Unidentified S2 E3

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Last night after my appearance on History Channel's Unidentified my phone began ringing off the hook.  It was not because talent agents and booking interns were elbowing each other out of the way to get to me, as I imagined they would, though.  One of my kids opened an exterior door to let the dog out after I had set the security alarm.  The central monitoring company called to see if everything was all right.  And so concludes my Walter Mitty-esque fantasy about the results of being featured in a TV show about UFOs.

The lead-up to the show was intense.  It reminded me of having pneumonia - not the coughing and gasping for air part - I had been given a high dose of Albuterol which raised my resting heart rate to three times its normal rate, while in the ICU.  That was how I felt at 9:59 last night.  Some people might panic if that happened to them.  I rolled with it.  I was excited.  This was the big moment, the one I had waited for, for decades.

My excitement was not so much about being on TV.  The notoriety may actually be the worst part of this experience.  I was ridiculed by my Army unit when my UFO sighting first happened.  I do not look forward to what acquaintances who feign friendship may say to me, or worse, what their kids may say to my kids.  

What is exciting about this is my story is finally being told and maybe some action will be taken.  I have wondered for years, why does nobody in our government care that we are being visited by people from other planets?  Someone should know about this.  Someone should do something.  How can this be ignored?  I cannot be the only one!

My vindication (for lack of a better term) came when I watched the show's host, Lue Elizondo, discuss my case with Chris Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.  Someone in Mellon's government role should have been briefed on my encounter back when it first happened.  I was happy the issue was finally being escalated.  More on that later.

Unidentified Critique

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I have watched the whole show twice now, and my segment three times.  My daughter saw me re-watching it this afternoon and made me start it over again so she could see my segment - not because she is so enamored with her dad but because she wanted to see our dog on TV.  

The show was well produced and overall I am happy with how I was portrayed.  But there are so many UFO skeptics out there who will look for any crack in the dam they can find, to invalidate mine and other witnesses' accounts.  So let me be the first to point out these issues and give them the proper redress.

This Sucker's Nuclear

I was surprised to learn my story would be included in an episode focusing on nuclear weapons.  Indeed, the issue discussed in the show is real.  I have heard anecdotes about this before, including one detailed story from my friend Tom.  Last year he told me his uncle used to work in a missile silo.  Tom's uncle had shared a terrifying experience with his wife.  The uncle would not discuss it with anyone else, but the aunt would talk about it all the time - a crazy story by an otherwise rational woman.  A spaceship had come down and disarmed the nuclear warheads where Tom's uncle worked, and then re-armed them.  When Unidentified told a nearly identical story I told my wife, "That's the same story Tom told me!"  She had been at the same party with me, when Tom told it to me.

What does my story have to do with that?  It is a stretch.  I was on a Canadian Army base, hours away from any nuclear facilities.  It is further from the American SAC base they identified, Loring, than New York City is from Philadelphia.  The producers needed an overall theme and they wanted to tie my sighting into the others somehow, for continuity.  That is my take.  Whatever it was, I am OK with that.  Maybe there is a nuclear connection.  I cannot say there is or is not.  More likely, the spaceship that creeped on me in August 1992 was generally checking out our capabilities, be they nuclear or conventional.  

These people (aliens) may not even make a distinction between the two.  Anyone who can get from there to here (wherever there is) may have some weapon (or a number of classes of weapons) that makes nukes look like sticks and stones.  So what is the difference to them?  And what is the difference to me?  If Unidentified wants to throw my story in with the nuke stories, c'est la vie, as long as the story gets told.

Unidentified Footage

About a year ago I met Travis Walton.  He is the subject of one of the most famous alien abduction cases.  A movie was made about his experience called Fire in the Sky.  He told me, "Hollywood got it all wrong."  I get it.  ISawOneToo.net  Word.

It is remarkable that I recognized the actor playing young me, from the one or two seconds he was shown in Episode I.  That was when I first got the uneasy feeling that the re-creation was not 100% spot-on.  Does this matter?  Not a whole lot.  The overall narrative was correct.  I was guarding a cache of ammunition, deep in the woods at Gagetown.  The show had me standing next to a large building - there were no buildings at all, out there.  No lights.  Nothing.  Just me in a clearing in the woods with a huge pile of ammo and explosives.

The field phone I called Mike on was lying on the ground and connected to the next phone by thousands of feet of copper wire which had been unrolled from a large spool.  Each phone was daisy chained like that.  

