Somewhere in the Skies - Witness Accounts: Volume Sixteen

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

On episode 216 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we are transported once again in to the eyes, hearts, and minds of those who have experienced those mysteries that lay somewhere in the skies. From black triangles flying slowly and silently over the skies of the U.S. and Europe, to a mass UFO sighting by an entire group of teenagers in a juvenile detention center. We also hear from the youngest voice to ever appear on the podcast, Eva, 11 years old, and a dramatic encounter she had with her father of what could only be described as a "Tic Tac" UFO. It's another powerful volume of Witness Accounts that spans continents, generations, and perhaps, even worlds.Thank you to all who contributed their stories to this volume of Witness Accounts. If you've has a personal UFO sighting, encounter, or story you'd like to share, please email: [e-mail] to discuss further. Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Somewhere in the Skies Subreddit: www.reddit.com/r/SomewhereSkiesPod/ YouTube Channel: CLICK HERE Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan’s book in paperback, ebook, or audiobook 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 is somewhere in the skies with Ryan Sprig. Hello, my name is Brian Wellman. I currently live in Tennessee, but in September of 2019, I was visiting Noab, Utah with my dad on vacation. And we were in Canyonlands National Park. I had taken an online night photography class, and I wanted to take some Milky Way photos. So we decided to go out that night and do that.

We had one last night where the moon was going to be down about, I can't remember the exact time, around 10.30 at night, and then we should have, you know, a pretty good night sky. It was cloudy and raining in some areas, but it was clearing off. We did still have some clouds, but not really bad. My father was sick that night, and we were trying to decide when we were going to go. I wanted to sleep a little bit and then get up at like two or three in the morning and go.

But he thought since he was sick, it would be best to go early in the night, and then he could sleep uninterrupted and hopefully feel better. So we headed out to Canyonlands probably between 9.30 and 10. I know we got there before the moon was down. I had set up my camera before. beforehand and all the settings that I needed for some Milky Way photos. I had the camera on a tripod, et cetera. So we got there and we just drove into the park.

We were going to look for a good place to set up where hopefully we wouldn't have any cars or anyone around. So we ended up driving into Schaefer Canyon Overlook, which is quite a nice overlooked there towards the east as the moon was setting to the west behind me, if I remember correctly. So I was set up. I had the tripod pulled out and I had just practiced taking a couple shots as I waited for the moon to go down. Shortly after the moon went down, actually before I was really taking any photos, I noticed you're coming from kind of the southeast, a streak in the sky. and I didn't think much of it, thought it was probably a shooting star or, you know, a meteor.

And I went back to getting ready to take some photos. And it wasn't within, it was within a minute probably that I saw a streak in the same general area in the sky. So I stopped and I looked and I noticed three lights, which I thought looked like they were in formation. And I thought, wow, that's a UFO. So I ran over to my dad. he was sitting in the car because, again, he didn't feel well. And I said, hey, dad, I think we got a UFO. And he said, yeah, I've been watching it.

He said it came over this kind of like cliff or hill there and moved slowly. And then a couple times it streaked into a position where it was probably, you know, degree-wise from us, probably 75 degrees in the sky there. So we watched it and it moved a little closer and slowly in. And again, at that point I thought it was three different objects. So we watched it a little bit and it moved around and made some incredible movements. You know, streaking through the sky, it was completely silent. It looked like it moved back.

back kind of close to where it was before a couple of times and really interesting directly due east there was a white light very bright white light in the sky and i was talking to my dad and he said he had seen that almost since we had been there and at times he thought it was maybe someone with a flashlight um maybe someone with a real bright light but he watched it for a while and was making really erratic movements and uh he said he actually watched it it for quite some time, didn't know what it was. So I saw that UFO off to the side to the east, and then we had the one that had come from the southeast.

They each had like different color lights. The one that had kind of done streaks in, had whitish blue lights. Again, at this time I thought it was three different objects. Then the one that was the bright light to the east was just looked like one bright white light. And it moved very radically throughout the canyons. It looked like a ping pong ball.

