my ufo sighting

The UFO Welcome Center, Bowman, SC, burned to the ground in 2024. Sadly, I never got to visit.

This weekend, I visited my best friend from high school. We looked at a school memory book that I compiled in the mid 70s. Amid the report cards, school newsletters, and memorabilia from school elections was a newspaper clipping from 1 October 1973:

My handwritten note says that a friend and I observed this phenomenon for 20 minutes. "I saw it that evening with red, green and yellow or white lights, then it was covered in a fog." I have no recollection of this, but here is the evidence, in black and white.

There were other encounters with the phenomenon in the South in the fall of 1973. In the most famous incident, two men in Pascagoula, MS, were abducted by "clawmen," robotic like creatures with claws like crabs. One of these two men is still alive and says his life was turned upside down by this experience.

So what about these two events--my sighting and the Pascagoula incident? Yes, they both took place in the South around the same time, and, yes, media and government sources responded to the events with doubt and dismissive comments. But, they are also examples of two common responses to encounters with the phenomenon: forgetting or not being able to forget. I completely forgot my experience. The Pascagoula men never forgot.

I don't know what the phenomenon is. I'm not sure I ever want to know definitively (if there is a "definitively"). It's likely that whatever it is--at least that portion of it that is not a hoax, which some of it surely is--it's been with us a long, long time. It confuses us. It fascinates us. It frightens us. It compels us. And for one evening in 1973, it captivated me.