When I picked up the phone to talk to Mike, it was not like he was just hanging out with the phone to his ear for hours on end, waiting for someone to pick up the other phone.  We had planned on synching up every half hour.  The UFO encounter for me ended at 11:27 pm so I picked up the phone three minutes later.  At the time I thought the encounter was over for Mike too but he told me two years ago, when we reconnected at Unidentified's request, that he was still watching the ship when we were on the phone.  He had also first noticed it about twenty minutes before I did.  I was seated and he was way down the road and walking around.  We had different vantage points.

Perhaps an empty space in the woods is not as exciting as a large steel building and it needed to be "punched up" for Joe & Josée Sixpack, watching at home.  Or, maybe it was just easier to re-create this scene than to find a place to shoot which would be representative of where I was.  Whatever the case may be, I want to point this out in the event that any skeptics decide to look at a Google Maps image of Gagetown and say, in their best John Mulaney voice, "Hey, wait a minute.  There is no building like that on the map!  This story must not be true!"  Well, it is, it has just been Hollywood-ized.

Another item that some critics may point out is the photo of me standing in a rail yard full of bombs.  There is no place like that at Gagetown.  The photo was taken in Miesau, Germany, the following year.  Remember that in 1992 no one carried around a camera in their pocket all the time, like they do now.  If we had, I would have had a really cool video of an enormous spaceship, as evidence of my sighting - assuming my battery held up.  The thing seems to die five minutes after I get off-grid, struggling for its last breath of broadband.  

Since camera phones were not a thing, there are not many photos of me in the Army Reserves and none of me at Gagetown - I thought I had brought a disposable camera up there with me but if so, I do not know what happened to it nor to the pictures.  So when Unidentified asked for pictures of me in the Army I gave them one from Basic Training, two years before Gagetown, and one from Miesau, the year after.  The casual viewer will not care about this.  For anyone who has worked at either Gagetown or Miesau and wants to point out the discrepancy, there it is.  Knock yourself out.

I was a Reservist, not Guardsman, as reported.  Both are part-time soldiers but the former is under the authority of the president and the latter by a state's governor.  The distinction is not insignificant, especially if you live in Portland right now, but it is benign as far as my UFO sighting goes.

Other than that, the rest of the encounter was well done.  They must have had up to six hours of interview footage to edit so I am sure it was a daunting process to piece the story together in such a short segment - I have tried some video editing for my YouTube channel and it is not fun.  I take my hat off to anyone who has the patience for it.  None of the footage from my trip to A&E's studio in Brooklyn was used, although they may have used one or more sound bites as voice-overs.  

The only part of my narrative that requires clarification germane to my sighting is the static noise I mentioned.  During most of the encounter there was complete silence.  Not even the crickets were chirping.  It was only after the ship had glided some distance away from me that I heard the static.

I used to attribute this aural experience to the animals sensing danger.  They did not want to be harmed by the same thing I feared.  But more recently I have come to believe that the ship possessed some type of noise cancellation technology designed to silence its operation.  In the process, it also silences everything within a certain radius.  Once it had traveled far enough away from me that the silencer lost its effect, the sounds around me started to slowly fade in, which is why I heard static.  I do not know for sure if this is the correct explanation of what happened, only that it happened.

I Saw an Alien Spaceship

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Yeah, I said it.  Why beat around the bush?  We all know what this show is about.  Aliens!  No need to be all, "I'm not saying it was aliens, but..." à la Giorgio Tsoukalos.  I knew it was an alien spaceship and I openly use the terms "enormous spacecraft" and "alien spaceship."  But I am just a guy in Connecticut.  What is more interesting is, for the first time, I heard Lue Elizondo using the term "UFO".  Last season it was all "UAP" and talk about how maybe it is the Russians or the Chinese.  I cannot take credit for Lue's change of heart but I hope that by me (and others) being open and real about this subject, more people can begin to speak about it without feeling stigmatized.

I'm not... No, actually, I am indeed saying it was aliens

Watching the show proceed I became more excited about one of the other stories.  The Air Force Security Specialist from FE Warren Air Force Base describes feeling a tingling sensation when the spaceship he encountered was hovering over him.  I have written many times about a similar experience, which I detail in The Spaceship I Saw - Part 3.  I knew the ship I saw was there before I saw it.  I could feel its presence.  The hair on the back of my neck stood up.  Then the hair on my right arm stood up as if it were a hot day, but it was actually a damp night.  I believe the ship was scanning the contents of the ammo cache with something like an x-ray.  I was caught in it and could feel it - although the sensation I felt could also have been related to the ship's levitation/propulsion system.  Maybe it was something else all-together.  But I definitely felt something, a charge in the air.