It was moving so fast and erratic. down in and out of the canyons, just fascinating. We had no idea what that was. It was about this time that I noticed three red lights, and they were kind of in the east too, and they were, again, looked like something in formation, and that's what I thought it was, that they were in formation. At one point, they looked like they did a pivot and plunged towards the ground, which it really caught my breath, because I thought, wow, that's going to explode into the ground. and they just disappear. There was no sound, nothing happened, no explosion, and they were gone.

They would reappear within a few minutes, and I saw that one again. So, you know, at times there were three different UFOs in the sky at one time that we were able to see. I remembered I had a small pair of binoculars, and I got those out of the car, and I put those binoculars on the first one that had come in, which it had stayed pretty much in the same spot, you know, besides moving back and forth a few times. And it was then I realized that it wasn't three different craft, but it was one triangular craft. It was a black triangle with the white bluish lights on it.

So I gave my dad the binoculars, and we both took a couple turns looking at it. Just an amazing sight through the binoculars. I also put the binoculars on the one that was towards the east, the bright light, the bright white one. and I noticed when I had binoculars on it, it was also a triangle. The white light was so bright. Actually, three lights were so bright.

It looked like one bright light, but it was also a triangle, and it was the one that was bouncing around within the canyons. I found the one with the red lights on the corners, and again, another triangle. This encounter, these triangles were there for two hours, the time we were there. During that time, I had taken an online class, so I was really determined to try to get some nice sky photography, which I was able to do. Unfortunately, I was only able to get some photographs of the white one as it was silhouetted on the LaSalle Mountains, which were due east from Canyonlands. But we did observe those triangles for within those two hours. I saw a lot of weird erratic movements from them.

they were able to streak what looked like miles across the sky in a fraction or a second. They would even look like they disappeared and would appear in another area. Sometimes it looked like a just big streak of light and they'd appear at the end of that streak. I never saw a center light. My dad did notice with the one white one that was really bright, that it pivoted what looked to be vertical, and it turned and he saw, white light in the center fire on and it looked like when that light came on it propelled itself

across the sky so i did not see that but he did and i thought that was a very interesting observation i would have liked to have seen it but um i continued to watch them the white the one with the bluish white lights and the one with red lights interacted for a while the white one had pulled back again and i noticed they looked like they were kind of rotating around each other i'm not sure what they were doing um kind of like orbiting each other or or just, you know, flying around each other. That lasted a little bit. We observed that with binoculars. I did, again, tried to take a couple pictures. Those just did not turn out. I didn't see anything of the other craft. The only one I saw any pictures of was the one that was with white, bright

lights. So again, you know, I didn't really feel any fear. It was more, this is amazing. They did kind of circle. I felt like we were being surrounded at one time, and I felt a little, you know, a little apprehension there. It's like, wow, we're completely surrounded, but I knew at any point, you know, with the sophistication of what we were seeing, that they could do anything they wanted. Again, my father was sick, so around midnight,

maybe a little after, we decided to go ahead and wrap things up and go. The craft were still there. They were still maneuvering through the canyons and up in the air. I'm not sure what they were doing. I speculate that they were mapping or

doing a reconnaissance of the area. I was in military intelligence that just looked like they were really gathering information of the terrain, which the white one was, again, was in and out of the canyons and all over. So I don't know if it was mapping. The only two things that could come to mind for me is they were mapping or doing a reconnaissance or they were looking for something. So I'm not sure what they were doing. We left.

We started driving down from Canyonlands coming off the ridges there. And I do remember talking to my dad. I just was looking and wanted to make sure we didn't have any lost time, which, you know, I don't think we had any lost time at all. Just an incredible encounter with three UFOs that lasted, you know, at least two hours there, almost two hours. But it's something I'll never forget. I reached out a couple of things. I reached out to an author, Dave Marler, who has written a book about Triangles, which if you read the book, they've been cited for many years, not just since the 70s. but going back through time.

I also was in an episode of Unidentified. They did an episode on Black Triangles. I stayed anonymous there. I was just apprehensive about putting my name out there, but now I realized it's, you know, there's nothing to hide from. You know, as far as my name, I don't mind that people know, and I'm more than happy to answer questions that anybody would have. But that was interesting being on that episode of Unidentified.

