off, the two boys are forced to follow the bizarre man to safety, but not before he shows them an enormous UFO flying directly overhead, which shatters their reality and casts doubt that the strange guide may be telling the truth after all. And then, along the banks of a small river in New Jersey, a fisherman and his brother come face to face with an unimaginable entity. Two years later along this same stretch of river, Patrick watches up close as an extraordinary object hovers in the forest, sending wildlife scattering in all directions, before shooting skyward through the trees and disappearing into the heavens. And lastly, several strange encounters leave Patrick mystified at a place known by locals as Ghost Lake. Register for FREE for the All The Strange Virtual eXpo on May 30th to watch an exclusive presentation by Ryan and a handful of other awesome guest speakers! https://allthestrange.com/registration/ Special thanks to Patrick for sharing these stories with us. If you have a story you'd like to share on the show, please reach out by using the contact tab on the website to discuss more: www.somewhereintheskies.com/contact.html Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at www.CWseed.com Episode edited by Jane Palomera Moore Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is part of the eOne podcast network. To learn more, CLICK HERE Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Most valuable promotions in Netflix are hosting a blockbuster triple headliner Saturday, May 16th. Rhonda Rousey returns to face fellow woman's MMA pioneer Gina Carano in the main event. Plus co-main's Nate Diaz versus Mike Perry. And the best heavyweight in the world, Francis Ngano versus Felipe Lenz. Watch Rhonda Rousey versus Gina Carrano, live only on Netflix. Saturday, May 16th at 9 p.m. Eastern Center time, 6 p.m. Pacific time. Something strange is happening on May 30th.

Rogue Planet presents All the Strange 2020. A virtual online expo highlighting and celebrating UFOs, extraterrestrial life, ghosts, Bigfoot, you know, All the Strange. Join us on May 30th as we showcase a series of fun presentations delivered by a lineup of awesome humans who are fascinated by The Strange. And get this, All The Strange 2020 is a 100% free event. So jump over to All The Strange.com and register now. This is somewhere in the skies. Brian Sprig

In 1996, I had the first of my four UFO sightings, but this was the big one, the first one. This pretty much blew the doors off my reality. It took place in Montana, and the story leading up to the sighting is almost just as good as the sighting itself. In 96, I was 20 years old, and I worked very hard for a baseball scholarship, and that was taken away from me. And instead of wallowing and self-pity in my bedroom, I convinced a friend of a friend of a lot of a baseball scholarship. I convinced a friend of mine to move to Montana. When I left high school, most of the guys were going to either Colorado or Arizona, one or the other. And I said, you know what, let's change this up.

And I convinced a buddy of mine to go to Montana. When we were out in Montana during our first month, it was in the middle of winter. We sat in an empty apartment for a month, knew nobody. And then this man just started knocking on her door all the time. He was absolutely nuts. We knew it, but we had nothing to do. And we entertain him. He just showed up every day, sat in our living room and just spewed conspiracy theories, telling us that 1999, December 31st was the end of the world, and we should get ready. And that AIDS and cancer was mainlined into society by the American government.

You know, as 20-year-old kids, this was entertaining to just sit there and listen to this guy, rather than just stare at the walls and wait for the snow to melt. Anyway, this guy just kept talking about this cabin he owned up in the north part of month. And this is where he was going to get ready for Y2K. This is where him and these people on his commune were going to prepare for the end of the world. So we listened to this guy for about a month straight. He'd stop in every day and just spew the same nonsense. And then one day he asked us if we would like to take a ride,

if we would like to go to this cabin. Now Montana is a big state. In the southwestern part where we were, we were going to have to drive to the Canadian border. And if you can picture a map, this is exactly a map. This is exactly like driving from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio. It was a long way. But we were bored, and we jumped in my car one night, and we started driving. And around midnight, the guy actually gave us some wrong directions, I think, on purpose.

