1998 Tacoma Narrows Bridge Sighting Report

This story comes from my Mother-in-law, who I want to highlight as a highly-reputable woman. She is a well-regarded Real Estate Agent and is a very even-keeled straight-shooting boomer with a beautiful home and a compassionate soul. She’s truly one of the most trustworthy people I know, and I’m trying my best to put that into words that you’ll accept, coming from a stranger on Reddit. She is not someone who enjoys weirdness or fantasy (including in entertainment), and is a very grounded woman in general.

Yesterday I asked her to remind me of a UFO story she told me about once long ago. The story goes as follows:

This event took place in Tacoma, WA on a Friday at twilight in 1998. Liz (alias for the sake of the story) was on her way home from a double-feature in Tacoma (Saving Private Ryan and There’s Something About Mary – Barbenheimer eat your heart out) with her good friend Ann (also an alias). They lived on the other side of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and were crossing the bridge when they suddenly noticed a large number of lights in the sky, hovering above the bridge.

Liz pulled the car over into an exit lane and came to a stop on the bridge to get out of her car and see this phenomenon. She noticed all other cars around her were doing the same and several cars along Highway 16 had pulled over to get out and look.

What she saw next she describes as a large, dark rectangle with multiple bright white lights scattered around on it (she did not recall how many lights). It sat motionless in the sky above them, fairly low to the ground. She said it made no noticeable sound whatsoever at any point in this event. The strangest part is what happened next.

Liz says that after several moments, the object began to rotate horizontally and as it did so it revealed itself as what is best-described to be a nearly-two dimensional object. She said that it completed its rotation and all-but-disappeared, as if a sheet of paper would have were you to rotate it laterally in such a way that it would become simply a thin line. After the rotation, it vanished.

Liz and Ann got back in their car in a state of shock and drove to Liz’s house to decompress the events they had witnessed. She says they just didn’t know what they were supposed to do, who to call, or what to say. They ended up calling some friends-of-friends who worked at local newspapers in the suburban community (of which they are well-established) and were bounced around by news outlets until eventually the next day a journalist called to get their story from a local paper.

Liz and Ann watched for their story to appear on local news stations, newspapers, etc and never saw anything appear. Months later, they received a phone call from a friend in San Francisco who called to say they saw their name in a local SF community newspaper which stated they had both seen and reported a UFO over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington. This was the only known publishing of the story, and one I haven’t been able to track down yet (but am still actively hoping to).

I bring this story to this sub as I find it fascinating, especially in conjunction with Holographic Universe Theory, and mapping it to the shadows-on-a-two-dimensional-plane metaphor used by Grusch with Congress. I told her about this after she told me the story yesterday and, of course, she had not heard about these hearings. She found that really interesting, but after the conversation I could tell she was going to be done thinking about this again and moved on to loving her grandkids.

Do what you will with this tale. Feel free to ask questions and regard or disregard. To me, she’s one of the most trustworthy people I’ve ever known. She has no reason to make this story up and it would be highly out of character for her to do so. Like, incredibly out of character. The biggest skeptics in my family have been shook by this story as they have no way to discredit Liz.