They did a really good job, but there were some things they left out, some things they kind of twisted around, I guess, probably to try to make it a more interesting story. But, yeah, it's season two, and it's, you know, the one on Black Triangles. Thank you for your time. 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. Hi, I'm Lee. I live in Manchester in the UK. I'm 35 years old. I was around 8 or 9 at the time. I was traveling in a car from Blackpool to my own.

back to Manchester. In the car there was myself, my brother who was two years younger than me, my mum and my dad. So we were driving down a country road on the way home. It was pitch black. We were the only car on the road from what I remember. The car we were driving in was an old Black Star Astra and it had one of the old sunroves that they don't think they do anymore. And I just remember looking up, seeing this black triangle in the sky. So I said to my mum, look at that mum what's that so my mum looked up she she said i don't know i remember shaking my brother to wake him up because he was asleep at the time fortunately i don't remember what my brother said because it was a long time ago i remember my dad asking what was what's going on so my mum told him

however he couldn't really do much except carry on driving so as we looked up we watched this object for around two minutes and then it just disappeared no sound no lights it was just good gone. It's stuck with me ever since and I still bring it up now to talk about with her mum and she remembers it vividly as well. Just a shame we had no recording equipment because back then it was just the big camcord of things that we had but we didn't really carry it at the time. So that's a bit of a regret. I don't remember feeling scared or frightened. I just remember looking in amazement more than anything. And ever since then I've been interested in UFOs and UAPs and anything to do with space, and it's left me 100% convinced that we're not alone.

When I get an opportunity, I always look up to the sky, to see if we can see anything else, but unfortunately I've not seen anything since. Thank you, Ryan, for giving me the opportunity to tell my story. I know it's only short. Keep up the good work on the podcast, keep looking up. Hi, my name is Kyle, and this is my sighting. In 2003, I was living in the town of Belvedere, Illinois, and my brother and I were playing horse in our driveway, and we had a hoop that was on our garage, and it was facing west. And my brother had tossed the ball in, and it bounced off the hoop, and I go to follow the hoop with my eyes as it goes into the trees, and I see this dark, chart.

color-colored triangular shape. And it was probably 2,000 to 2,500 feet in the air, almost, almost directly above and to the front, or to the west of us. And it didn't have any, like, solid edges. It was all rounded on the sides. And the back, in the back in a recess section, there were two, like, circle nozzles on each side.

and a longer elongated oval in the center, but it was recessed inside of that edge of the triangle. And I looked at my brother, and I was like, what's that? At the time, I was really interested in our modern jets and mostly World War II aircraft. And I was like, I've never seen anything like that. And that weekend we were supposed to go to our grandparents' house. And we did. And we talked to my step-grandfather about it, and we spent two hours on the internet trying to find something that matched our description,

and we never found it. And shortly after that, I started having bouts of sleep paralysis. I would wake up in the middle of the night and I would be frozen. And I couldn't move my fingers or my toes. And I couldn't scream. And it was really hard. And I didn't know what to do about it. I continued having the sleep paralysis for years after that.

And I eventually just figured out that I had to relax. and breathe and close my eyes and focus on moving things to get my body working again. And shortly after the first incident, I was getting off the bus with my friend Nick. And as we got off the bus, we saw these two jets chase something that was smoldering in the air. And we asked our reading teacher the next day, who was a. Air Force Reservist, and she said that she didn't know anything about it, she'd ask, and we, of course, never heard anything. But after that, I started having real vivid, lucid dreams, and that's something I still have to this day. I don't correlate these incidents and put them

together, but it seems that it's something that happens to people who witness the dark triangles. And yeah, that's what happened to me. Hello, my name's Michael. I'm originally from the United Kingdom, from a place called Liverpool. I migrated and I now live in Perth, Western Australia. I'd like to tell you what happened to me and my girlfriend at the time who went on to become my wife the event took place in 1997.

I actually know precisely when it took place it was the 28th of March and I'll tell you a bit more about that why I know the date a little bit later what happened was we were in a car travelling between Formby and Southport in West Lancashire in the United Kingdom

and we were on the way to a party it was about it was like early evening it was still light but it was starting to go dark and we were quite excited We hadn't been drinking or anything. We were just on the way to the party because we were driving.

