Somewhere in the Skies - Witness Accounts: Volume 24

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

On episode 297 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we once again travel around the world to hear the deeply mysterious and fascinating UFO stories of you, the listeners. From a massive unknown craft sighted over a military base in Canada to various UAP zipping across the skies of England, Scotland, and across the United States. These are the powerful and profound stories of everyday people like you and me who looked up into the skies and saw something looking back. Special thanks to those who submitted their stories. If you would like to share your UFO story, email Ryan directly at: [e-mail] to discuss.  Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Book your Cameo video with Ryan at: https://bit.ly/3kwz3DO Official Store: CLICK HERE Buy Somewhere in the Skies coffee! Use promo code: SOMEWHERESKIES10 to get 10% off your order: https://bit.ly/3rmXuap Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook: https://amzn.to/3PmydYC Tik Tok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryansprague51 Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Read Ryan’s Articles by CLICKING HERE Watch Mysteries Decoded for free at: https://bit.ly/3rJpbd7 Opening Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte Copyright © 2022 Ryan Sprague. All rights reserved. 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

I wrote a little song to remind you, Choice Hotels, get you more of the experiences. You value. The Cambria Hotels got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Cocktails up here feel just right. It's Cambria homemade. Bring a date, your team, or even your mom.

Book direct at Choiceotails.com. See you on the roof. The Summer in the Sky's podcast is free to listen to you every week. But if you would like to help support the show, we have a very active Patreon page where you give what you think the show is worth. In return, you'll get early access to the main show, bonus episodes, and priority to ask our guests your listener questions. Your support truly makes the show continue and grow. So to learn more and to join, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. This is Somewhere in the Skies.

with Ryan Sprague. To you having me on. I really appreciate you giving me an opportunity to tell my story. It's funny, I, for years, really didn't have too many people to tell this story, too. And then once I was on Unidentified a couple years ago, suddenly everyone wanted to hear about it. So we'll start off with introductions. My name's David Marceau. I am a senior manager for a major corporation.

here in the United States. And in 1992, when I was 19 years old, I had a close encounter with UFO. And what I saw wasn't your typical sighting. A lot of UFO sightings seem to be some strange lights in the sky, things you really can't identify, which is why we call him unidentified flying objects. What I saw wasn't unidentified.

I knew right away what I was looking at. It was unmistakable. I was in the woods on the... in military service. I was an Army reservist and my unit was doing our annual summer training. We went up to Gagetown, New Brunswick, Canada and we were an ammo unit.

So even though my specialty was not ammunition, everyone had to pull guard duty and I had to go out at 11 p.m. one night, I believe it was, this was probably a Tuesday or a Wednesday, the second week of August. 1992 and I had a guard an enormous pile of ammunition out in the woods there were three sites three of us each guarding a site and around 1120 I looked at about my one o'clock position from where I was

sitting and over the tree line was an enormous spaceship I've been criticized online for jumping to that conclusion I think somebody said immediately saying it must be a spaceship. What are you going to do? I can't apologize for that. Saying anything other than it was a spaceship would be like looking at a house and saying, well, I don't know, that might be a dog or, you know, looking at a tree and saying it might be a rock. It was there.

It was in front of me. It was less than 100 yards away from me. I was what people have called a trained observer. Luis Elizondo was the first person that called me that. I had never heard that term before, but as soon as he said it, that made sense for me. I actually was trained. At the time, we had these flashcards that were like playing cards,

and each of them had a silhouette of an aircraft. It was either a NATO or Soviet-block aircraft, and we were taught to identify them by their shapes so that if it was dark or they were far away, we would know whether to shoot them or not. So I knew looking at this thing, you know, had no wings, no tail thin, no propellers, no engines, no visible means of propulsion or direction, had no markings, no seams or rivets, made no noise. Interestingly, it made, nothing around me made any noise when this thing approached. and for years I thought this was because

like the crickets and the tree frogs and the other nighttime critters knew something like some kind of instinct and they were all quiet because there was some danger there. More recently I've come to the conclusion that the ship may have had some type of noise cancellation technology and that's why everything around me was silent which begs a lot of interesting questions.

Maybe a lot of people have reported spaceships are silent, and that was true in my case, but everything was silent. Maybe they actually make a lot of noise, and we just don't know it because the sound is canceled out. Anyway, it was terrifying. It was the most traumatic, terrifying thing that's ever happened to me. And I was literally scared stiff. I went into a mode like, you know, I've done a lot of small game hunting,

and I remember when my dad was teaching me to hunt, he would, you know, tell me if we, you know, come up on a pheasant, the pheasant isn't going to fly away until after we've passed it because they know they fly too slowly, and if they try to fly out in front of you, then they'll get shot. But they'll let you go by, and then they fly out behind you, and then they can get away that way. and sometimes people even step on them because they're not going to move.

And I was in that mode when this thing was coming by. And he was traveling very slowly, probably less than a mile an hour. It may have been hovering motionless at first. It's hard to remember. But this was about a five-minute encounter when it was very close and a couple more minutes passing beyond that that I kept watching it. But while it was in my vicinity, I couldn't move. I suppose I could have, but I,

I was trying not to because I didn't want to be seen. At the time, there was no drone technology like we have now. So the thought that the thing might be unmanned was not even a possibility. Never considered it. So I assume there were some people or creatures inside piloting the thing and that if I moved that they would see me and then, you know, all these, every science fiction show and movie that I had ever seen started going through my head and I thought maybe they'll beam me up. up or they'll zap me with a death ray or something and that's it no one will ever know what

happened to me and and you know they'll tell stories about i don't know the guy just disappeared all this is going through my head at the time so terrified not moving just barely uh you know like moving my eyes and in my head enough to keep the thing in sight until it was uh leaving my field of vision and i knew that uh at that point i had to get up and kind of kind of follow it because I was afraid that it might circle back around and come back over me. So the whole encounter lasted about five to seven minutes and absolutely terrified. And to the extent that, you know, when I finally did start talking about it, you know, initially me and the other guy that saw it a few sites away,

we told everyone in our unit about it. And then we got ridiculed and, you know, we were the laughing stock and lost all credibility. so we stopped talking about it. And then after that, I don't think I told anyone for about another, at least five years. I think it was in the late 90s. I remember telling my cousin and his wife about it. And at that time, it was like I had been transported back to that moment and started, I was like reliving the terror of the incident.

