My First UFO

“Do You See It?” My very first art journal page. It illustrates the incident that happened 37 years before. Art by Barbara Fisher 2014. The object didn’t have any markings on it—the eye as illustrated symbolizes the haunting feeling I have that the thing was looking at me while I looked at it.

It was 1977.

I was 12 years old.

I had just finished re-reading John Keel’s The Mothman Prophesies, along with having just had a first read of Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse and Our Haunted Planet—all found at the Kanawha County Public Library and checked out together.

And I had just had my mind blown by reading Dr. Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia—also found in the dimly lit, dusty stacks where I stalked my prey: books filled with forbidden knowledge, folklore, ghosts and the great Unknown.

Previously, I had only been exposed to nuts and bolts, extraterrestrial hypothesis works by authors like Frank Scully, Jim and Coral Lorenzen, Donald Kehoe and Frank Edwards.

This new, high strangeness-laden strain of thought surrounding the anomalous subject of UFO’s had hauled off and smote my brain from behind, sneaking up and changing my worldview within a week. (That’s how long it took me to devour that set of books in a frenzied, up-all-night reading by flashlight binge.)

In hindsight, I would say that I was primed to see a UFO.

I was ready.

Now, it’s not like I had never seen strange things before.

I grew up surrounded by oddness, with strange flashing lights, and entities oozing through walls and prescient dreams. Family members had strange experiences, from my father’s sighting of an anomalous light in the Navy, to his sister having ghost experiences. I had been taught to dowse for water and metal by my Grandpa and on summer nights all through childhood, he and I and Grandma sat up star watching, and tracking strange lights bobbing and zipping along the night sky in ways that no man-made craft could fly.

But I had never seen what one would call a “structured craft.” Nothing with defined edges, that looked anything like a cigar, a saucer, or and egg. It was always lights in the sky—and they happened so regularly on the farm at night that they were fairly unremarkable.

But there I was, 12 years old on a post-dinner walk through an old residential section of Charleston, West Virginia with my mother. It was around 6pm on an early June evening. The sky was still blue because the sun didn’t set until around 8:30 or 9pm.

I had my Kodak Instamatic dangling from its wrist strap, mostly forgotten, because I had failed to find any cats on porches to photograph. (I had recently read a book on how to photograph dogs and cats by renowned photographer Walter Chandoha, and was tired of photographing our three cats and dog and had taken to carting my camera everywhere in search of neighborhood pets to pose for me.)

I’d been staring into a particularly large yard that often had cats lounging in it, when I ran into Mom who had stopped suddenly and pointed up into a large, old maple tree. “Look up there!” she said, excitedly. “Look at that bird!”

My eyes followed where she was pointing, up at a high branch, and squinted. I saw nothing. No sparrow, no robin. Not even a pigeon.

I blinked. “I don’t see a bird.”

”It’s right there!” she insisted, pointing actively, pumping her arm forward and up. “It’s red, it’s red but it’s not a cardinal. What is it?”

I thought maybe she glimpsed a woodpecker, and that would be exciting, so I tipped my head, squinted my eyes, adjusted my glasses and stared all along the branch she was clearly pointing at and saw….nothing. Not even a whisper of red.

I kept scanning along her line of sight until I got to the tip of the branch, beyond where her finger pointed, and then, in the patch of blue sky not occluded by bright green leaves and dark branches, something caught my eye.

It wasn’t red.

It was a dull aluminum or brushed silver color.

It looked like an upside down bowl.

And it was moving—drifting lazily like it was descending an invisible set of stairs in the sky.

And time stopped.

I couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t move.

My mind. Stopped. Moving.

Vaguely, as if from far away, I could hear my mother. Her voice sounded hollow and dampened, like she was done in a well, far underground.

She was still going on about that damned phantom red bird, exclaiming how she’d never seen such a thing, while I stood there, staring, unblinking, at this…..thing.

This metallic object, slowly moving diagonally across and down the sky.

I forgot I had a camera. I couldn’t feel my hand. I couldn’t feel the blister on my heel from my recently outgrown sneakers.

I could barely breathe.

My breaths came shallow as I stood there, gaping, watching until that thing—that metallic flying cereal bowl—disappeared behind the rooftops of the Victorian houses of this historic neighborhood.

Finally, I could move.

I blinked.

I could breathe, and I looked at my mother, who was now agitated, berating me for not seeing the bird.

“I don’t know how you didn’t see it, it was right there, in plain sight—a bright red bird, right there on that branch, plain as day!”

