This is one of those stories that is going to frustrate you to no end, as it has for me – for reasons that will become clear to you. I’ve sat on this story for awhile now, and the only reason I’m sharing it now is because I noticed some familiar themes in my buddies account that overlaps heavily with that of UFO witnesses, even though my friend did not actually see a UFO. I want to provide this story for everyone’s consideration, rather than keep it to myself. He confided in me because he knows I’ve been studying this phenomenon for about a decade now.
He told me that, late one night – like, after midnight – he awoke suddenly with an urge to urinate. For context, my buddies house isn’t in the middle of nowhere, but imagine living on a dead end road where the end of the cul de sac terminates, and is immediately adjacent to a lush, wooded, undeveloped area. So, aside from his neighbors and the main road a lil ways away, he’s tucked away nicely in there, and it’s great for sky watching.
Another thing I want to note: my buddy isn’t super into UFOs, but he loves watching the sky with me and talking to me about them. His girlfriend on the other hand is way more into that type of stuff, but not in terms of a scholarly or academic approach or whatever – she just casually reads about this stuff more than him. Thing is, the reason she reads about it more often than him is because apparently, she has had UFO sightings her entire life – strange lights in the sky pulling unusual maneuvers. My friend used to joke about it, but he has called me frantically at least twice over the years to help him triangulate an object he is currently seeing with his girlfriend. His descriptions of the objects, though not anomalous, was always enough for me to raise an eyebrow. I’d also like to mention that my friend also experienced an incredibly vivid, intense paranormal experience. Again, this kid isn’t into this stuff too much at all. I’ve given him and his girlfriend the rundown on what you should do in terms of video recording one (record in landscape, try to get a reference point in the shot such as a treeline or something to help gauge size and distance, etc), and he’s acted on that advice, but unfortunately the sightings were not condusive to a quality video.
Anyway, onto the story: my buddy wakes up suddenly one night to go urinate, and as he’s standing there in the bathroom (which is directly next to a window facing the woods outside in his back yard), he realizes that the entire backyard is illuminated, like bright as shit – he described it as peak luminosity of a particularly low and sizable fireball (the ones that turn night into day for a split sec), or like those construction floodlights they elevate and put on the roadway for construction or accidents (this got my attention…where have I heard that one before?). He doesn’t remember if his backyard became light as he was standing there urinating, or if it was already light when he walked in, and he just didn’t notice at first.
My friend is now thoroughly curious, and he exits his bathroom and goes into the living room to get another vantage point, to see if the light is out front, too. After he looked out the front, he said the light was everywhere, as if it were coming from above. When I asked him about the characteristics and nature of the light, he described it as totally uniform (I asked him this in an attempt to determine elevation and angle of where a light source may be coming from – if he could only see the light through one side of his house, but not the other, that may bring me closer to the answer). He checked the neighbors house through his window to see if their lights were turned on or whatever, but nothing was. He could find no origin for this extremely bright light.
Now, he goes back to a window and begins looking up to try and find where its coming from, but he said that it was “like coming from nowhere”, and was just “all around”. Naturally, I asked him about the moon – I believe it was clear that night, and although I can’t recall what phase of the moon it was at the time, he was absolutely certain that this light, whatever it was, was far brighter than the brightest moonlight he has seen. In other words, in his 35 years of life, he has never once seen conditions that would illuminate an area so brightly and so uniformly in the middle of the night, let alone by the moon.
Then, he said something that really creeped me out, because I am familiar with the potential implications behind it: he said that as he was pressed up against his windows looking upward and around for this light, he noticed everything fell completely silent. He said that all of the sudden, every bug that ever made noise outside his house at night just wasn’t there anymore. This is the middle of summer in upstate New York – it’s loud up there at night. But that night, for him, it wasn’t. It was at first, but then suddenly it wasn’t.
The strangest part of all comes when I ask him the obvious: “so when you went outside to try and find out what it was, what did you see?”
He told me he never went outside to look. I was flabbergasted, almost angry. I asked him why? and he kinda paused for a moment, and he said he honestly didn’t know why. Then, almost as if realizing how strange that is only then when retelling the story to me, he said it back to himself out loud with a hint of confusion in his voice: “wait, why didn’t I go outside to check?” I asked him what he did instead, and he said he suddenly become disinterested in whatever the light was, got tired, and went to bed.
That is like, the complete opposite of everything I know about my very close friend. Despite me being the one with the real hardcore fascination on the subject, I know he would be just as hyped to get an opportunity to take a video of a UFO as I would be. In fact, that’s what he had already done multiple times over the years, as I laid out above…but for whatever reason, not that night….and he can’t even explain himself why that is.
I wanted to make a joke about how he should maybe look into hypnotic regression, but I figured that might be for another time.
Anyway, that’s the story. Curious to hear your thoughts; I know he did not see a UFO technically, but this story had a lot of hallmarks of UFO experiences here, and while I totally concede that there’s likely some manmade or natural explanation for it, I felt that not sharing this with you all would deprive everybody of the opportunity to decide for themselves what his experience was representative of. Thanks for reading.
Actually before I go, here are the themes that I noticed in his story that often come up in UFO reports:
The Oz Effect: This effect refers to the phenomenon where witnesses report a sudden and unexplained silence or absence of ambient noise in the immediate vicinity of a UFO sighting. This eerie silence is often described as the “sounds of nature” going quiet, as if the UFO creates a localized disturbance in the acoustic environment. (in my friend’s case, he experienced the bugs around his house going quiet) The strange compelling effect of suddenly becoming disinterested in what they’re seeing. The one case that this is clearly depicted is the mid to late 1980s Hudson Valley UFO Flap, or “Hudson Valley Boomerangs”. One incident involved motorists pulling over to the side of the highway to watch this thing fly over, but one witnesses described all of the people simply staying quiet, getting back into their vehicles, and driving away as if it never happened, or as if it wasn’t the craziest thing they’d ever experience in their life. No commotion, no nothing.
submitted by /u/ElusiveMemoryHold
[link] [comments]