And my eyes welled up. And I didn't actually shed a tear. But my eyes were as full of, water as they could be without any tears actually coming out. And, you know, because of the ridicule that I had faced years earlier when this thing happened, I said to my cousin's, she was his girlfriend at the time later, his wife, I said, do you believe me? And she says, well, I can see, you know, you're visibly, I don't remember how she put it, like, shaken or something, but, you know, I had physical symptoms of the trauma.

and so after that it was a little bit easier to start telling people I still didn't like tell everyone I met because I didn't want people to think I was a weirdo but a little by little I started to let the cat out of the bag early on in my relationship with my wife I let her know about it and she was cool with it and it was because it was like sort of an open secret within my extended family that my sister-in-law ended up sending me the New York York Times article about Luis Alizando and everything he was doing with, uh, to the Stars Academy that I tracked him down and was able to, to reach out to him and eventually, uh, told my story on unidentified. One thing that, uh, that Luis Alizando asked me, he said, anyhow, has this changed you? And I said at the time that this has, the event made me fearless. It's not that it, that it really made me fearless. I feel fear.

I don't feel it the way that I would have before this incident. What I can liken it to is how if you've ever smoked a cigarette, drink a beer, you know,

the various substances. I'm not into all that, but, you know, I did smoke for a while. And you know that, like, that first cigarette, that first drink, whatever it is you're having,

gets you really, really high. And then, you know, you've had more and more and more and more, and after a while you don't feel it as much. So someone who's been drinking for, you know, 10 years can still get drunk, but not off of one beer, like maybe someone who's had their first beer. And that's what fear is like for me now. I still feel it, but not like, it's not. really anything.

It doesn't really affect me. I don't really get scared. And it's because I think this extreme trauma, it was, no words can really describe the terror that I felt when an alien spaceship was, less than 100 yards for me. Traveling very slowly. I'm out in the middle of the woods. in who knows where in Canada.

I'm armed. I had an M-16 rifle. This is the old style of the fires full auto, but no bullets. There had been an incident a few years back where civilians had stolen some ammunition and some soldiers, American soldiers shot at them.

And so this time around, in order to avoid an international incident, they sent us out there with our weapons, but no ammunition. It was just a show. So, you know, I don't know if the people flying this ship, if they could see that I'm armed and possibly a threat, but not know that I didn't actually have any ammunition in the weapon, so I really wasn't a threat. So it was extraordinarily terrifying. It felt like a sitting duck, and that changed me. so that there's really nothing that shakes me these days.

So that's my story. There's a lot more that I can tell. There's so many little details, and I've tried writing it down a few times. And, you know, it's like it was a five to seven minute encounter, but I could fill a whole, you know, I could fill hundreds of pages with it. Someday I will. I'll write it all down.

But, yeah, that's my story. I'm sticking with it. And I'm Dave Marceau. Thanks for listening. 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 LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. Hey Ryan. My name is Josh, and I would like to share an experience that I had. The experience was on Saturday, July 11th, 2020.

Here in Las Vegas, I'm a Vegas resident, and it happened on East Russell Road near the San Boyd football stadium. I was walking down Russell Road at about maybe 7.45, 8 o'clock p.m. And as I was walking, I just happened to look up, as I always do, searching for things. And as soon as I popped my head up, I noticed a cylinder in the sky. If I had to estimate, it would probably be at about maybe 5,000, 6,000 feet. I could be wrong.

But it was a cylinder with the front portion of it being black and the second portion of it being gray, more of a gun metal color. And it was flying straight up at a good clip. and then it stopped, made a right turn, and probably flew another, I would say maybe two, 300 feet, and it stopped again, and then it either disappeared or it shot off instantaneously, because it was gone. There was a cloud of smoke and the object was gone. So that just blew my mind. It lasted probably less than five seconds, and it left me with a feeling of disbelief, of experience. extreme curiosity and of wonder just to what it was. It didn't seem like a conventional craft. It didn't seem like a man-made craft, but it could be. It could be something else, too. So that was the beginning. And I kept walking down Russell Road. And I got to the end. And by this time, it was about 8.11, maybe quarter after 8 p.m. And it was still light out. And I noticed above the stadium, this bright pink.

object that was shaped like a square, maybe a rectangle, but it was not aerodynamic. And it shot straight up in the air from behind the stadium to about maybe a thousand, two thousand feet. And it started making enormous vertical circles and horizontal circles in the sky. It was going really fast. And I don't know how it was flying. It didn't have wings. It didn't, from my perspective, didn't have any means of propulsion. and it looked like a square, like a block of some sort.

And it just kept making these circles. I watched it and recorded it for about maybe two or three minutes. And then as I was recording it, I look off behind the stadium near what I believe is Sunrise Mountain. And I noticed a bunch of sirens and lights coming towards the stadium. So I wasn't sure what that was and what was going on. but I stopped recording and kind of made my way out of there. I wasn't sure what was going to happen if it's something I should see or something I shouldn't have seen. So I didn't want to be any part of it.