And we got stuck in the snow. We were not going anywhere. So we had to start walking, and we started walking through the Montana wilderness in the middle of winter, with somebody we knew was certifiably crazy. It was me and my friend, and we just followed this man, as he just kept telling us, this is the way to my cabin. If we don't make it to my cabin, we're pretty much going to freeze the death. So your car's stuck, you're going nowhere, and if you don't follow me, you're basically dead. So we started following this guy, and right off the bat, he jumped off the road, and we started walking through the woods, and we knew we were lost, and we were in big trouble.

He just kept firing off, you know, all about the conspiracy theories, and, you know, way do you mean? meet this person tomorrow when, you know, the sun comes up, and we hadn't even gotten to the cabin yet. We were just afraid for our life. So, as we were walking through the woods, we were starting to give up hope, and he saw a clearing, and we finally came out into this clearing where he could, you know, gain his bearings again and find out if we were truly lost or not. At this point, it was about three in the morning, and we were under a pitch-black Montana sky. I mean, the big sky in Montana, if you've never seen it, it's just, it's unbelievable. You know, even if you're in a life-threatening moment, it'll make you forget about everything, just the beauty of it all. And underneath

this huge crystal clear black sky with just stars that you could reach out and touch, um, there we were, just post-holing across, you know, two feet of snow, going a couple feet at a time, just, you know, making no headway. And we were, my friends and I were very angry, very angry at this guy, but what we were going to do? So anyway, right? right at that moment, he goes, you guys don't believe me that AIDS was mainlined into society by the American government. And you don't believe me that Y2K. It wasn't Y2K at the time, but December 31st, 1999 isn't the end of the world. He's like, you don't believe in any of that? And we were like, the guy's name was Todd. We were like, Todd, we're like, just shut the fuck up and just get us to

your cabin. He goes, I'm not moving another foot. We're not going anywhere until you tell me what that is. And then he pointed up to the sky. And, and, you know, he pointed up to the sky. And, reluctantly my friend and I looked up and there it was it was huge it was almost the size of the full moon and the moon was almost full that night and it was a circular object uh it was just this piercing white on top and green on the bottom with just this red strobe going across it just you know pulsating across and my friend and i looked up and we saw this thing and immediately we just fell back in the snow. Like just, you know, the snow was basically up to our waist.

So when we just fell over, we were, you know, just laying there. And we were looking up in the sky, just looking at this thing. It wasn't moving at all. But the light was just, you know, the green and the white and the red strobe. And we could tell, you know, from this, that this guy had seen this. This guy, Todd, had seen this so many times. It was almost a bore to him. And we laid there for, you know, about a minute.

And then all of a sudden, this thing just started dancing. all over the place. If you could picture the Rocky Mountains in the distance under the moonlight, you know, with just jagged snow-covered peaks, and, you know, there's the moonlight just illuminating off them. Here was this thing went from just hanging over our head to within a split second. It was just dancing up and around the Rocky Mountain peaks

before coming to a quick rest, and it would stop for a few seconds, and then just start dancing above the Rocky Mountain peaks again. And then all of a sudden it shot back up into the sky, and it just stood stationary. My friend and I literally had tears just streaming down the sides of our face. It was like a combination of terror and awe, and we didn't even know what to think.

And the guy Todd was standing right next to us the whole time, and he goes, you think that's messed up? He always called us boys. He's like, boys, you think that's messed up? He's like, there's usually four or five of those things all flying around in formation. He goes, that's why my wife and my daughter won't come back up.

here anymore. They're too scared. You know, and that's when he told us, wait till you meet my friends tomorrow. They'll tell you stories about these things that you won't believe. Well, we ended up making it to Todd's cabin that night. And, you know, I'm cutting through a pretty grand story just to get to the back half of this where we met somebody else who actually had a, basically a running with one of these objects. It wasn't essentially the object that we saw. But it was a, as this man described it, not Todd, but one of his friends.

described. It was a circular craft. And he and his other friend were hunting one day, and they were hunting near Todd's cabin, which is where we were getting to the entire time. We were walking to Todd's cabin. But this was at another point, and these other two people were hunting near Todd's cabin when they saw this like metallic, like silverish, you know, circular, you know, it was a lenticular craft. It was like a form. It was like a form. I just hate saying those words, but he said it floated in over the trees just above tree top level. And this other gentleman and his friend were just watching this thing, which wasn't a good decision, which I'm about to say, these guys made a bad decision when the other guy took a shot at this thing.

