I went down to the Mississippi spillway in southern wisconsin to go fishing. There were about 6-7 other people along the shoreline fishing too. It was probably about 11:30 pm. The spillway was on the non-channel side of the river so there was a bunch of small islands in the backwaters. All was very quiet until a guy yelled “what the hell is that”. We all looked where he was looking and a round white light was above us by a few hundred feet but maybe 200-300 feet away too. It sat there for a period of time. We all started grouping together speculating what it was. I thought it was a helicopter with a light and it was an optical allusion on distance. Then after about 3-4 minutes it started coming down lower. It went over the island directly across from us and went into the tree line. It lite up the island like a prison yard. A few seconds later all the deer, raccoons and other animals were jumping in the water and swimming away from the island. We were all dumbfounded. There was no noise. Dead silence. Nobody even spoke a word. All you could hear was the animals making noise in the water and the spillway. Then all of a sudden the light went straight up in the sky until it looked like one of the stars and disappeared.
That was the day I changed my opinion about spirits, angels and UFOs since that is the only three things I could relate to what I saw.
My dad got me interested in all things astronomy when I was a kid, and a telescope he made (ground the lens and everything…he was an engineer) let me clearly see the rings of Saturn at age 9, in 1969…two weeks before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
A year before, I was in the bottom bunk of my bedroom, looking out the window after going to bed, when I could swear a saw a red ball of fire fly past outside our bedroom. I never told anyone about it, and as I grew up, I could never figure out what I had seen. It didn’t match any natural phenomena nor tech or aircraft I became intimately familiar with in the next fifty years.
I always watched all the meteor showers and kept up to date with them. The Perseids were my favorite every August, and three different times saw non-meteor things…that in all my geeky headed knowledge…were NOT identifiable.
The most clearly seen UFO event occurred in 1997, while living in north Central Alabama. This particular Perseids shower was the strongest and most magnificent celestial show I’d ever seen, and my wife and kids were entranced.
We could see the lights of Birmingham some 45 miles east. The shooting stars were every few seconds, with several instances of multiple meteors racing side by side.
During lulls, and scanning the horizon. We ALL saw a dull orangish globe just above the horizon between us and Birmingham. A bit later we went to even higher ground a few miles away, and still had clear view of that globe.
It was not flying straight lines, sitting still, turning on and off, nor anything I’d know ANY aircraft would do…it would literally travel in a random fashion kind of bobbing up and down, and generally being a distraction.
Swamp gas? No swamps this far north. Balloon? I’ve flown in hot air balloons dozens of times.
To this day, no idea what it was. But, glad I got to see it.