And I just ended up going home. Actually, I went to a friend's house. As far as the way it made me feel, again, it was just utter disbelief. Checking my head to see if I really saw that. What I think it was, I honestly don't know. I don't know what either of the objects were. My best guess is something top secret manmade or something not of this world. Where do I stand today?

I stand by my feelings. I still don't know what it was. And, you know, we could have come so far in our progress with aerospace technology that it could be something manmade, but it could certainly be something else as well. And it was just a really exciting day for me. I've had another sighting, a pretty cool one since then, which I would be happy to share again in another time. It was investigated by Mufon recently, and the results were pretty cool.

It was on September 14th at 455 a.m. Here in Las Vegas, this would be West Russell Road this time, as I was walking west to the gym to get an early morning workout. And I noticed a bright light in the sky that was situated roughly right above Nellis Air Force Base. And the thing that stood out to me was that it was not moving, or at least it did not appear to be moving. It certainly wasn't moving left or right,

and it wasn't growing in size or shrinking, so I didn't think it was moving towards me or away from me. And I watched it for about seven to ten minutes, and it just sat there, pulsing. It appeared to be an orange sphere. I guess we could call it an orange. orb very large and it was just sitting there hanging in the air above the air force base for about seven to ten minutes and i kept watching it i recorded it and at the end of the time frame

it went from a pulsing orb to two very small blinking lights in an instant it just transformed and then it started very slowly moving away to the west And it just glided off over the horizon very slowly, and I watched it the entire time. But it remained stationary for about 7 to 10 minutes. And I couldn't hear a sound from it, although it was far away. So it could have been making a sound, but I didn't hear anything directly coming from it. And the interesting thing is, the very next two days, I had the exact same sighting of the exact same object, just in slightly different locations with the exact same characteristics.

What do I think it was? It could be something man-made, perhaps some type of helicopter or hover jet that was able to silently remain stationary for an extended period of time. It could certainly be something else too. And I sent this siting into Mufon in the video, and they recently had an investigator, contact me. And he was able to use radar data, flight scheduling, flight data. And his

conclusion was that it was an airplane and that it was flying towards me. That's why it did not appear to be moving. I'm not sure if I agree with that because the size of the light did not change at all. But I don't have a very well extended knowledge of of flight characteristics. So I could be wrong. But the cool thing was, even though it was a plane, the investigator told me that the only plane

that was in the air at that time, at that location, going that direction, was a Janet flight going to Area 51 from McCarron. So even if it was an alien, it was still something cool, and I just wanted to share that.

I wish you a good day. Thank you, my friend. Bye-bye. Hi Ryan and all the listeners out there in the somewhere in this guy's podcast. Firstly, just thanks for the opportunity to share my experience. And also a big warm welcome to Scotland, Ryan. I know you've just moved here from across the pond. So I hope you enjoy your stay here and enjoy living.

And damp wet old Scotland, anyway. So my name's John. I am 41 years old. I have a wife and three children. and I live in Kipfield Bank which is a small semi-rural village on the southern fringe of the central belt of Scotland I work full-time as a prison officer

or in the States you would probably refer to them as corrections officers so I've worked in the prison service for just to come up for 14 years so my experience happened in the 22nd of October in 2017 if memory serves

that would be just before the big New York Times article that really triggered off a lot of the stuff that's been happening over the last few years. It was roughly 9 o'clock at night. I had been in my garage, which I use as a sort of a man cave type area, do some of my hobbies in there, keep my dive kit in there and repair that

and build models and stuff, just bloke things to do it anyway. So I was closing up at night and I was heading back into the house. I collected a few items to take into the house I didn't want to leave in the garage overnight Ironically, I actually included my Nikon

DSL heart, was slung over my shoulder at the time. So before leaving the garage, the reason I know it was 9 o'clock is because I actually just looked up at the clock. I thought right about going to the house, organised for work in the morning. So I pulled down the shutter of the garage, you know, after collecting my stuff, walked towards

up the driveway towards the house and just have their cut look at my phone and I looked up and my attention was drawn to what I could only describe as two warm white lights. I say warm white as in like incandescent lights rather than that sort of bright white LED. So two circular white lights and sitting, you know, right next to one another and a sort of horizontal plane if that makes any sense. Can I describe it as like a figure gear of eight on its side. That's kind of really how it looked. I could only describe these things as travelling at breakneck speed. You know, it was really moving across the sky. The whole

counter only lasted, you know, a short amount of time, a few seconds probably. They were moving at a low altitude. So it drew my attention right away because, you know, I like to look up at the sky and, you know, admire what's happening in the skies above at night time. where I live we have a fairly decent view of the sky there's not a great deal of light pollution so you can see a fair few constellations that night actually I remember seeing a satellite

on the way out to the garage at night as I say I have a wee look up and I remember seeing a satellite it's not uncommon to see things like that where I live but this really drew my attention but as I say it was rocket across the sky