It wasn't too far away. He said it was maybe 100, 150 feet off the ground, and the one guy took a shot at it. And he said, you know, he didn't know if he hit it, but he said that. The craft actually buckled after he shot. And he saw that after he shot at this thing, that it started moving toward him. So these guys who were in the same clearing that my friend and I and Todd were walking through, they just ran for cover. They ran for the tree line when they saw this thing slowly starting to move over the trees

and start following them in their direction. So while they were in the trees, this craft was, pretty much just scope and form, just hovering over the trees, like, you know, just trying to find out exactly where they were on the forest floor. And he said at the very last moment, the craft found him. It was hovering right overhead as they were like pretty much hugging a tree, just trying not to be seen or heard or anything. And he said that the bottom of this craft opened up and out of the bottom of it spilled this liquid, this very viscous gelatinous, this red liquid, and it got all over him. It got all over the one man and then got on the arm of

the other man. And when this guy who was telling me this story, it was now about a year and a half after this happened to him, he was riddled in tumors. I mean, his whole back was just, it was gross. He showed me. His friend who got hit in the hand in the arm, his hand was all red, you know, whatever, whatever this stuff was, I mean, if it wasn't radioactive, it was extremely poisonous. So between Todd, the guy that took us up to the cabin who showed us the initial UFO and his friends who told us this story about getting hit with this material that came out of the bottom of this craft, you know, I asked him and my friend asked him, what do you think this was, you know, was this, is this what we think it is? It's not from here? These guys didn't even want

hear it. They were conspiracy theorists through and through. They were getting ready for the end of the world. They thought it was the American government, you know, not, no. there was no other culprit in the world than the American government. Even if a straight-up alien just came up and looked at them face-to-face, they would still think it was the American government. But we ended up leaving there. And years later, my wife and I, my now wife, ended up moving back to Montana. And the people I was living with back then, you know, I had new friends.

And they were like, Pat, you tell this crazy story about being up north in Montana and all these UFOs and stuff happening. He's like, we got the weekend off. Let's go up there. And I was like, oh man, like I said, it's a nine-hour ride. But we did. My wife and I and some friends got up, got in the car, and drove back up there. And we ended up meeting up with some people who knew of Todd and knew of this other gentleman.

And the stories they told were even more outrageous. I won't even get into it because it'll, you know, lessen the validity of what I'm telling. But basically what they were telling my now wife. and my friends years later when we went back up there. It scared me, and it scared my life, and it scared my friends so bad that we took off. We lasted up there maybe four hours. We drove nine hours up there and lasted four hours because these people were so still wrapped up in government conspiracies and, you know, and this and that. But all I will say is that they call Montana Big Sky Country for a reason.

And, you know, if you look on, you know, a map where cities are lighted up and are lit up, I should say, and you see the power usage of each area in the country. Montana is nothing. It's just black. And if you ask anybody in Montana, I would say one out of five people will tell you a great UFO story. You know, the Great Falls missile silo is out there, which, you know, carried the nukes in the late 60s. They have missile silos all over Montana that nobody knows about. You know, and in the Great Falls case of 1967 when the UFO came in and just shut all 10 missiles down, made them non-operational.