It struck me that if anyone who lived on this street would happen to see us, they’d probably think us quite unhinged. A kid staring, silent goggle-eyed at the sky and a frustrated woman going on and on about an invisible red bird.

I didn’t say anything for a second, then blinked again and said quietly, “Maybe it was a cardinal?”

She snorted. “I know what a cardinal looks like. It wasn’t shaped right and it was bigger.”

”Where did it fly to?” I asked having trouble forming words, as my mind kept going over that silvery thing I saw, trying desperately to explain it away to myself.

It was my mother’s turn to be puzzled. “I don’t know,” she said. “It must have flown, but I don’t remember seeing it go. It must have just—well, maybe I blinked. But it’s gone.”

She finally noticed that I was acting strangely and frowned down at me. “What’s wrong with you.? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I shook my head. “Mom. Is the Goodyear Blimp in town?”

The Goodyear Blimp had visited our city a year before. It was the only thing close to the right color that moved slowly enough to even fit remotely the description of what I had seen. Although it was much larger than the thing I saw, and its engine made noise and was a dull shade of grey as opposed to the brushed metal color of the…thing.

I still didn’t wouldn’t call it a UFO, even in my mind.

She frowned. “Didn’t see anything on the news or in the papers about it. Why? Did you see a blimp?”

I shook my head and said, “I saw something. It moved slow. But it didn’t make noise. And it wasn’t shaped right. And it didn’t have ‘Goodyear’ written on the side.”

I felt nauseous, and my knees were weak. I realized years later that I was probably in a state of shock.

I took a deep breath and said, “Mom. I think I saw a flying saucer. A UFO.”

She scoffed and shook her head. “You didn’t see the bird, but you saw a flying saucer?”

She nodded toward my camera. “Well then, why didn’t you take a picture?”

I looked numbly down at my camera, still dangling from my wrist. I shook my head once and said, “I don’t know. I couldn’t move. I forgot I had it with me—I couldn’t even feel it hanging from my wrist.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “After all those books you’ve read, you’d think you’d be ready to see one of those contraptions. Big dummy.”

I didn’t say anything; I just looked down at my too-tight sneakers. She was right, I remembered thinking. I wasn’t ready.

“Well, come on. Let’s go home. You look awful,” she finally said with an exaggerated huff as she started back down the sidewalk.

Most of the way home, we talked about what we had seen and not seen.

She asked questions and I answered, and then I asked her what the bird looked like. As we walked, her description of the bird became less and less specific. She couldn’t recall the shape of its beak, the size, whether it had white or brown or black markings on it, how it was sitting on the branch—in fact, the best I could get out of her was that it was a red bird.

This was strange, because one of the things we did as a family was watch birds, and field guides to birds were well-worn, oft-consulted books in our home. There was no good reason for her inability to describe what she saw.

About five blocks from our house, we fell silent and just trudged along, not speaking. I was still fairly numb, except for my stomach, which churned with anxiety.

By the time we got home, she had forgotten about the bird.

But I still remembered the UFO in the sky.

Brushed silver on a brilliant blue cloudless sky, with shadings of gold along the edges where warm sunlight caressed its curves.

It was seared into my memory, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

I kept thinking—was it a kite? I’t didn’t move like a kite and wasn’t shaped like one I’d ever seen, and I’d built quite a few. I loved kites.

A balloon? No. It wasn’t a blimp. It wasn’t a plane, a hang-glider—anything I could identify.

It was a mystery that haunted my mind.

Especially the way it drifted, majestically, as if it was going down a flight of stairs—a slow, graceful, silent descent. It moved impossibly—and exactly as John Keel had described as being a maneuver typical of UFO’s.

In my head, that thing—that UFO—kept drifting. That vision kept replaying in my mind. And the words of John Keel that I had so recently read rang out in my thoughts. I had liked the quote so much, I had copied it down in decorative lettering and hung it over my typewriter.

“They are not from outer space. There is no need for them to be. They have always been here.” (John Keel, The Mothman Prophesies.)

If they had always been here, would they always be here? What were they doing here? Were they watching me? Could that thing see me while I was seeing it?

When I looked at it, was it looking back at me?

And why couldn’t Mom see it?

After what seemed an eternity of walking in silence with these thoughts running faster and faster laps around my brain, we made it home and walked in the back door.

Dad was reading the newspaper.

I put my camera away in the dining room buffet cabinet and walked up to him and stared down at him, while Mom poured herself a drink of water from the bottle in the fridge.