And I don't know why, but I felt goosebumps and I sort of shiver up your spine. Just something about it didn't sit right. Now, if I was a wee kid, you know, we used to go on holiday to the north of Scotland, pretty close to an Air Force base called RIEF Lossie Mouth. And just not far along the road, there was another air base, which is now shut down. I think it's an Army base now. Ryefkin loss Lossy mouth

had fast, it still does have fast jets stationed there it's the Eurofighter typhoon now but back in the day

it was the old tornadoes so I've seen lots of low-flying fighter jets you know in terms of its speed that's what this thing

looked like it was moving but there was no sound it was a straight trajectory it wasn't art you know

it was sort of flying straight straight level. The forward of the two lights was pulsing. The other one was what you would describe as a solid on all the time light. But then as it moved across from my perspective, it was going from the right to the left. And the first, the one at the leading light, I suppose, was pulsating and very quickly faded and never saw that again. But the detailing light, if you like, was still there for a few short settings and then that just faded out as well and as far as the whole encounter goes that's it so it was travelling above the field just beyond my house

maybe I don't know 200 metres away roughly was what I estimated at the time aircraft fly over my house all the time so we're probably roughly roughly halfway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, probably slightly closer to Glasgow actually, but you know, so both of those big cities have airports and so aircraft fly over the house all the time, particularly on route to Glasgow, but you can see aircraft

you know heading to Edinburgh as well in the opposite direction. Normally at that height, you will hear the aircraft engines pretty loud, but they're normally substantially more higher in the sky than this object was

but it was silent, but it was silent and I mean eerily silent it was a still night there wasn't any wind whatsoever or you know very very little certainly it was quite a clear night there wasn't any adverse sort of weather

patterns or anything at the time it was just quite a still calm you know autumn evening but this thing was just there was no sound whatsoever I stood for a few minutes after the lights faded just kind of try to gather my thought thoughts

and I was figuring out what did I just see here, what did I just witness? I considered all sorts of possibilities aircraft, helicopters at that time of year it was pretty close to the 5th November where people celebrate Guy Fawkes Night

so you know there's usually lots of fireworks and stuff going on it but this was now firework because there was no as I say there was no sound there was no contrail you know like if a firework was off you know there's usually

some sort of trail of sparks and stuff behind it. There was none of that. It just faded out. There wasn't a bang, there wasn't a pop that you would normally associate with these airborne pyrotechnics. It was a steady horizontal course. There was no fluctuations, as I said before.

There was no arcing at all. There is a road nearby. As I also considered, that could it have been car lights. But in the direction that it was heading, it would have to be heading up the hill in which case then you would see the red tail leaks of the car as opposed to the

white lights but it was also not following the track of the road because as I say I do live here so I know what direction the cars would be going in and stuff it was interesting as well that the object just faded you know there was a pulse

and it faded rather just blinked out and as I say the trailing light also done the same a short time thereafter even though that wasn't pulsing I did consider the possibility of drone

but again when I think about the speed I don't know it just it was too quick it was really really fast as I said I had experience watching fast jets

you know manoeuvre and practice and stuff in the north of Scotland I don't think drones can move at that rate of knots And again, it felt a lot was dark And I know that your perspective can be altered And the darkness is a bit more difficult to judge distances and stuff And I get that But it felt fairly close

And you would like to think that you don't know There would be some sound coming from that as well After a minute or two, I come out of the house And I just told my wife about it who was a sort of nonchalant really she's not a believer or a you know anybody who's interested in this sort of field

spoke to my dad who was quite interested in the story and I was like okay that's interesting that's fair enough but it's no really anything I've really spoke about since to that many people other than a few close friends I did a Google search when I come into the house as well I felt really not shaking but just something did they sit right

you know so I did a Google search and I found a website called Beams I believe it's some research organization probably in a smaller level

but similar to the Mufoan I would imagine at this point in time I'd never heard the Mufoan or any of these organizations but when I went on this organisation's website there was a site enlisted that had a small picture attached and

it was so eerie when I've seen it because it just pretty much looked identical to the object I'd just seen somebody from Devon in South England

that'd managed to photograph this object and it was described as two cells dividing you know if you ever see biology videos or images and biology textbooks and you look at cell division

that's what this thing looked like and the lights themselves weren't solid it was almost like they had a nucleus at the centre with a glow sort of on the outside. It was still bright in the centre,

but there was a sort of darker spot in the middle of it. On both lights, I don't know if these were two objects or one object. I just don't know. I don't know. What I do know is it's not an airplane. It's not a helicopter. I've no idea.

It was a strange, strange experience. And I think about it most days, usually when I'm popping out to the garage to do a couple of jobs or to, you know, do some washing or, you know, take the stuff out to the tumbo dry that we keep out there or whatever I'm doing or even if I'm popping out to the car

to collect a few bits and bobs. I always look up at that same spot and think back to that night and it still stumps me as to what it is. The report, a wee statement that I wrote myself at the time, you know, I jotted all these notes down and entitled it Unidentified Low Flying, Lights.

I'm not saying this is Little Green Men from Mars or trans-dimensional entities or anything like that, but I cannot explain what this is. It really made me feel not uncomfortable, but it made me feel strange. As I said, I don't know if you noticed at the start, but actually I had my camera, I had a DSLR camera, slung over my shoulder. I had my mobile phone in my hand and thought did not occur to me to take a photograph.

I was just transfixed on this object. I don't even think I would have had enough time to get a shot off. One of the most strangest experiences of my entire life. And as I say, I still think about it to this day and wonder, what did I see in the sky? Thank you. Hi, Ryan. It's your friend Kelly from the UFO Rabbit Hole. Thank you so much for inviting me to share my story with you and the somewhere in the sky's audience. So I saw a UFO when I was 13 years old. I was on vacation with my family at the Outer Banks in North Carolina in a little town called Avon, just north of Hatteras. We went there almost every summer, and one of my favorite things to do at night was to sit outside and watch the stars.