It really is. I'll tell you one thing, if you want to go and possibly see a UFO in the lower 48 states, Montana is probably one of the top three places to go. But this was the story that started it all. After seeing this, I didn't get into UFOs heavy right off the bat

after seeing that. I did grow into a couple years in my 20s and do stuff, but it was in my late 20s and early 30s that I was like, after seeing a couple of the UFOs, more really bizarre flying, unidentified flying objects, as I should say, that the doors were open with this, but it was that first encounter that really, like I said, blew the doors off my reality. And just to reiterate one more time, it was, this thing was, when we initially saw it, the first UFO

that my friend and I fell back into the snow, you know, it was huge. You looked at the moon, you could picture a big moon, this was almost that size, white on top, green on the bottom with a red strobe and just it danced all over the sky uh came to a rest and as this guy said there's usually like four or five of them flying around in formation up there so if you ever want to check it out uh go to montana northwest corner you know hang out there for a couple nights during the summer during some clear clear black nights and uh you got a high probability at seeing something but that's that story i guess the best way to fully understand exactly what i saw and experienced late one night back in 2014.

We have to go back three years prior to 2011, and what a very good friend of mine saw in that exact location. This is the very northwest corner of New Jersey, in a rural area on a little river called the Muscanette Kong River. And my friend, who will call Mark, is a bunch of years older than me, a very prominent businessman and an upstanding member of the community. So when he talks, people tend to listen, and when he decided to drop this story on me one day,

I was shell-shocked, to say the least. But Mark knew of my interest in the UFO topic, and he heard me have conversations about it from time to time, and even partook in some of those conversations. But I had no idea that for three years, he'd been living with this bottled-up experience that rocked him to the core. He had never told anybody about it,

which is what he preceded the story with. Pat, I've never explained this to anybody. I don't even think you're going to believe me But ever since he told me the story the first time And many times after he has cried, sobbed As soon as he started telling the story Because it was apparently so overwhelming But as he tells it he and his brother were fishing one day

In the river They both had hip waiters on So they were standing in the water And he said they kept hearing this high whizzing sound Like zh And he and his brother just kept looking at each other Not knowing what to make of it He said after a few minutes he had the compulsion to look to his right, and he said standing there, in the water, right next to him, was this eight-foot-tall, half-mantus, half-man, almost like looming over him.

He said he couldn't believe what he was looking at, obviously, but he also said in the first couple instances that he felt that this thing couldn't believe that it was actually being seen. Mark immediately fell back into the water at a pure fright. He said he lost control of all his bodily functions. And he said as he was looking at it, it was looking back at him and peering deep into his soul. It could feel all his emotions and read all his thoughts. And this experience lasted no more than 15 seconds, but I stopped him right there to ask him, you know,

what did this thing look like exactly? he said it was way more insect-like than it looked like man but it had like the physical maneuvers and the motor functions of like a human being I asked him what did he feel was this you know did he feel like it was good or bad and he said it was just too overwhelming he didn't feel any evil coming from it but he said what I thought to be the most interesting it was like looking at God

he said there was like this body-length halo around it, like this orange light. And he said within an instant after the 10 or 15 seconds this lasted, the entity just disappeared like in the snap of a finger. I had him stop again to explain how this happened when it was standing just directly in front of them. And it came down to a theory that we kind of both had where life exists on different frequencies. And human life exists on a frequency that we're all familiar with. But when we go back to this thing kind of not being able to believe that it was being seen, I have a feeling that it could have been standing right next to him the whole time,

but it was just on a different frequency that we don't pick up. So I asked him, you know, what happened next? And he said, after it disappeared, he looked to his brother, and he could tell immediately that his brother saw it as well. his brother and he were very close their whole life but since that moment when they saw this thing he and his brother have never spoken again he said his brother took off

and left Mark there trying to claw his way out of the water and Mark eventually made it back to his car and tried to contact his brother who was long gone by then and he said since then

his brother has answered the phone a few times but will not discuss it and will not even have a relationship with Mark anymore. Now, I asked Mark many questions about what exactly happened in this 10 and 15 seconds. And he just said that this thing peered so deep into him that he was just paralyzed with fright. So this brings us to 2014, three years later, when I had a very remarkable, experience in that exact same area. I mean, we're talking 100 yards away from where Mark had this sighting of the mantis man. And I took my dog for a walk one night, and we went into an old

abandoned campground that was right there. And I decided to cut off the trail and walk into the woods a little bit. And when I started looking into the woods, I saw this very bright orange, orb-like light. It was about 75 yards away. And I just kept thinking for a little while that it was a garage light, you know. But I realized I knew this area very well, and I knew there was no houses back there. And it definitely wasn't somebody with a flashlight, because this orange light kept going from the forest floor up into the tree and then coming back down. So it was moving up and down about 40 feet just over and over again. The floor of the forest was very flat. So I sat there and just looked at this thing. As I was looking at it, I could tell you. I could tell you.