”Did you have a good walk?” he asked, turning down the corner of his newspaper and peering up at me over it.

I didn’t answer right away, just stared at him.

He frowned. “Are you ok?” he asked, when I didn’t chatter at him about the squirrels we’d seen or the cats of how the nice the roses smelled down on Virginia Street.

In an emotionless voice, I stated simply. “I saw a UFO, Dad.”

Mom came into the living room and said, “No you didn’t! If you saw one, why didn’t you tell me about it?”

I looked at her and wearily said, “I did tell you. You stopped and pointed up a tree at a bird you saw and I didn’t see it, but then I saw something moving in the sky, and it was silvery and it looked like an upside down bowl and it drifted like it was going down a set of stairs, but you kept going on about the bird, and I never saw the bird, and I couldn’t talk or move, I just watched it until it was gone.”

The words poured out and she stared at me and shook her head. Setting down her drink, she lit a cigarette with shaking hands and said, “I don’t remember any of that,” in a sharp voice that would accept no argument.

She took a long drag from the cigarette, and then blowing the smoke out in a huff, laughed. “And why didn’t you take a picture of it? You had your camera.”

I sighed and shook my head, “I don’t know,” I answered,. Defeated,, I turned and headed up the steps up to my room.

My border collie, Rufus, followed on my heels as Dad returned to hiding behind his newspaper fortress, blocking out my mother and I both.

“She shouldn’t be reading all those books you let her read,” she complained.

Dad just answered, “She can read what she wants, She gets good grades. You should be happy she reads so much.”

And then Mom turned up the TV, and I was in my room with the door shut.

I thought about it a lot. That image stayed with me. It still stays with me. The strangeness of that little episode—that must have only lasted a minute, maybe two, probably more like 45 seconds—has stuck with me, and the questions left unanswered have haunted me my whole life.

Why did Mom see a bird that I couldn’t see? And why couldn’t she describe it beyond it was red and not a cardinal? And why couldn’t she see the silver thing in the sky? And then, why did she slowly forget the entire incident? To this day, she doesn’t remember it, though Dad remembers me telling him when we came home about what I had seen.

No, there was no blimp in the area at that time. The next day while Dad was at work and Mom was planting flowers, I snuck in the house and called the airport and asked. No blimp and no weather balloons.

Then, the more disturbing questions started chasing me.

What was that thing anyway? Was it real? What does real mean? Was it solid? Was it a hallucination? Was I crazy? Why hadn’t I been able to take a picture of it? Why didn’t I think about my camera? What kind of person has a camera in her hand and then forgets when confronted with a vision of an impossibility like that?

What if I wasn’t crazy? What if it was real and it was piloted by some sort of intelligent being? What were they like? What did they want? Did they see me? Were they looking back at me? Did they do something to my mother’s mind to make her not see them? Why? Were they watching me then? Were they watching me now?

I didn’t read the UFO books again for a week or two after that.

I just couldn’t. I was having trouble sleeping, and I felt like I was being watched.

Besides, what good did they do? I had my camera with me and still didn’t have enough sense to try and photograph it.

Of course, if I had taken a picture, and it showed a UFO, would I then have had a visit from the dreaded Men in Black?

I was suddenly glad I hadn’t had sense enough to photograph it.

Though, in truth, the books had prepared me. The reason I -knew- as I watched the thing drift idly down the invisible staircase in the sky that what I was seeing was a UFO, was because Keel had described that very motion so eloquently that I instantly recognized it and -knew- my world had changed forever.

I had taken the UFO books back to the library and checked out instead, The Antagonists by Ernest K. Gann, a novel about the siege of Masada. A little light, uplifting reading that is perfect for a kid home for summer. And when I finished that, I dug into How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn, which Dad had suggested I’d probably like.

I had traded in UFOs for Romans attempting to subjugate Jewish rebels and the tragic way of life in a 19th century Welsh coal mining village.

Until Dad came home from the bookstore on his day off and tossed me a paperback.

It landed on my lap where I was sprawled in the living room,, sniffling over the tragic death of yet another coal miner in that Welsh village.

It was a paperback of The Mothman Prophesies.

”I reckoned you should have a copy of your own, before you wear out the library’s book.”

I smiled and wiped my eyes and thanked him. I set aside the dying coal miner, and opened up Keel’s book, and started reading it for a third time.

Dad nodded.

It was his way of saying he believed me and understood why I hadn’t tried to take that picture.

John Keel -had- prepared me for my first UFO, even if he never knew it.