Having grown up in the suburbs where the sky is always a dull shade of orange, and the stars are few and far between, the spectacle of a truly dark night sky filled with thousands of stars was something I couldn't resist. I found myself out on the deck most nights looking up at the stars in awe. One particular night, I was out on the deck in my usual stargazing routine when I had the strangest thought go through my head. What if I see a UFO? It was a very strange thought. UFOs weren't something that I ever really thought about. And yet, suddenly, I felt a very strong urge to scan the skies, looking for something that I wasn't sure that I even really believed existed. And as soon as I did so, I saw a light moving across the sky. It was a small, bright, clear light

that seemed to be moving a little too swiftly to be a plane. And as soon as I locked my eyes onto it, it took a hard 90-degree turn and then another before accelerating instantaneously and streaking off past the horizon like a meteor. I remember being absolutely electrified by what I saw. I felt like I was going to crawl out of my skin. I didn't know what I had seen exactly, but I knew that it moved like nothing else that I'd ever seen. Even at 13, I knew instinctively that the physics of it all just stretched the boundaries of all reason. And yet, I knew what I had seen. I ran into the house to tell my family, but they laughed at me and accused me of making up stories. And to be honest, there was a part of me that wondered if maybe I had imagined the whole thing. I mean, how could it be

possible that I just happened to see something so strange and seemingly impossible, literally a second after having this strange thought that I might see a UFO. Was I fooling myself? I had a pretty active imagination as a kid, but I never had any trouble differentiating my flights of fancy from actual reality. And yet, when everyone else thinks that you're making it up, at a certain point, it becomes easier to place that doubt with yourself. I didn't think about the UFO much after that. Probably not even once a year. But every long once in a while, I would remember that night and wonder what it was that I had seen. It wasn't until the spring of 2021, when I returned to the Outer Banks with my family, that the story suddenly became top of mind for me again. I had been half paying attention

to the occasional news story that I came across that talked about how the government had admitted that UFOs are real and that we don't know what they are. Each time I came across a story like that, it made me think of what I had seen when I was 13, and a little part of me wondered if I might have actually seen a UFO. And so when my family decided to return to the Outer Banks for vacation, it felt like the perfect time to dive back into the subject and figure out what was going on. I had a whole week with nothing to do but kill time reading on the beach, and I thought that given that time to focus, I'd be able to get to the bottom of what was really going on pretty quickly, mostly because I didn't really believe at that point that UFOs were real. I mean, sure.

The government was saying that UFOs are real, but the government says a lot of things. I figured this had to be some kind of a play to get a rubber stamp for black budget spending, or maybe it was secret foreign tech. I wasn't sure what was going on exactly, but I was sure that it had to have some kind of a rational explanation. However, instead of a neat and tidy explanation. What I discovered was a deep and labyrinthian rabbit hole where each new mystery once examined gave way to an even deeper one, and whose tendrils seemed to be entwined through every academic discipline and sphere of life. There were no easy answers, only a bottomless well of questions. I was utterly fascinated and completely hooked. The UFO rabbit hole

podcast was born of that obsession and of a life-changing anomalous experience that I had a few months later. But I don't want to get bogged down there. I told that story in episode 294 of somewhere in the skies if you're interested in hearing about it. So fast forward a year to the summer of 2022. I'd been working on the podcast for the past nine months and was finding myself deeper and deeper in the world of UFOs. I ended up taking a class from one of my favorite authors on the subject, Dr. Diana Walsh Pesulka. She wrote a book called American Cosmic that made a huge impact on me

and my understanding of the phenomenon and so I was very excited to learn from her. And I did learn so much in Diana's class and one of the most profound things that I learned was about the process of redaction that occurs when someone has an anomalous experience like a UFO sighting. The stigma associated with such events,

often paired with serious doubts or outright disbelief that such things are even possible, can cause people to change how they tell the story of what happened to them, even to themselves. And as I learned about how this redaction process unfolds, I had a startling realization. My UFO sighting at the Outer Banks when I was 13 wasn't the only sighting that I've had. In fact, I had a much more profound sighting in a park outside of Akron, Ohio, and broad daylight when I was 21. Let me tell that story, and then I'll explain how I think it is that I came to forget something that was so extremely. So it was a spring day in April of 2007. I've been going through a tough time and a friend

invited me to a local metro park. The plan was for us to hang out in the woods and do LSD. I'd never done it before and to be honest, I had no real idea of what I was getting myself into. We each did one hit and then sat on the top of this hill overlooking a pond surrounded by trees. After a while, the visuals started kicking in. It wasn't anything major, but for a first timer, it was thrilling. I remember looking at the twisting yellow-green grass of early spring and thinking that I understood now what Van Gogh must have seen. We sat there talking, having that kind of sweeping cerebral conversation that flows from such a state. It was a very pleasant and mellow experience. But at one point during this conversation, something seemed to appear above the tree line.

I remember both of us being startled by it because although it was very large and only a couple hundred feet above the tree line, it truly seemed to come out of nowhere. We'd both been staring in that direction, but we never saw it approach. It was just there, as though it had emerged from a hole in the sky itself that we couldn't see. At first, I thought it was the Goodyear Blimp. Akron, Ohio is the home of the Goodyear Blimp, and so seeing it floating overhead was a pretty common occurrence. And this did remind me of the blimp in some ways. It was of a similar size, though this was slightly bigger than the blimp, and the way that it seemed to float slowly and stoically across the sky reminded me of how the blimp moves. But that's where the similarities ended. Whatever this was, was a deep brown color

and more oblong in shape than a blimp, what many would call cigar-shaped. Any other details are impossible to give. Although the object had a distinct size and shape, it also somehow felt like it didn't have any discrete edges. It was hard to look at, almost like it was blurrish. It was blurr. I just kept rubbing my eyes trying to get the image to resolve into something familiar, but all I saw was this long brown smudge moving slowly across the sky. It made me weirdly uncomfortable, and I actually felt like I wanted to look away from it. And then, as quickly as it was there, it was gone. It traveled maybe a few hundred yards across the sky over the tree line,