it was moving a little closer. You know, not each time I blinked, but I could tell the light was getting brighter. It was a very weird orange. It would go from dark to light, almost like it was refracting light and then turning it into these different bright and dark orange colors. But the other thing that I found very strange, that the whole force with dead silent, I just noticed in an instant that it was complete silence. and the most incredible part of this is after, I'd say a minute or two,

every four-legged animal in the woods just goes blowing by me on both sides of my periphery. I mean, it went from dead silence to just like seeing deer burst by me and hearing like other creatures just take off right on both sides of me. My dog was just, she wasn't even on her feet anymore. She was just laying there trembling. And when I looked back and, caught focus of this orange light again, I saw that it was starting to move towards me at more of a rapid pace, and I was petrified. I eventually got to my feet, and without my dog even getting up,

I just dragged her out of the woods to where the road of the campground was again, and I saw as the orange orb just started moving right to where I was sitting on the log. And as I stood there, you know, with all the hair on my body standing up, I watched this thing as I just slowly made my way out of the campground, back to the main road. And it was incredible. This orange light went from just hovering in the woods there to shooting straight up, like right out of the forest, up through the canopy of the trees,

just gone straight up from just hovering there to, it reminded me of a video I saw, one of the best I think, which is a UFO in Jerusalem. that just comes down in front of a gang of people just surrounding it. And then after, you know, maybe a minute just shoots right back up into the sky. After this happened, I contacted Mark and told him about this. And we had gotten together many times after that to do nothing but discuss this. We used to get together maybe once every two weeks and, you know, talk about all sorts of things.

But now we were getting together twice a week. And I became like his therapist where he would just recounted, story over and over again and we would break it apart. So I told him one day, I'm like, you know what? I'm like, let me look up if anybody else has seen this thing on the Muscanette Kong River. And lo and behold, there's a gentleman who wasn't far away who made an entire website out of the Mantis Man of the Muscanette Kong River. Apparently this thing has been seen multiple times by different people. But the best part about this is that it was really him, saying that it was just so light years ahead of anything that he could even comprehend.

And he said the way that it just looked like a god with the light around it right before it vanished. I actually wrote a little article about this not too long afterwards and put it online in a town forum. And just by chance, some TV show from the Discovery Channel found it and asked me if I would contact Mark so they could interview him. and they did and his story has never wavered um and we've broken it apart many many times uh but it really comes down to what this thing looked like and what it was projecting into him um he said it was definitely a benevolent force um but it was just something that he couldn't understand and he wish he never saw and then i asked him do you really mean that and he says no but I've had to live with this now

knowing that I'm not crazy and knowing that I have something that I experience that basically you're the only one I could ever tell and you know he went on the TV show Anonymous who knows who saw it but he's never explained this story to anybody else in our area or we'll even talk about it but this all happened in the same

you know vicinity of like you know a 200-yard stretch on the Muskinet Kong River and then down even Even further, other people have seen this man, this man. So I don't know what's going on around that area, but it's very strange. Lots of places can expose you to identity theft. Oh, no. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity,

which is way more than anyone can do on their own. If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away all through text, phone, email, or the Life, lock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at lifelop.com slash special offer. Terms apply. Owls are somehow connected to UFOs. I don't say that lightly. After over a decade of obsessive investigation, I am convinced of this connection. As strange as it may seem, people are seeing owls in the highly charged moments of a UFO sighting and within the challenging memories of UFO abduction. This mystery has been the focus of my research. My name is

