The misfortune of an actual UFO sighting

Letter: The misfortune of an actual UFO sighting (seacoastonline.com)

I appreciated the piece by J. Dennis Robinson in the March 8 edition of the Herald about Betty and Barney Hill’s 1961 alien encounter near Franconia, N.H. in 1961. I had the privilege of meeting Mrs. Hill and listening to her tell her story as a class reward at the end of a UNH Astronomy course some years back. She brought her alien head model and star map and told her story in simple, believable terms. Mr. Robinson’s telling of their story reminded me not all media accounts are sensationalist dribble.

After many years and too many sightings my conclusion is nothing makes you a believer and silences the “all that stuff is impossible” experts in their own minds faster than to have the misfortune of an up-close and personal sighting of an actual machine. Not some amorphous light in the night sky but an actual machine in the air doing what all your experience up to that time tells you is absolutely “impossible” with our present technology. Nothing whatsoever can prepare you for that life-changing experience until it happens to you. Your curse from that time forward will be to put up with the legions of experts, educated idiots, know-it-all's and total fools who laugh, point and call you names. Nothing like seeing what is obviously a solid object moving soundlessly through the air breaking every physical law you believe in to destroy your skepticism and remember, an opinion from someone who’s never seen one is simply that, an uninformed opinion.

So yeah, an actual close-up sighting of an actual machine is like "common sense", a curse because for the rest of your life you will have to put up with the legions of know-it all, smartest people in the room who lack it but just "know" what they “know” why you couldn't possibly have seen what you absolutely did.

Occasionally by mentioning it another person is finally able to talk about their experience and that helps for there are many who are too afraid to admit they ever saw one. So keep it up as there are more stories out there than you can imagine.

For me, UFO ‘stories’ offer me some of the greatest comfort about ‘weird’ things that we discuss here in the forum. Personally, I feel that if I were asked to present my best evidence for the existence of the esoteric, UFOs would be up there. There is so much evidence that we can point to, it seems overwhelming. Along with NDEs, they are my go to ‘candle bearers’.

Mediums, on the other hand, are at the other end of the scale. 

In my head I remember ‘if a UFO were to land on the Whitehouse lawn’ as being a popular belief as to what it would take to convince people of their existence. In 2021 that wouldn’t even make a dent in peoples belief IF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA DIDN’T WANT IT TO, it was probably ever thus.

Have reports of UFO sightings vastly decreased over time? It seems that way to me, but things have changed. Or have they just been overtaken and submerged into the modern worlds fascination with celebrities and scandal? Are there any young YouTubers that are serious about searching out new UFO sightings? Mainstream reporters now won’t report anything that they’re not encouraged to report imo. Maybe that’s why we don’t read about such reports. It’s so easy to dismiss anyone who is interested in such things as cranks, conspiracy theorist etc that any reporter would have to know that their career was going to be short lived if they pursued such interests. It appears to me that people are promoted to Editor as long as they strictly conform to conventional thinking. It’s the modern way! 

Sadly I personally think this is not the way we should be going. We desperately need weirdos and cranks and out of the box thinkers imo.

Stan, I'm not sure whether this has been asked or talked about before. That is, during your time flying, were there oddities or unexplained sightings which you saw or heard at first hand, either yourself or from close colleagues?

Stan, I'm not sure whether this has been asked or talked about before. That is, during your time flying, were there oddities or unexplained sightings which you saw or heard at first hand, either yourself or from close colleagues?

No, in my own (true to form) personal experience I never saw anything that I was excited by, although I flew for around thirty years. If I knew then what I know now, when I was a co-pilot, I might have been asking the ex Air Force guys I flew with about what they might have seen, but I wasn’t as interested as I am now. I remember one guy that was in a Victor tanker saying that he and others watched an unknown object fly in formation with them for a while. But he was not a regular guy that I flew with, so I don’t know how much I ‘trust’ his word. 

I do sometimes see videos of things purporting to be ‘UFOs’, when I recognise the images as being things  like heavy contrails in unusual light or simply distant aircraft etc. I am not particularly observant about most things, but I love looking at aeroplanes and would say that I’ve done a LOT of it, for over fifty years. To give you some idea, one wee dog that we had, got so conditioned to me running outside when we lived near the flight path to Durban airport, that he eventually ran outside and barked at the sky whenever he heard a plane flying overhead. Even now, one of my greatest pleasures is simply looking at the outside views while flying planes in DCS world. I find the detail that goes into much of the modelling, wondrous.

I have know a pilot colleague for nearly three decades but only in the past few years I discovered that he is a firm believer in UFOs, having had more than one sighting when he was younger. He wasn’t a pilot then I don’t think, but still in the RAF, probably an officer. Based in Scotland (Lossiemouth/Kinloss) he (and his girlfriend) watched as a large, triangular shaped, dark coloured object glide silently overhead at slow speed. If I recall correctly he estimated its height at about 500ft. I can’t remember the other sighting he had. 

I flew with him first in Brunei in the early nineties when we flew for Royal Brunei Airlines, but only got to know him better when he was a pilot manager and my boss at EasyJet around 15years later. He is a serious guy, not a joker at all. So I was surprised when he wrote to me after he read my book and told me of his thoughts and experiences. He clearly saw something that changed his worldview! 

I had a moment of insight while considering the possible reason(s) as to why I haven’t really had any strong ‘ personal experiences’ of my own. My current thinking is that, had I done, I don’t think I would have been a member here or previously at Skeptiko. I am pretty convinced as it is, if I thought I had definitely seen a UFO or ghost or had multiple psychic experiences like others have/do, there would be nothing to investigate. As I’ve said before, for me, it’s enough to ‘know’ such things exist. That opens the door for future enlightenments, I don’t have to know everything immediately. There’s years of learning in only one simulation game! I feel I’ve reached an ‘equivalent’ place now, to those that have experiences, through investigation and intuition as well as thought. It will never be as convincing, but teasers such as the one I had while meditating were enough to push my own indicators towards one end of the spectrum.