And we were on like quite a, it's quite a rural road because it's on the coast. And Southport's like a seaside town. As we're driving, I was listening to the radio. And it mentioned that Hal's Bob Comet would be visible in the northern Hemet. atmosphere skies that night. And I was intrigued by that, mostly because several days beforehand, the cult members from the Heaven's Gate sect had committed suicide. And for those of you who remember, or for those of you don't, the story goes that the

cult members committed suicide because they believed that they were going to be transported onto a UFO that was hidden in Hal's Bob comet. Now, I'm not making a judgment on that. I'm just letting you know what I saw anyway. But I was intrigued by that anyway. And that's one of the reasons why I was interested to see whether I could see this particular comet. So as we're driving, I started looking out the window just to see if I could see anything as we were driving past. And then as my wife was driving, I was in the passenger seat. I noticed something out the side window. And I could see quite a large object in the sky kind of coming into view.

So I couldn't quite make it out. So I asked my wife to pull over so I could get a better look. So we pulled over at the side of the road. And literally, it was quite bizarre because I distinctly remember looking, trying to make out what I could see. And it was quite an overcast day. March days in the UK can be quite wintry and it was quite overcast. So there was a lot of cloud cover. But the clouds just opened up to reveal, I couldn't see the whole obviously.

I could only see one side of it, but it was just enormous. I mean gigantic. Like people have asked me to explain how big. I'm talking like half a mile to a mile across. I mean, this thing was enormous. And I couldn't see all of it because some of it was still hidden in the cloud. I did make a report of this many years later to a UFO site and I've looked at it and I've mentioned on that

that it was cigar shaped that's not a memory I have now I may have thought one side of it was cigar shaped but I couldn't see the whole object anyway I couldn't make out any distinctive features of the object I couldn't make out whether it was metal, what it was made of. It was grey in colour, very bland looking. But what I certainly could see is three-dimensional structure.

And I could see it was an object and it wasn't moving. And I remember looking and thinking, how is that object able to stay perfectly still and not move? my wife was seeing exactly the same as what I was seeing so it wasn't like a delusion or a mirage

we were talking while we were looking at it how high was it it was quite high I'd say at least 10,000 feet maybe 15,000 feet it was right up there but it was just giant

the strange thing was that while were watching it, we noticed that there was, I think there was three orbs, like light-coloured small objects, very bright, very intense coloured. I think one was green, one was red, and one was yellow. I'm not 100% sure now on the colours, but they were definitely kind of connected to the main craft in the sense that they were interacting with it and the interesting thing was they were basically darting

haphazardly across the horizon the panoramic horizon and the speed that they were moving literally one would go from one end of the horizon to the other in a blink of an eye and I remember thinking at the time that's not physically possible to move with that speed it was almost like at the speed of light

it was just incredible speeds it was just these things were just darting around the main craft again they look like solid objects they weren't lasers it was difficult to kind of work out how big they were they were quite small in comparison to the big craft

but that doesn't mean to say that they were they were tarny either it was just difficult to work out they were circular very orb-like kind of objects we observed this I was I'll be honest with you I was freaking out I was so excited my wife was getting school my girlfriend who went on to be my wife was getting quite scared and she was urging me to leave because we were going to be late for the party

I really didn't want to go but eventually after five or ten minutes of watching this show I couldn't wait to get back into the car because I wanted to get to the party and tell everyone what was going on we got back into the car we started driving towards Southport

as we're driving it was probably five ten minutes and it was starting to go dark we were coming into the outskirts of Southport which is like quite a small town really and we were hitting some busier road and all of a sudden as we're talking about what we'd seen there was an enormous flash of instantaneous light within the car itself which basically blinded us because it felt as if it came in either through the sunroof or the windscreen, it lasted about a second or so. My wife, who was driving, was completely blinded and had to do an emergency stop. But then as soon as it hit the car and hit us, the light was gone.

It lasted like a second. And afterwards, I was just, I just looked at my wife. and said, did you just witness what I've just witnessed and she just burst out crime? I mean, it was, there's the interesting thing about what happened to us is these are the two most extraordinary things that have ever happened to me in my life and they happened within a 10 minute period. I'm absolutely certain that whatever came into the car, it wasn't like a, a, faulty speed camera or whatever. It wasn't like a laser.

