NUFORC Sighting 87822

Occurred: 1967-06-04 20:30 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2012-03-19 03:33 Pacific
Duration: 2-3 minutes
No of observers: 4

Location: Decatur, AL, USA

Shape: Light
Characteristics: Lights on object, Landed

strange light shivered across sky, stopped overhead, tried to land, stopped, and then took off out of sight in 2 seconds.

Summer 1967, Decatur Alabama Before I report the sighting, I need to explain why I know what I didn’t see. I didn't see an airplane or a comet.

1966, 1967, 1968: My buddy and I lived within walking distance of the river. Several times a week we would walk down to the river and sit on the dock and watch the skies and discuss girls, our band, and our future. Sometimes we would fish but usually we would lay on the pier and watch the skies as we talked. We began noticing the movement in the skies and starting jokingly calling them UFOs. After a few months, it was very easy to distinguish between single engine airplanes, commercial jets, high flying military jets, satellites, and of course the very fast moving meteors. We even began to start noticing the stars and their familiar patterns in the sky.

We began noticing lights in the sky that were almost definitely not planes or satellites or meteors and we started calling them UFOs (half joking and half serious). We would see an average of 2 or 3 UFOs on any given night. We then started watching the skies for about 3 or 4 hours a night just to look for UFOs. We didn’t know what these things were, but they were not planes…and since they were very high up in the air, we never saw the shape of these object. They were the size of the largest stars moving around in erratic patterns…but very, very fast. Faster than our military jets and faster than our satellites. Satellites move in a straight line and jets move basically in a straight line with some deviation in their course. But jets and satellites do not stop and hover or circle at 60,000 feet.

Sighting: My buddy and I had met a couple of girls and we were at their grandmothers house out in the country one night in the front yard. I was sitting on the front porch with my date and my buddy was sitting in the swing in the front yard with his date (4 of us total). The last thing on our minds that night was UFOs. My buddy yelled my name loudly and called for me to come and look at something. I wasn’t interested in him at the time and almost ignored him, but he wouldn’t shut up about it. So all four of us met in the front yard and looked up in the sky to the west. There was a fairly large light moving from west to east toward our position. This particular light did not move like any of the other UFOs that we had seen before. This light was a little bit larger than any of the other lights before and it was larger than any star in the sky that night. As it moved, it reminded me of pulling a fishing lure through water. It seemed to sort of vibrate through the air as it tra! veled in a straight line to almost overhead. We had been watching now for almost 30-45 seconds as this thing moved from the horizon to overhead at what we figured was about 20,000 to 50,000 feet. It moved extremely fast. Faster than a military jet or satellite but not as fast as a meteor. Then it stopped almost overhead. If we had walked down the road about a half mile, it would have been directly overhead…straight up. It hovered for about 3 to 5 seconds and then it began to circle overhead. It was not a perfect circle and it was not a complete circle. (Imagine a 3 year old trying to draw a circle on a paper with a crayon.) That best describes the path that it slowly flew above us. It seemed to be looking for something. The diameter of the “circle” was less than a quarter mile. Circling took about 10 to 15 seconds. Then it stopped again for about 3 seconds and started getting bigger and bigger. It was now about 5 times the size of the brightest star I have ever seen in the ! sky…almost the size of a street light. This thing was landing ! and it w as going to land in the field across the street about 200 or 300 yards away from us. All four of us began to run down toward that field to watch it land. All of sudden, something bit me and kept biting me. Something was in my way and I couldn’t move forward. I didn’t want to look down to see what was biting me because the UFO had just captured my total awareness. However, when I did look down to see what was “biting” my leg, I saw that I had run into an electric fence. So I was not going to get to catch up to everyone else and I decided to just watch the UFO from this vantage point. I watched this thing as it was coming down toward earth and it seemed to “panic” and stop descending at almost the exact time that I ran into the electric fence. The UFO was now low enough that we could have seen what it was if it was daylight…but it was still just a very, bright light in the sky. It stopped and hovered for about 5 seconds like it didn’t know what to do and then it went straight ! up and out of sight in less than 2 seconds. Totally silent. I have never seen anything move that fast before or since. I thought “we don’t have anything that can do that!” There was no sound of rockets or jet engines or any kind of smoke trail. My father worked on the Saturn 5 rocket booster and I was familiar with rockets and jet engines. This vehicle was strictly antigravity powered. Romance had now changed to UFO talk and we spent the rest of the evening looking for more UFOs. After that event, the girls never ridiculed our UFO stories. This event was within a year of the Falkville policeman who reported chasing an alien through the woods. Sadly, he was laughed out of the force. Falkville is 25 miles from Decatur. I figured that the NASA military base in Huntsville was the interest of all the UFOs we saw.

After graduation in 1969, I never got to spend time just watching the skies and I haven’t got to see anymore UFOs.

Posted 2012-04-18

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