Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 15:21:11 From: John Harrod Jharrod@oakweb.com To: ufosnw@rt66.com Subject: my ufo sightings I was never a skeptic, but didn't think I would ever have a sighting. I have sat on the top of the Sierras in the back country in snowcats all night long all winter since 1983. I finally saw one, and there's more to it than a simple sighting... please read on and if you have a suggestion for posting to your sight email me back. Please read on. These are written accounts of my sighting and that of my father, who was a United Airlines pilot for 30 years. "I wish to preface this story with a couple of details about myself as regards UFO's. I am not a mystic, I am not quick to buy any story that seems unprovable by modern science...while still admitting that it is a vast universe, and that anything is possible, given the infinity of space and time we seem to exist in... In January of 1992 I was sitting in my snowcat on a run at Sierra at Tahoe, around 3AM, making snow... I was rested, not high, had not been drinking or taking any kind of mind- altering substances...I was facing to the east... the night sky was very dark and clear, with almost no light coming up from the Tahoe Basin, which was about ten miles to the east. I saw an oddly bright orange ball of fire coming up in the direction of the basin...it had unusual detail in the corona, kind of a flickering. I thought about it and decided I was looking at the exhaust of a large jet taking off out of Tahoe airport and flying directly away from me... thus the orange ball of fire. It did occur to me as odd, because large jets had ceased regular service to Tahoe several months earlier. It was raising up quite quickly...then it abruptly- and by abruptly, I mean instantaneously! took off north at a speed that made it a streak of bright orange fire. Then it stopped on a dime, hovered motionless for a second, then proceeded to do a number of these maneuvers over the next sixty seconds. I got the major willies. I was not scared, but I knew that nothing any human could build in THIS age could withstand those kind of forces- OR accelerate with the speed of the USS Enterprise going into Warpdrive. I jumped out of my cat almost instantly, looking all around to see if there were any other sources of light that could have caused a reflection on the inside of my windshield- but there weren't, and there it was, still making the same movements. I would guess from the detail and from the fact that it was to my side of a couple of peaks in the far off distance that it was three to five miles away... Then it shot straight down out of sight- and reappeared a few seconds later, shot up to about 15,000 feet- hovered, then instantly rose at a speed beyond anything previous, shooting straight up into the sky on a pillar of orange light that looked like a neon tube, and kept going, right on out of the atmosphere. I could see it for a long time. I had tried to call another cat operator to check it out, but he was out of his cat. However, I was to learn this last year that I was not the only witness. TO BE CONTINUED... During my sighting of this orange fiery object, the manuevers it performed were remarkable enough to give me serious willies- I was not fearful, the thing was a long way off- I was to learn that it may have been about seven to ten miles away- more on that soon- but that means it was covering a lot of miles on it's one-second trajectories. It moved across the night sky approximately 40 to 60 degrees...left to right, right to left, with altitude changes, and some of it's movements were shorter and more nearly vertical. I could not think of any possible reason for these weird manuevers, but more on that later also... It was moving so fast that there was no real appreciable acceleration or deceleration... it was stationary, then there was a streak of orange light, then it was stationary somewhere else for a moment. I was very happy and excited to witness this. I always wondered if maybe I would see some strange phenomenon in the sky, being up in a cat on the top of the Sierra where visibility is so good, but never thought I would see anything so clearly impossible by present human technological standards... and never before or since have I seen anything so wild. NEXT: it gets more interesting... Four months after the UFO sighting in 1992, I went to a local pizza parlor where a friend was putting on the showing of a Christic Institute film called "the secret war", narrated by Elizabeth Montgomery (see it if you ever have the chance- it's about the Iran Contra affair) and at the show was a very odd, spooky looking guy who said nothing until everyone was on the verge of leaving, then asked if he could have a moment to speak to everyone. He admitted that he was not there for the movie, but rather, wanted to know if anyone present had seen any ufo's in the Tahoe Basin... I thought about that for a moment and went over and said, yes, I had. He then asked me if it had been coming from the direction of the lake. I said it seemed to be...HE THEN ASKED ME IF IT WAS AN ORANGE BALL OF LIGHT. I said, yes.... WAS IT MAKING JERKY MOVEMENTS. I got the willies all over again. I looked more closely at this guy... tall, thin, gaunt, sanpaku all the way, looked like he had been maybe kidnapped by aliens! Spooky...I asked him, how the HELL did you know WHAT I SAW?! He said, that's what EVERYBODY'S BEEN SEEING. Turns out he had seen one like mine a couple of years earlier and had been so impacted that he had been traveling around the lake tahoe basin asking people about sightings, and he had come up with a bunch of people who had all observed similar craft- coming out of the lake or from near the lake, orange balls of fire, jerky, high acceleration movement and eventual flight straight up. He asked me if I wanted to know why they made the jerky movements. He said he had talked to people from Nevada who knew about these things... Said the airforce & CIA had learned from the roswell craft that the controls in these things were bioelectronic, that the creatures set their hands into little recesses in the seats