This thing took over the centre that the whole car inside the car we couldn't see anything. We were absolutely blinded by the most intense white light I've ever witnessed. And as I say, after it had finished

it was gone. My wife, I was so excited. I wanted to get to the party and tell everyone. My wife begged me not to talk about it because she thought would be ridiculed because of the taboo nature of this phenomenon. And for some reason, people are just not willing to accept that these things happen. This thing has stayed with me. And my wife, we're no longer.

together now unfortunately although we've got a good relationship for over 20 years 20 years and it still strikes me as the most bizarre episode in my life and she won't talk about it i've tried to get her to talk about it i think because she doesn't quite understand what happened she'd rather not think about it because it doesn't fit into the way she wants the world to work What do I think it was? I don't know. I don't think it was of this world because I don't see how anything that I saw

we've got that sort of technology and the speeds that I saw on that day and then what happened afterwards. There was an element after that we both said that we felt as if we'd been probed and we felt a little bit weird afterwards. There wasn't any time distortion or anything. It was just the light came and then it went.

I tried to kind of scour and do some research to see if anybody else had seen anything similar that night. But I wasn't able to find anything that recorded this particular event. As I say, it took place on, I believe, I think it was a Saturday night because we were going to a party. It was the 28th of March, 1997. The Heavens Gate cult members had committed suicide, I believe, a couple of days earlier. And it was at the time when Hal's Bob Comet was still in the... area. I hope you enjoyed the story. It certainly changed my life. It gave me a fresh perspective on

kind of what is important in life. I certainly am a believer that we're not the only life force in this universe. And thank you, Ryan, for giving me the opportunity to tell this story. What's up, guys, Ryan Sprague here, and I'm just dropping. and in to remind you about our Patreon campaign. Somewhere in the Skies is always free to consume, but it's not free to create. So if you want to help the show on a monthly basis, we have tons of rewards for you in return, including shoutouts on the show and website, bonus content and episodes, and free merge. Want to be my guest or pick a topic for the show? You can do that too. So if you'd like to learn more and to help support the show, visit patreon.com slash somewhere skies. Thank you.

and keep looking up. Hey, how's it going, Ryan? And somewhere in the sky's podcast. My name is Roz, and this is my story. So it begins when I was around 16 years old. And I was at a buddy's house of mine. And we were just watching a movie in his living room. It was around 9 o'clock at night, wintertime.

So it was pretty cold out. and it had been dark for a while. And we were in his living room watching a movie, all the lights out. And the way his living room is oriented, you have, you know, the couch is facing the TV, and then the TV has two windows behind it. So we were looking at the TV along with facing these windows, and the windows had the blinds down. So we're sitting there, and then a freaking super bright light that was moving.

um started to come through the windows behind the tv with the blinds down that's how bright it was so we were like you know what the heck is that um and the where my friend lived he uh it was pretty rural and he had a field right behind his house so our first thought was did a tractor turn on its headlights or something and they're coming through into the uh the living room but we got up you know this this took place within seconds and um so we immediately popped up and went out his back door to go check out what it was and uh in the sky around i want to say two football fields away is a fireball it is i always said it was it was around the size of a SUV and this fireball it almost looked like your cliche picture of the sun just shrink down

to the size of a minivan and uh it was so close it was actually unbelievable and it was moving slowly across the sky not doing anything just moving uh and we we went to us we went to school with uh a friend of ours who lived down the street from my buddy and we immediately called her up because it was actually heading right in the direction of her house so we called her and uh we told her you know you got to go outside and and look what's coming over your house right now And as she, as she was about to go outside, the best way I can describe it, the fireball collapsed in on itself and was gone. So, yeah, that is, that is the story. And I know you wanted to, wanted me to include how it made me feel.

And I think the best way I can describe it is it made me pretty excited. Like I said, this happened when I was around 16, so it was definitely the event that pushed me into getting super interested in the whole UFO subject. And yeah, it made me pretty happy because I love UFO so much and I'm lucky to be able to have a story of my own. So that is everything. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Summer in the Sky's podcast. Hi, Ryan. This is Sean and my oldest daughter, Eva, who's 11 years old.