and then disappeared as strangely as it appeared, as if into an unseen hole in the air itself. My friend definitely saw it too, and we kept asking each other, what was that? And even though we agreed that it didn't look anything like the blimp, we also ultimately agreed that it had to be the blimp. I mean, after all, what else could it have been? And we were quite literally tripping. So that must be it, right? What I'd thought I'd seen was impossible. So the only explanation was that I hadn't seen it. And so I simply put it out of my mind. But how does that happen? I'll admit that even having experienced this whole thing for myself, it was still very strange and unsettling for me to realize that I could just forget something like that and continue to not remember it, even when I was spending every spare second of my day immersed in the study of the phenomenon. I was thinking about UFOs literally all of the time. So how could I have forgotten what I'd seen? Forgetting actually isn't even the right word, because it's not like this memory was blocked or suppressed exactly. I think that does happen to people, but it didn't feel like that was what

happened to me. Rather, this felt more like a categorization error of some kind in my brain. It's like that memory was a file in my brain, and because I had never named that file, UFO sighting, when I searched for UFO sightings in my brain, that experience didn't pop up. I hadn't built any connections in my brain between that experience and a UFO sighting, And so for me, those connections simply didn't exist. And I think there are a few reasons for why that happened. All of which I suspect are pretty common among people who have these types of experiences. First of all, I didn't think of what I saw as a UFO because it didn't look like what I thought a UFO was supposed to look like.

As someone who at that point in my life didn't have even a casual interest in UFOs, my main conception of the phenomenon was what I saw in the media. To me, a UFO is a flying saucer. an actual, solid, technological craft piloted by aliens from another planet. And that's just not what this looked like at all. I couldn't really tell what it was, and even though what reminded me vaguely of a blimp, its weird, blurry appearance didn't look like any kind of craft that I'd ever seen. So I didn't necessarily think that it was a craft. What I saw defied categorization, and so my brain simply failed to categorize it.

The second reason for this categorization error was the fact that we were on Eleanor. Like I said, that was my first time that I'd ever done LSD, and I didn't really know anything about what that experience was supposed to be like. I'd heard that LSD made you see things, so I assumed that that was what it had done. However, looking back more than 15 years later, and with a considerable amount of experience in psychedelics under my belt, I look at this experience differently. For me, LSD can dramatically change the quality of what I'm looking at. things can seem to look alive at a molecular level. Colors and textures are more profound.

But I've never had an experience on LSD where I saw something that wasn't there, particularly something that another person also can see. That doesn't mean that I have entirely ruled out that what we saw was just a weird shared visual experience as a result of being chemically altered. It could be. It's just that given my other experiences, it seems unlikely.

It also changed my perspective to, understand that many people who research psychical phenomena and contact experiences see psychedelics as a legitimate contact modality that can allow people to perceive things that tap into abilities that they otherwise wouldn't have access to. We're still learning about what psychedelics do to the brain, but despite the traditional view that they increase activity in the brain, the latest research suggests that psychedelics significantly disrupt normal neural activity and quiet the brain. Could this allow your conscious mind to pick up on things that it otherwise would filter out? It's too early to know for sure, but it's certainly possible.

There was a final reason that I managed to forget about this experience, and it's because, frankly, I doubted my own mental state. In the spring of 2007, I was coming out on the other end of what I sincerely hope will end up being the worst year of my life. My father had been diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer and passed away suddenly, leaving my family devastated. A few days after the funeral, my fiancé cheated on me and abrupt ended our relationship. And then, after months of licking my wounds, I went out on my first date as a single woman with a charming PhD candidate that my friends introduced me to, and he ended up drugging and raping me. I apologize for bringing down the room with all of that. But for the purposes

of this conversation, I think it's actually really important to make clear the level of trauma that I was processing at the time. The thing about processing trauma and grief is that it can make you doubt yourself on the most fundamental level. For me, I think it was easier to believe that the tragedies that had befallen me were somehow my fault than it was to deal with what felt like the utter randomness of the universe and it's seeming indifference to suffering. At least if it was my fault, then I had some level of control. And hypothetically, if I could fix the things that were wrong with me that caused these things to happen, then I could stop them from happening again. It doesn't make a lot of rational sense, but it's the kind of fousting.

and bargain that people deep in grief make all the time. But instead of saving yourself, you end up poisoning yourself with endless self-recriminations. And that's where I was on that spring day in 2007, heartbroken, beaten down, and filled with a deep self-loathing. I didn't trust myself or my perceptions of reality, and I felt awash in a sea of cognitive dissonance. So when I saw something that I didn't think I could possibly have seen, it had never been easier to doubt myself. I just assumed I was wrong. And the reason I bring this up is because as I've spent more time diving into the experience or literature, it's clear that trauma, like psychedelics, might at times provide a window

into experiences and perceptions that we wouldn't normally have. No one knows why this is exactly. Perhaps it's just that the psychologically destabilizing impact of these events allows things to get through your filters that normally wouldn't. Again, we don't know. But I wanted to share my story because I don't think it's unusual. I wasn't the only person in Dr. Pesulke's class who uncovered anomalous experiences in their past that had been redacted and pruned past the point of all recognition.

But once you understand how this process of redaction works and the motives that underlie the personal misreporting of our own experiences, it becomes a very simple task to excavate those experiences and reintegrate them back into the fabric of your life. which, to be clear, is not the same thing as finding answers. I still have no idea what I saw at the beach that night when I was 13, and I feel like I have even less of a sense of what I saw at the park when I was 21, and I may never know. But I am grateful for the fullness of life that is available on the other side of redaction.

