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Sky Sights

When I was 19 or 20, I saw a UFO.

I was living at home with my baby daughter, Elizabeth, outside of Sarasota, Florida beyond the glare of streetlights.  My oldest brother Nathan was about 11, my sister Priscilla 8, the youngest brother Lloyd was 5, and my mother also had a baby, Debbie. 

Evenings at dusk, to get some exercise and amuse my siblings, we played our own form of badminton in the large front yard.  An imaginary net was "strung" even with the front door.  I took Lloyd on my side while the other two were our opponents.  We would play until it was so dark, one couldn't see the birdie until it was right on top of us.  This is great for the reflexes, by the way!

To the west was a large, deep empty field, and then a quarter of a mile away a stand of pines, stark against the evening sky.  Sunset was beautiful, the trees full of evensong, and the day's stresses and frustration would fall away with the children's laughter.

One evening when the western sky was almost dark and the game winding down, I saw a cluster of lights, brighter than stars, away out in the Gulf well past the stand of trees.  Watching them, I realized it was something far, far out of the ordinary.  Nathan was fascinated, Priscilla somewhat interested, while Lloyd continued to run around with the racket and birdie.  Dad called the kids in for bedtime, and we called back to wait a minute. 

After a little while, Dad came out to see what the holdup was, and I showed him the lights and described that they had been doing.   Dad grabbed the two youngest and ordered Nathan to come in immediately; they all got the "bum's rush" inside.  He refused to even talk about it later.

This was the age of Sputnik, and all eyes were on the sky.  There had been a rash of "UFO" sightings in past months, but I'd ignored them.  Most officials put it down to sightings from MacDill AFB, near Tampa, others protested that it was none of that, and MacDill officials had no comment as usual. 

My father, normally an intelligent man, held that, first, rocket propulsion was due to exhaust pushing against air (he wasn't having any of the 'for every action there is a reaction' stuff), and second, God would never allow mankind or its inventions to leave the earth and the air around it.  Therefore, he didn't believe in Sputnik, and he sure wasn't having any of those strange lights nor let his children see them.  I think it was partly that it was sinking in that maybe - just maybe - he was mistaken.

What I saw that night cannot be explained by technology at the time, nor even by technology now, almost a half a century later.  Of course, UFO means - and people often forget this - Unidentified Flying Object, not necessarily aliens from space.   I soon learned not to talk about it; such tales further classified one as a "kook". 

I imagine this is the case with those who saw this fire rainbow, but Snopes Urban Legend site says it's true, and has a spectacular photo to prove it.  (Click to enlarge and for details.)

By the way, I found the link to this spectacular photo in Recipe du Jour's great newsletter.

Happy sky watching.

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