We're from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and on August 8th of this year, we were camping, and we're in Rocky Mountain House, which is a couple hours north of us, and we're heading north towards our campsite. When my daughter saw what she thought was an airplane, but she said it looked weird, so she yelled. What is that? Because I was tracking it from when it was in the middle of our windshield to where it was pretty much. directly beside me. And so I looked at it, and sure enough, I could see it, and it was about 3,000 feet above us, and it was about the size of an airplane easily, but it was going really, really fast, and I was shocked.

I just didn't know what to do. There was no one else on the road. It was unbelievable. I had never seen anything like it. It was completely white. It looked exactly like what you would think a double-sided egg would look like, you know, if it had the thin end on both ends instead of like a thin and thick. It was at about, it was flying at a 30 degree angle, kind of like almost like belly up.

And it was moving hella fast. And it kind of slowed down once we saw it. And it had a shimmery look to it, almost kind of like it was blurry. So it was traveling directly west. We went, I tried to find a spot to pull over. I asked my daughter to grab the binoculars that were right beside her. She went, reached over to grab them, and she turned back, and she saw it drop a thousand feet straight down. And I found a spot to pull over, and I went to reach over to grab my cell phone.

But as I was grabbing my cell phone, I was looking left, I saw it actually do a hard 90 straight north into a cloud. And then I grabbed my cell phone. I was going to take a video now that we were parked, and we looked. looked at it and we couldn't find it anymore. And my wife, for whatever reason, her, she just could not look up. She said she just had this compulsion to look straight down. Same with my other daughter. She just, they both just could not look at it for some reason.

Like Sarah said it was a plane and she couldn't look up. She couldn't even look at it for some reason. And now every time we talk about it, she's quite uneasy. And then Hannah, yeah, for same reason, she just, literally couldn't look up for some reason. So it was kind of weird. So Ava and I were the only ones that got to see that particular egg.

So then that was neat. We were just shocked. Couldn't believe we had seen that. So then we continued on to the campsite and we got to the campsite and we told my parents who were camping with us and asked, we started asking my mom about her experience, which was back when she was nine or 10.

and eight? Yeah. Yeah. And she had a close encounter with the third kind, and she said how the way we were reacting was exactly how she reacted when she was a young child. And then Ava and I decided to draw a picture separately of what we saw, and we drew the same thing, like a double-sided egg, almost like a tick-tack, but fat in the middle.

And we even drew, I drew like little squigglys around it, and so did she. So yeah, that's our story. And then as far as like feelings, I've had this obsessive like compulsion now to constantly look in the sky. I've had another experience since then, and Ava's had, how many of you had now? I've had five.

Five experiences? Yeah, since then. My recent one was when we were, I went out hunting up by White Court in November, third week of November. and we were sleeping in a tent. It was minus 20. And we heard, I, everybody was asleep.

It was about two or three in the morning. I woke up and I heard this, what sounded to me like a swooshing sound. I thought it was a plane, but it was like a swoosh instead, like the air was swooshing. And it came over top of the tent. I could hear it just stop above us. And then I fell asleep. And then when we woke up, I remembered it, but that's all I remembered.

And I asked everybody, normally everyone gets up to go pee in the middle of the night out hunting because everyone's had a few drinks. And no one actually woke up that night. Everyone said they slept the greatest they've slept in a couple of years. And it's been really weird. It felt like these two experiences have made me feel like it's almost like watching. But I don't know how else to explain it. I don't know how you feel.

I feel fine. It's weird because my dad's like was scared and I was didn't feel anything. Like I felt normal when they showed when they were here. Hi Ryan. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be able to tell my story. My UFO sighting happened. I think it was like 1997. I was a social worker working in a camp that was for kids. It was basically, I mean, it was basically like a detention center. But it was out in the middle of the desert. It was in Alfrida, Arizona, which is very close to the border of Mexico.

And really just out in the middle of nowhere. So the kids lived at the camp and the staff lived at the camp. and the way it was set up there was an area where the kids stayed and then there was like the dorms or whatever where the staff lived and there was a little path that went from the staff housing to the area where the kids lived and that path was not lit it was pretty dark like I said it was the desert but there was a little path that went between the two places. So I was walking with another staff member along this path.

And I'm just telling you it's really dark. You can see every star in the sky. It's just, I don't know. I've never, it's never, I've never lived in a place where the sky was really that clear because it's the desert, there's no clouds, and I live in Washington now, so there's always clouds. But it's out in the middle of nowhere, and the sky is just really clear. You can see all the stars. So I'm walking along with this other staff member, and we're talking.

