Unidentified

Unidentified

Admittedly, when I was twelve years old, my best friend and I would go out and look for UFO's. Often we'd actually "spot" them as they progressed across the sky from southwest to northeast or northeast to southwest. Sometimes, we'd see several at the same time. These UFO’s came with a sound not unlike the sound a high flying jet makes after it’s flown past at 30,000 feet.

However, those trivial sightings aside, we really did see something strange one evening when I was 13. On that evening, my friends-Mark, Jimmy, Donny- and I were laying under an apple tree spying on Beverly, our neighbor. We were hoping to get that really good view of her when she stepped into her bathroom or bedroom, and we were not disappointed. (To Beverly, I want to apologize for my immature act. I don’t know what I was thinking. It happened just once. I swear.)

The apple tree was located it the back end of an empty lot in an average 1950's style subdivision in Roanoke, VA. Its branches were untended, and over the years it had grown limbs that reached out like a bell-shaped umbrella from its trunk, creating a hollow space underneath.

As we were laying there that late summer evening, we noticed a round bright, blue spectrum white light grow larger in the sky above us. It was perfectly silent and grew as large as a house seemingly right above the house next to Beverly's house. There was no accompanying reasonable explanation for it. No truck. No plane. No searchlight from Searstown. No blimp (we lived within a couple miles of an airport). No reported weather balloons. No reported methane leaks. The light was so bright that we had to shield our eyes, which was not a problem because we were petrified and wanted nothing more than to bury our heads in the ground. I remember trying to mash myself flat to the ground on top of the half-rotted fallen apples.

Jimmy, the wildest of us, whispered, "G*** D*** Mother___" I'm getting the F*** out of here!" Bad idea. I remember we all had to tackle Jimmy and hold him down. The light hovered there moving back and forth gently as if pulsating or breathing and knowing. There seemed to be some sort of different colored light mixed in with the brightness, but I've never been able to determine exactly what it was. The glowing sphere stayed there a long time, seemingly an eternity, but probably about fifteen minutes or so. We laid there under our tree shielding our eyes and trying to be as small as possible. It seemed that the light was penetrating the apple tree looking for us. I knew that it was only a matter of moments before we were sucked up into the center of the ball or vaporized on the spot.

Then, without warning or explanation, the light flitted away at an incredible speed, without sound. It just zipped off and disappeared high into the sky to the west, quickly growing smaller and smaller until it was gone from sight into the dark of space.

I wanted to puke. I have never been as scared as I was that night. We sat around afterwards and talked it through trying to come up with any reasonable explanation that we could think of. But nothing seemed to fit.

To this day, I have no idea what it was that we saw, but from time to time, like the Stephenville UFO stories that have come out, it seems others have seen what we saw that night under the apple tree.