Another similarity between his experience and mine was the feeling of being frozen with fear.  Terror is a better term.  I mentioned this in an article last week, recalling one of my earliest blog articles, Some UFO Psychology.  The Air Force Guy says that even after 30 years the emotions are still there, they are "raw."  I felt the same way until I began writing about my encounter and talking about it more openly, to more people.

Prior to two years ago, on the rare occasion I would open up to someone and tell my story, my eyes would tear up.  I would not actually cry, my eyes would just gloss over.  That was how traumatic it was.  I would be instantly transported back to the scene of the encounter, reliving the terror which enveloped me that night.  I have never sought counseling for this but from what I have read about PTSD, that is what it was.  It was not with me all the time, haunting me day and night.  It was always on the back burner.  But whenever I spoke about it (which was rare), I was right back there in the woods in Gagetown, staring at an enormous spaceship from another planet, fearful of being zapped by a death ray or being beamed up or of, God-Forbid, the ship landing and its occupants greeting me.  That probably sounds pretty cool to some people but you would not think that if you were alone in the woods, at night, holding an automatic weapon with an empty magazine.

The Air Force Security Specialist wraps up by saying the ship he saw shot off in a streak of light.  I did not see that happen with mine but Mike, the other witness, said he saw that happen from his vantage point.  I would love to speak with this Air Force guy and share some details of our mutual experiences, with each other.  I texted Lue this afternoon to ask if he could let the guy know I wanted to speak with him.  Lue said yes.  Hopefully he will reach out.

I understand if the guy wants to remain anonymous.  Jeremy McGowan, who was featured next said it best, "You don't necessarily want to be the guy who saw a UFO; you don't want to have that stigma."  That was me until I started this blog.  The blog was itself a product of having spoken to Lue Elizondo and the producers of Unidentified - it has been a two year saga for me.  I only got into the #UFOTwitter crowd once it looked like I was going to be on TV talking about my experience.  I decided at that point that if the cat was going to be out of the bag I should just dive into this subject head-first.

Additional Non-Sequiturs

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Interesting that the four of us featured in Episode III all served around the same time, had incidents around the same time, and are all about the same age.  Are all the younger servicemen afraid to speak up?  Are all the older ones dead?  I have already beat cancer and pneumonia - maybe I will get Coronavirus soon and that will be that.  I am glad I had a chance to speak up when I did.

It was nice to be featured in the same episode as Harry Reid.  He has always struck me as a good guy, even though in his younger days he was a bit of a bad-ass.  I can relate.  I had to rewind when he said, "They're afraid because they don't want to sound like a fringe person."  I thought he said, French person.  My wife heard it too.  We were both like, what is wrong with being French?

My wife was happy that the house looked good on the show - thanks, camera guys and producers.  My kids lost their minds when they saw our dog on TV - Daddy, no big whoop, but the dog?  OMG!!!  I was just happy that I was portrayed in a positive light.  I was a bit nervous about that - I should not have been because the first thing that Lue and one of the producers each opened up with, during my first conversations with them two years ago, was to reassure me that they would take me seriously.  But you know, once bitten, twice shy. 

Lue mentioned on the show that I reported the incident.  To be clear, I did not try to file the report, Mike did.  I do not remember if I told my direct superior but probably would have.  Mike reported it to the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge that night and that is where the report ended.  This NCOIC told him to get out of his Command Shack, like Mike was just some jerk, messing with the guy.  While this was going on, I was speaking about the encounter with our driver, who was an NCO but not in my chain of command.  He enthusiastically believed us and said he had heard of many reports of sightings near military bases.  I also told my dad, who was on duty there too, and retold him the story about five years later, but when I visited him a few days before Lue came to my house in February, he did not remember hearing about it.

Now, a day after my episode aired, a calm has come over me.  This was induced by seeing Lue Elizondo and Chris Mellon discussing my case.  I know that was probably staged for the cameras but I am certain there were other real instances of this and not just between those two people.  Mellon said, "There should have been follow up.  This kind of reporting should be examined in a purely objective fashion."  Ya think?

Thank you Lue, Chris, Tom DeLonge, and the producers of Unidentified, for bringing this news to those who need to hear it.  I have waited nearly thirty years for the opportunity to get the information I have into the hands of the people who can do something with it.  Now it is up to them.

Lue's last text to me today was to assure me, "You are making a difference!  People in D.C. are watching!"  Good to know, I think.  Watching, how?  Maybe I need to invest in some curtains.

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If you have seen an alien spaceship or any type of unidentified flying object (UFO) contact me using the Contact form at the bottom of this page.  You may remain anonymous if you want.  I will not ridicule you or try to tell you why you are wrong.  I get it, I saw one too.

Thank you for reading and keep an eye on the sky.