Mike Cleland, and I have explored these connections in my book, The Messengers. At its core, this book is simply a collection of stories, and each is a remarkable real-life experience. The Messengers is also my own story of how Owls played a role in my life. The Messengers is the first in a trilogy of books. All my books are available on Amazon in paperback, e-book, and very soon as audiobooks. Well, I grew up next to one of the most notorious, creepy, downright scary roads in America. Simply called Shades of Death Road. It's a seven-mile stretch winding through the cornfields of northern New Jersey. And even on a clear day, if you hang a right and head down that road, it's like traveling into midnight. The road itself is still.

steeped in hundreds of years of war. I mean, the amount of spirits and specters and ghosts to UFOs that have been seen down there through the years by people who've reported it, people that I know. It's been thrust into the limelight as of late. Jack Osborne and his crew from whatever show they're with traveled down there and had all sorts of problems. Equipment malfunctioned. Their car broke down.

They had a flat tire. But they took a few pictures. and the one picture of a shadowy figure standing next to a tree was really one of the best I've seen of the unexplained on Shades of Death Road through the years. It's a man who they said it was right in front of him, but he was not there. But to tell you about my experiences down on Shades of Death Road, I should probably precede that with giving you a little history on the road. It was originally a settlement between the Iroquois and the Linape Indians

who had fierce battles back there. And a lot of the area just became a burial ground. So when the white man came in, it caused a lot of tension and friction. And running along the road is a state park, somewhat famous state park called Jenny Jump. And as the legend goes, a white settler and his daughter were up on the ridge there,

surrounded by one of the tribes of Indians. And the white man, not knowing what was going to happen to him or his daughter, convinced his daughter to just run and jump off the cliff. Hence the name Jenny Jump. But the road itself is filled with all sorts of landmarks, such as the ferry hole, which is a really creepy cave that was only discovered in the early 1900s, even though people were back there for quite a long time.

It overlooks a lot of the burial ground, and it's said to have contained all sorts of bones and pottery and, you know, arrowheads and a lot of the bones that they took out of there, they really couldn't identify. But the most famous landmark on there is Ghost Lake, which is where I had one of my experiences. This was a, it seems to be a man-made pond that was flooded by two men back in the day. But what they didn't know is that the low-lying area that they flooded

was really the big portion of the burial ground. There's also an abandoned cabin back there with a piano, built into the wall where, uh, you know, a lot of young kids, especially when I was young, we would go back there. And, uh, even though I never heard anything, some of my friends claimed to have heard some really weird stuff coming out of there, um, especially like the piano music, uh, in the dead of winter. But some kids had, uh, quite a harrowing experience in the early 80s back there that was written about. Um, if you want to look that up, it's, it's quite interesting. It was, uh, you know, an unnerving story. But,

Like I said, the road itself is filled with all sorts of spirits. You know, they said, you know, drivers driving down the road would see like a vision of a deer just running alongside their car, which would signify that deer's were about to come out and you were supposed to slow down. And, you know, there's a Native American spirit guide that just shows up on the sides of the road. But some of the scarier stuff is, you know, they had a hanging tree down there. I do know that the people who lived down there very early on took justice into their own hands. And there's a tree that overhangs the road, which apparently a lot of people were hung from. And some people have seen, you know, the remnants of people hanging there in some kind of spirit form.