Instead of forcibly amputating the experiences that I can't explain, I'm able to make room for them. allowing for mystery to exist and carving out a place in my psyche for the unknowable has brought a sense of depth, meaning, and awe back into my life that I thought I'd lost in childhood. And best of all, I'm no longer at war with myself or my memories. And in reestablishing that trust with myself, I have found a great deal of peace. Thank you so much for the opportunity to tell my story and thank you for listening. 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 heavy weight in the world, Frances Ngano versus Felipe Lins. 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. Hello Ryan, how are you doing? This is Terry Natris. I'd just like to tell you about my experience

way back in 1978. I was 28 years old then, 72 now. And it was Sunday the 25th of June, 1978. I was starting to pop my gate to go fishing. I was running a bit late to catch the turn of the tide at noon at that day. The weather was fine, clear blue sky,

not a cloud in sight. I've been a keen photographer for many years and nearly always carried a camera with me at weekends I placed my camera in the bag as usual but I had second thoughts and I put it back in the cupboard that was probably the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life I was travelling north on the A189

from Cramlington to Limemouth Power Station where near at the beach where I always used to fish there and I spotted an unusual object just above the horizon to the left of the road at first I thought it was an air balloon being sort of a zeppelin shape until I caught a better view

if it's about a mile further down the road I pulled up in a lay by got out of the car studied the object for about a minute and I realised it was moving to the left which was west but very slowly and it was just about five or ten degrees above the horizon

horizon. I then consider that may not be a balloon due to the strange coloured squirrel of light was emitting and I can only describe as sort of a liquidy gas which seemed to be covering this perfect

symmetrical symmetrical symmetrical shape sort of a cigar shape. I got back in the car and drove further up the road about another three miles until I came into view again. I stopped get out of the car again

which I noticed it was sort of diminishing in size and I realised it was actually turning around and I watched this object do a complete 180 degree turn which took about 45 seconds then it started moving to the right which is east towards the sea when I viewed it end on it was difficult to make out an exact shape

but it seemed to resemble the rear of a submarine and as it was turning end on the swirling coloured substance was covering the object which seemed to indicate to have some sort of screened over its entire surface but still maintain in its perfect shape. I had now come to the conclusion

that it wasn't a balloon anything I'd seen before. I also rule out the possibility it could have been a gas cloud or sort of the fact that the movements were in a controlled manner really. I decided to race up the motorway

towards the power station. and pulled up next to the gateway I usually parked the car this was another four to five miles on the object was in and out of view on the way but by the time we arrived that power station it must have turned round again

and there was now heading west it was obviously much closer to the object that I was much closer to the object than before and it was huge it was moving behind a pylon so I had a scale of distance I could determine how far away it was and it must have been less than half a mile from me.

I stood and watched the object for about five minutes as I slowly went out of view. The swirling substance was like a, difficult to describe, but it was nearest description, I would say condensed light of blue, orange and yellow mixed together in a swirling mass of energy. It seemed to be covering this perfect cigar shape. There was no sound.

The whole sighting from start to finish was about 15 to 20 minutes and there's no one around but myself because it was a very quiet Sunday lunchtime and in fact I had left my camera at home was frustrating to see the least. I couldn't do anything more

other than what should just float away in the distance silently. So I decided to go down to the beach about 100 yards away from where I parked the car and there was one solitary fisherman down there

I set the rod up and cast off and sort of tried to get him to be confidence by walking over and chatting with him and then I asked him, how did you see anything in the sky? And he says, no, no, he says, have you seen a UFO? And I said, well, I think I have. The guy told me his brother-in-law worked at RAF Boomer, which is close by

and told them that there's been a few sightings of recent. We're talking for about five, ten minutes, then I looked up in the sky to see if there was anything about. Nothing was about. But what I did notice was there was quite a few light aircraft circling the area. I would say quite dangerously, because I shouldn't be that close to each other. And basically it was, you know, I was the only.

witness to this incident but it's been haunting me ever since and I thought I'd better get it on record and tell the story. It was printed in UFO magazine in 2002, though I did say it was Sunday the 25th of July but it wasn't, it was actually June. Behrman and mine it was 24, 25 years later and I just apparently I got that month wrong but I couldn't change it. for the article. And that's it, basically. And thanks for listening. Cheers.

Hey, Ryan. This is Mike Cleland, and I have been wanting to share a story with you for your witness accounts program, which I think is a really valuable show. I think when you do the witness accounts, I think it really provides a wonderful, almost a service to the UFO community

to get this raw data, just people simply talking about their sightings firsthand. I think it's really important, and I'm grateful, doing this. And it makes for a really engaging show. I really get excited when those shows come up on my podcast feed. Full disclosure here, I have been doing UFO research on my own. I've written a few books. And I have also been a guest on your show, Ryan. So I just want people to know that up front. I had a very strange sighting along with my partner at the time, my partner Andrea, who you have met.

and telling this story, I think like 90% of it is going to be trying to describe how weird the thing we saw was. Now, I was with Andrea, and it was on Thursday, April 25th of 2019, and this would have been about 6.30 p.m. when we saw this. Andrea and I were driving from upstate New York to a very small UFO conference that was taking place just outside of Providence, Rhode Island, and in a small suburb of Providence called Warwick. And we were on our way to stay with our friends Suzanne and Jack. And Suzanne and Jack are both experiencers too, as is Andrea. So Andrea and I both have had powerful experiences, seemingly UFO contact experiences. So we're driving. The sun is still up, but it's skidding. to be sunset. It's getting to be just as twilight is arriving. And we're driving towards Providence

from the north, so we're heading almost due south. I think it's roughly southeast on Highway 146. And this is kind of a twisty-turning road that goes from Massachusetts into Rhode Island. Now, Rhode Island's very small, so this highway, there's not much of it in that very small state. So there's really only, you know, about a dozen miles or so. Now, I was driving, and Andrea was sitting next to me, and it was an overcast day, and it was getting to be twilight. So the cloud cover was kind of gray on gray, and it wasn't very, it just had that indistinct kind of cloud cover. And this road is twisty-turny, so we're kind of turning one direction, and there's trees right and left of the road, so we don't have a wide view of the sky at all times. But we come around a corner, and we both say the same thing.

she and I both saw it at the same time, and we both said, what is that? And it looked like, at first, it caught our eye because, I mean, it could have been like, it was roughly the same color as the darkest shadow of a cloud, but a little bit darker. So there was an unusually dark form in the sky. And I remember saying, that's too dark to be some weird little cloud. And she agreed.