and interfaced their own nervous systems into the craft's guidance systems, which were part biological, and that focussed microwave beams could disrupt and disable the craft- and that the critters did these maneuvers in order to avoid being shot down! Well, I don't know if I believe that. for one thing, why couldn't they just go blazing straight out of the atmosphere at a zillion knots, that should be sufficient to avoid being shot down. But I do know this- I know what I saw that night, and it was not of this planet. No human could take such forces without becoming pate... and no structure running under the known physical constants of our little part of the universe could suffer such G forces without turning into little pieces of scrap metal. It seems to me that these things carry around with them the local constants of some other part of the universe. In fact, I have a friend who works for the airforce at Edwards who wires obsolete fighters to be used as drones to be shot down by pilots ion gunnery school who told me about the Aurora project... 9 G's, but pilotless... flies on some kind of propane pulse engine... it's what they're been seeing and hearing in LA, the things that leave the smoke rings up high in the sky... and that is a primitive and slow craft compared to what I saw that night. More to come... This last winter, I started at Sierra and worked for a few weeks... while in the cat barn, I heard a couple of snowmakers talking... one of them said, " Keep your eyes out for those "UFO'S" old Chuck, the security guard, has been seeing! Yeah, said he saw some BIG ORANGE BALL OF FIRE MAKING JERKY MOTIONS IN THE SKY"...Ha Ha Ha Ha!!!! I turned around and said, WHAT DID YOU SAY!!! WHO saw this! They told me and I tracked him down... a retired man who works at Sierra as a security guard... turned out he and his wife were on the deck of their house last summer off of North Upper Truckee Road, looking south toward Meiss Meadow... which puts their sighting about the same place MINE was, - TRIANGULATION tells us more accurately where the things were coming from- and he described the EXACT SAME THING I SAW. IDENTICAL. He was worried about me telling people, he didn't want people at Sierra to know, he was afraid they's think him crazy. What I have related here is not exaggerated or embellished in any way. It happened just as I have described. Something IS going on. I can't believe we fly around in fighters if we have and are flying things that can do what I saw that night. I DON'T think that it's US. It's THEM. Whoever they are...I just hope- they're friendly. NEXT ARTICLE My father was a pilot for United Airlines for 29 years... once he returned home with a wild story about seeing a UFO... and here it is... My father is a very humorless and pragmatic individual who never had much interest in gags or jokes... so I was interested to hear his tale of seeing a UFO once in 1970...I was fourteen... he came back from a flight and told me this story... "We were enroute from Chicago to LaGuardia when ground control advised us to be on the lookout for a large object that was on their radar and had been observed by several airliners in the area...as we got closer to the object we picked it up on our screen... we had a United Vice President aboard, a captain, co- pilot,(my dad) second officer (engineer) and four stewardesses...all of whom saw the object- There were two other airliners watching the thing when we got visual on it. It had been doing high- speed erratic manuevers but was stationary when we got it on radar... then it started pacing us, staying several miles ahead and to the right...then ground control asks us, is it still there? It just went off of our screen! Right out of the MIDDLE of the screen... We had it in visual; contact, as did another aircraft, but it just blinked off of everyone's radar, one by one...we were most interested in it at that point...then it shot across our flightpath to our port side, and it was so fast you almost couldn't see it, just a blur... then it paced us for a while on our port side...it was a large sphere, maybe a hundred feet across or bigger...it had a green light on top and a red light on the bottom, both lights alternately tracing a path around the perimeter of the body of the craft, the green doing a half- circle across the top, left to right, the red doing an arc across the bottom half, right to left... then it shot at us at perhaps 2000- 3000 miles per hour, passing under us to our left perhaps several hundred yards below us. The shockwave rattled the airplane violently, as if we had hit a huge airpocket..." This was the story he told us, my mom and me. I was very surprised and as it was exptremely out of character for him to make up a story like this, I believed he had seen SOMEthing.... To Be Continued About a week after my father came home with this story, a letter marked 'confidential' came in the mail from the airforce. My father was out of town on a flight. I was very curious to know if it had anything to do with his sighting. I opened it. (I knew he wouldn't care) It requested my father to attend a meeting in Manhattan in a week to discuss the sighting and it specified that he was not allowed to discuss the sighting with ANYONE, including family. This confirmed to me that he had seen what he said he did. Then, the capper: in 1993, I was watching a special, a Sixty- Minutes sort of thing on UFO's, and there was one segment that went as follows: in 1970, two airforce fighter pilots were scrambled over Norad in the Rockies to check out a large UFO which was in Norad airspace and not responding to identification requests. Both of these pilots, then retired, were able to get fairly close to the thing before it took off at a zillion miles an hour...they said, ( And it was another of those getting the willies moments) it was a large sphere with a green and red light, both moving in a semicircle around it, alternating left to right. They saw what my father saw, same year, same continent, just 1800 miles away... Those are my two ufo stories, and they are why I believe very strongly that we have visitors." Thanks for your time.