I have no idea what we were talking about. And then, for whatever reason, we stopped, and we looked up. And I don't know why we did that, but we did. And there were three lights in the sun. sky and they were very, very far away. So, you know, we could tell immediately that it wasn't, it wasn't planes or a plane. At the time, I thought it was one, I thought it was one aircraft. And that's where these lights were coming from. But then they, the, the three lights moved away from each other. And so that was very strange. It was like, wait a minute. And we were both looking at us.

who were like, what is that? Because they moved away from each other. So unless it was like an aircraft that was like stretching, I don't know. I don't know of any aircraft that does that. It just didn't make any sense. So then we knew at that point that we were looking at three separate aircrafts or whatever we were seeing in the sky. So at this point, we're just kind of standing there and we're not really saying anything. and, or at least I don't remember that we were saying anything.

And then, all of a sudden, the lights go back into a triangular formation and they just take off across the sky. And we're like, okay. And I don't remember what we said. I don't think we said, like, I just don't, we didn't say anything of significance. I remember the feeling that I had that was like, oh my goodness, like what did I just see? It was like, it was like confusion, basically. And we just started walking. And back to, we were walking.

Actually, we started making our way towards the camp, which where the kids were, which is where we were going in the first place. So as we came up to the clearing where the kids were, A few of the kids came running up, and I remember one of them came. And these are like teenagers. And they're like teenagers from the inner city, kids that are there because they had committed serious crimes. Some of them, some of them very serious. And one of the kids came up and he was like, Miss Dee, did you see that UFO? And I'm like, yes.

And the other kids were like, did you see it? you see that UFO across the sky? And I'm like, yes. And there was just like a feeling of a little bit of excitement in the camp. But to be very honest, it wasn't like what you would think where people would just be like, I don't even know, like, freaking out about it. They really weren't. It was like this really subdued feeling of just like, wow, like what did we just see?

And also, you know, no matter, I think what it is is that, you know, no matter what we saw, we were still in this situation where these kids were incarcerated and we were working with them and it was a very difficult situation. And so there was this feeling of like, well, we just saw a UFO in the sky, but it doesn't really change our situation. And so it's interesting because, you know, one of the questions that you ask is like, how did you feel about it? And I have to be honest and say like, I really have wanted to and been curious. I have wanted my whole life to see a UFO. And I've always been curious about them. But in this moment when we had actually seen one, I, I don't know how to describe how I felt about it

because it was almost like, okay, yeah. Like, okay, yeah, there was like a UFO in the sky. And of course there was. And that was kind of the feeling. It wasn't anything like this big amazement where we were all just like freaking out all night over it. It was like it was like it was always supposed to be there. and we were supposed to see it.

And now we just have to get back to this difficult life that we were living at that time. Looking back at it now and just thinking about the situation I was in, because I will just say that this camp that I was working at was absolutely a horrible place. And there was a lot of abuse there. There was racism there. It was a terrible, terrible situation. And I believe that they are not there anymore. which is a good thing.

But it was such a bad situation that there was always this feeling that the staff or the people, not the staff, not the regular staff, but the people that were running the place were constantly trying to dehumanize the kids. I mean, basically so that they could justify how they were being treated there. And my job was to advocate for them, which was a very, very, very, difficult job. So now looking back at it, it just really makes me feel their humanity even more than I did before because we were all in this situation. Like we were all, we were all in this terrible situation where there were these very clear roles. They were like the kids who, you know,

we were supposed to control and, you know, their humanity was always being taken away. And then there was a staff and they had like this real dominant position over the kids but ultimately we were all human beings and just looking back at it that's what it reminds me of it reminds me of our humanity that you know even though we were in this this little universe together where things were really awful and the roles were really uh really unjust we were still Just little tiny humans on the earth looking up in the sky and seeing something that we didn't understand. So that's how I feel about it now looking back. Thank you, Ryan, for giving me a chance to tell my story and I love your podcast.

It makes me feel like I'm less alone in this world. Somewhere in the Skies is produced by Third Kind Productions in association with the Entertainment One podcast network. Thank you, Mark.