Now, describing this is going to be tough because it did seem to, I will say, morph a little bit. My first thought was that it was like a partially inflated giant mylar balloon. It had this kind of thin, irregular quality to it. So it wasn't like a distinct metal craft in the sky. It was kind of indistinct. And honestly, it didn't look like much more than a potato chip in its shape, right? sort of curve, kind of lumpy, and it was rotating. Now, it was rotating very smoothly, and this was a little problematic. I was driving. I was trying to keep an eye on it. Andrea was trying to get

a picture of it, so she was fumbling with her camera. She never got a picture of it, though we did get some good pictures of the highway, and you can see the cloud cover very clearly. And this potato chip shape was kind of twisting, and Andrea was saying it's blinking out, and I was like, Like, no, no, it's just twisting out of, it's just twisting to, we're seeing its thinnest edge. And we both talked about this in the moment. Now, so just try to picture this. Imagine taking like a business card and holding it between your fingers, right? So you're looking at it head on and you see a big rectangle, right?

And then you turn it to the side. And when it's as thin as the piece of paper, right? So you're looking at the edge. If it was, let's say, a white business card on a white side. day and you are out on the beach, let's say, at a certain point it would be technically invisible if you were looking right at its thinnest edge. And then it would essentially reappear if you kept on twisting it into form again. That was the sense I got. It was like a potato chip-shaped thing very, very thin. That was rotating and it would skip out of view when we saw it along its

thinnest edge. So this dark steel gray, whatever it was, would twist out and be out of phase. There's a very strange aspect to this too, which Andrea and I both saw and both talked about. This thing was in the sky, low enough that it was below the cloud cover, yet high enough that it was, it seemed pretty far away. It seemed like we were looking at something rather than, large that was a big distance away. And this is tough to say. If I drew this, which I did a little Photoshop recreation and I put it on my blog, in drawing this, right? So I have this little curved sort of potato chip piece of slate gray floating in the air. And then about three times the length of the potato chip above that, stationary, was a tiny singular dot. I am talking about

barely perceptible, essentially like a period, a single little dot, directly in line above this. And I don't know any other way to explain it. It looked like the sky was a giant bolton board. And there was a pin in the bolton board. And that's what we were seeing. like the little teeny pushpin, and all we could see was a little dot, and then this potato chip was hanging by a piece of fishing line, essentially an invisible piece of fishing line. So that was the illusion it created.

A single pushpin in the sky with a single thread of fishing line holding this twisting potato chip. Now, to make things stranger, we were approaching Providence, and that meant approaching the airport. and we were seeing big commercial aircraft crossing the highway, like low across the highway, and so if this was some sort of like weather balloon or some sort of radio reflecting surface or something like that

that was held aloft in a balloon form, the last place on earth you would want to put this is seemingly, seemingly directly in the path of incoming flights that were going into the Providence Airport. So we were seeing this. At the exact same time, we were seeing airplane traffic crossing the highway, coming in for a landing. So as we looked at this thing, we were on the highway kind of driving twisty tourney, and we'd go around a corner and we'd lose sight of it. And then we'd come back around another corner, and there it would be again. And it went from a potato chip to a credit card. So instead of a credit card, which is a nice rectangle, it was a little. little more rounded and indistinct like a potato chip.

But wow, is it a very strange thing? And both of us were absolutely perplexed. I feel strongly that if this had been some sort of mylar balloon, we would have recognized it as a milar balloon. But both of us were really surprised at the strangeness of this. Now, if I had to guess the size of it, I would say that this thing was much larger. than, let's say, a billboard on the side of a highway.

I mean, it was much larger. I'm saying three or four, five times larger than a billboard on the highway. That's the only thing I can equate as being similar because it felt almost rather two-dimensional at times. So it had that kind of billboard flat quality to it. Okay, so now if anyone out there knows of some sort of, like, I don't know, some sort of mylar balloon reflective surface that would appear this way in the sky. Please, please tell me.

I'm totally open to this being something other than what it appeared to be, which was something very strange. And I will cautiously say something paranormal. But I simply have never heard a report like this before. I'd never seen anything like this before. And it confounded both of us in its strangeness. and when I did the blog post and did create the Photoshop images and what I did is took the photos that Andrea had of the highway

so I have an accurate shot of the highway and then I tried to create the shape in the sky with the little dot above it and it was clearly done with Photoshop and I clearly labeled the photos as being done in Photoshop and it was funny I wrote up a short little report and put these images on Facebook, and a lot of people chimed in without having done much more than give a cursory

glance at the image and saying, this is nothing but a Photoshop image. And yes, of course, I mean, it was like my drawing of what I saw. So yes, it was a Photoshop image. Thank you for letting me share this long and somewhat unresolved story. Love the show. And I am wishing you and Jane the greatest success in Scotland, the land of my ancestry. Bye now. Somewhere in the skies is produced by third-kind productions in association with the Entertainment One podcast network.