In the 30s, there was a woman who beheaded her husband and buried his body on one side of the road and his head on the other. One of the big stories that I grew up with was the girl in the 50s who was coming back from her prom, who died in a fiery car wreck. And, you know, I would hear all sorts of stories from people young and old who would see this girl, you know, walking the road in her burnt prom dress. One of the really weird things was, you know, in the 90s, some hikers found hundreds, thousands of polaroids scattered throughout the forest. you know, these Polaroids were just, you know, and it wasn't just one group of hikers. It was a couple different groups of hikers at different times found these pictures,

and the pictures were of women in distress who were like, you know, bound up with their eyes like half open. You know, you could tell they were alive. A television, same television in different pictures just turned to different channels. And men, like, laid out on steel sheets. from what the police were able to deduce some of these people in these pictures were of missing people that they'd been looking for for quite some time

so you know whatever it was it was quite nefarious but the road should really have been paved in blood with all the violence that went on down there there were bands of thieves and highway men who you know if you would get off one of the main roads heading to New York City you were robbed

killed along this stretch of forest, you know, in Warren County, New Jersey. But the first instance that I had down there was that Ghost Lake. And I was about 17 years old. And, you know, I grew up hearing about this place. And it's only right down the road for me. So I convinced my girlfriend to drop me off there one night at like 9 o'clock so I could go fishing. I'm a terrible fisherman, but I went down there with a pole and threw my line in the water. and after like 10 or 15 minutes

this other fisherman just appeared out of nowhere. You know, if I was standing at 6 o'clock, right around the shoreline at like 10 o'clock was this other fisherman. And the lake itself is really, it's a glorified lake. It's more like a pond. But you can see the whole shoreline. You could see everything.

It was a crystal clear night. The stars were out. But the mist was all over the place, you know, hanging over the lake and, you know, in the woods. And when I was looking at this guy, this fisherman, you couldn't see the bottom half of his body. I kept looking and, you know, it was really just from the waist up. But the weird thing was, I kept thinking to myself,

hey, I probably know this guy, you know, I'm from the area. He looked exactly like me. He had a baseball cap pulled way down. He had no equipment with him. But every time I started walking towards him, I would walk five feet towards him, you know, along the shoreline, he would move away from me five feet. If I would move 10 yards towards him, it was like a dance. Every time I moved, he would move the exact same distance.

away from me until I got to the spot where he was originally standing and now he was completely across the lake and I was starting to get on nerve that was really if the guy was trying to creep me out he was doing a really good job but as I sat there looking at him I still at to this point I could I look down at my own legs I'm like well there are my legs how come I can't see this the bottom half of this guy and he um he ducked behind this cluster of three trees I'll never forget it and I thought he was just ducking behind these trees to come out the other. other side so he can continue that on the shoreline fishing. But he walked behind these trees and never came out.

And backing up where he was, was the state park. There was no roads there. It's not like he was walking to get out. And it just really just backed up into like a cliff. So unless this guy came with climbing equipment and, you know, or was living in the woods, I have no idea where this guy could have went. And you could, you could see the man. When he started walking around the tree, you know, it wasn't like, you know, there was

foliage covering covering it all. I could see him starting to walk around the cluster of three trees and that was it. And when he disappeared literally right in front of my face, because I wasn't even paying attention to me fishing. I had a line in the water just to make it look like I was, but I just kept watching this guy. And when he never came back out, I ended up, I don't know how I got the nerve, but I walked all the way around the lake to the tree and continued all the back to my point of origin and I couldn't find this guy anywhere you know there was no sign of him you know there wasn't like uh he left no bait or tackle or footprints in the mud or anything and I was looking so at that point I uh I was I was scared and uh I told my girlfriend to come back and pick

me up in two hours this was about an hour and a half later and I was like I was finished I figured I'd just go out to the road and um wait for her there you know even though it was dark and all this It was a little less scary than the lake. Two and a half hours came, and she still wasn't there. And I was getting, I was a little perturbed. So I started walking, you know, the, you know, the distance of a mile, a couple miles, back out to the main road, which took a little while. But I made it to a pay phone, and I called her. And she was livid.

