Something Strange in the Sky

My First Experience with an Unidentified Flying Object

While going through some old papers a few days ago, I found this drawing I did when I was 13 recreating my first UFO sighting, which I had just seen hours before.

I had been sitting on my friend Bill's front porch in Oak Park, Illinois, a little after the sun had gone down, when we saw a brightly glowing object through the leafless trees in the western sky; it floated a bit downward to the lower right, then rose up above the trees, where we finally had a clear, unobstructed view of it. It was clearly a solid object, in the shape of the top half of a hamburger bun, I thought, and was bright yellow-gold in color, but with a very strange glowing green fringe outlining its entire shape.

While hovering above the treeline, it did a quick jerky movement back and forth slightly, from left to right and back again, very different from any conventional aircraft, and then remained stationary for about 20 seconds. It then drifted back down below the treeline and retraced its path back to the upper left before disappearing off in the distance. The entire experience lasted about 40 seconds in all.

I called O'Hare airport afterwards to report it but also to see if anyone else called in about it. The man who answered was gruff and dismissive, saying we just saw an advertising blimp, that's all. I mentioned that we actually saw the advertising blimp he referred to 30 minutes earlier, but it was entirely different in both appearance and movement. But he was firm: "No, you just saw an advertising blimp.”

So what was it?

All I can say for sure is that it was extremely unusual—especially that green fringe around the glowing form. I don't even know how something like that could have been achieved, especially back then. All in all, it wasn’t a particularly dramatic sighting compared to some other accounts one comes across out there, but it was certainly dramatic enough for us kids at the time.

Which brings me to the following point. I’ve had other sightings of anomalous phenomena in the sky over the years, but for me at that age, that first sighting was the most dramatic in its impact.

Regardless of whatever that object was “objectively,” I’ve long held that anomalous encounters invariably hold a certain synchronistic or symbolic significance in our lives, especially dramatic ones. Such things don’t appear to us when they do for no reason, in other words, whether that be an unusual craft in the sky, a strange animal crossing the road (as I also experienced once), a ghostly shape at the foot of one’s bed in the middle of the night (ditto), or any number of other strange things one might experience. This is a subject I’ve taken up in various books and articles along the way, but particularly in my essay “Portals of Strangeness: Symbolism, Synchronicity, and Fortean Phenomenon” (which is also a chapter in my book The Sky Stretched Out Before Me.) In it, I discuss the possible significance of unusual phenomenon like these not just on the personal level but when they happen within the larger culture, too. If this happens to be a topic of interest to you, I hope you’ll check it out, here:

https://raygrasse.substack.com/p/portals-of-strangeness-symbolism

There’s one other postscript to be added here. The night after I posted online about finding this old drawing of mine, I had a very unusual dream in which someone was explaining to me a central aspect of how UFOs work, and how they’re able to do some of the strange maneuvers they do. My dreams usually aren’t at all logical, so things that made complete sense in the midst of the dream usually make zero sense when I wake up and think back about them. But this time the comments the fellow made at least made a modicum of sense when I woke up.

To set the stage, I first have to explain that I’ve posted on social media before about my thoughts on the curious similarity between some UFO behaviors and how the cursors can zip around crazily on our computer screens the way they do (in “seeming defiance of the law of physics,” you might say!)—leading me to wonder if these unidentified craft may be akin to those cursors somehow, in terms of being directed by pilots in a similar way?

The following is a bit hard to explain, but I’ll give it my best shot. The fellow in the dream seemed to be elaborating on that cursor theory, addressing the seemingly impossible moves that some UFOs make, with their right-angle turns, making no sonic booms, stopping on a dime, etc.—by saying something about “You know how you could create an AI video in which an air conditioner falls out of a window and lands on a pedestrian’s head? It can be programmed to have virtual weight and heft in the video, and act much as it would like in real life. But those are all just calculations in the computer. You could just as easily adjust the calculations so that the air conditioner DOESN’T have weight, so that is DOESN’T hurt the person when it falls, or maybe even falls upward instead of downward, or sideways. Seemingly “impossible” things, in other words. It’s all just about the mathematical calculations.”

That could all be just nonsense, but it certainly was an interesting dream to have in the wake of putting my story out there on social media.

Over and out.

Ray Grasse is a writer, astrologer, and photographer living in the American Midwest. He is author of ten books, including The Waking Dream, Under a Sacred Sky, and An Infinity of Gods. His websites are www.raygrasse.com and www.raygrassephotography.com.