She was like literally sitting by the phone waiting for me to call, hoping I would call. And she got in a car, came to get me. When I got in the car, she, like, reamed me out. she told me you know I she's like you you I didn't think you were going to last more than an hour there so I came back she came back for me um and you know against her better judgment she got out of the car walk down the little ways to ghost lake to come get me and she says I kept looking for you you but you weren't there I called your name I was there for like you know a little less than five minutes but you were not there and this is like virtually impossible because especially if you're

calling my name calling somebody's name you could see you could see the whole shoreline. It is not a big lake at all. You know, if anybody's there, you could see him perfectly. So when I told her that I'd been there the whole time and there's no way that she could have missed me, she just thought I took off. And I found this almost, even almost as strange as the fisherman itself, because, you know, how could she come down there and I wasn't there? I made a point of standing right where the trailhead was in the beginning and never really took my eyes off it. So if somebody entered that from that area, and especially calling my name, there's no way that they were going to miss me. And after I told her the whole story about the

fisherman and her coming down there and not being able to see me, you know, right there in front of her where I told her I was the whole time, she was on nerve to say the least. And I was a little, I was left scratch in my head. But the second instance I had down there was about six months later. and I told a friend of mine about the whole fisherman and what I saw. And he's like, look, let's go down to Lenape lane. You know, they claim to see these white orbs down there that eventually turned red, you know, in some sort of, you know, weird, in a weird situation, these white lights eventually turned red to signify that, you know,

danger is imminent or whatnot. But my friend and I went down there and, you know, we hung out next to the car. We took, you know, a couple brief walks into the woods, maybe like 50 yards, 25 yards, and then we'll come back out to the, come back to the car. But soon we saw this white light in the woods. It looked like a really bright flashlight, and it would, like, flash on by, like, a tree, and then flash off. And then, in, like, near another tree, it would flash on and flash off.

It almost looked like, you know, if it was something from the norm, it would be a couple people back there choreographing, you know, flashlights going on. And the flashlights would blink, like they were trying to, like, signal like, Morse code with the light. But just like the fisherman, and this is what I explained to my friend, we got the nerve. I don't know how we did it. But we started walking towards the light, you know, yelling out, who is that, and this and that. But the light never got any closer and never got any farther away. And when we noticed this, we were really starting to, you know, the old.

proverbial hair was starting to stand up. But soon, the lights weren't just shining from behind one tree and then moving to another tree. They started going off in rapid succession from like one tree to the other and, you know, this kept going on real quick. And when my friend and I saw this, we didn't even say anything to each other. I think it was me. I just turned around and kind of took off back towards the car. You know, we never saw the white light turned red. I think if I would have saw that. I don't know what the hell I would have done, but I know I probably wouldn't have ever gone back there even in later years.

It took a while for me to go back there after these two instances. But when I was about 15, the very first strange occurrence I had near Shades of Death Road was when my father and I went camping at the Jenny Jump State Park. And we were like kind of up on the ridge line so you could look down and see. see the whole, you can see where the road was, the patches of forest, uh, ghost lake. You could, it was almost like a model. You can see the whole layout of everything. And we're sitting up on the ridge line. And, um, in this one huge patch of flat forest, these bursts of white light were coming out. Like somebody with a, um, with a flashlight was just running through,

no, not a flashlight, like with a camera, just running through the forest, just, you know, popping off a flash, you know, it looked like somebody just sprinted. through the woods, hitting a camera trigger, and just, you know, erupting a flash of light. And my dad, who's a really grounded guy and a man of science, I sat there and kept asking him, you know, what is this? And he was, he was, I don't want to say he was scared, but he was definitely mystified of what was going on. You know, as he said, and I remember, he goes, it looks like lightning. You know, it looked like a whole thunderstorm going off, like, underneath the canopy of the trees.

and I thought back to this when I saw the white light down there with my buddy because it was. It was like a flash of light and then it would go off or it looked like it ducked behind trees and it just happened eventually in rapid succession. But when this happened with my father, we sat there for quite a while watching this and it did not stop. And there were no houses back there. There were no drives. It was just a patch of, you know, of empty woods. And as I said, it really, it was quite a sight. It actually looked cool, you know, just to see this dark, dark, dark big patch of trees and just these bursts of white just coming out. Like I said, like lightning.

Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One Podcast Network. To learn more, visit Entertainment Onepodcast.com.