Except for public figures, all names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Sometimes, when you see something extraordinarily weird, you might prefer to think that something’s wrong with your eyesight, or that you’re witnessing an optical illusion, or that you gotta cut down on the margaritas. Otherwise, you only have two options left to explain the bizarre. You could be suffering from schizophrenia, which is no fun at all—drugs for the rest of your life, having to tell the voices in your head to shut up every once and awhile, mothers picking up small children and fleeing in terror when you walk down the street, etc.
On the other hand, what you’re witnessing could be all too real. If what you see scares the hell out of you, then any other explanation becomes preferable.
I was playing with my friend, Tom, over at his house after school one Wednesday, while his mother worked feverishly in the den to catch up on her office work. We figured that as long as we didn’t raise too much of a ruckus, she wouldn’t come upstairs and send me home. Sure enough, we managed to keep so quiet that everyone lost track of time. Suddenly, it was nine o’clock, and pitch black outside.
Though seasonably warm for mid-October, Tom’s mother worried that I would feel a chill walking home, so she offered me one of his sweaters. She also didn’t want me to walk home alone at that time of night, so she told Johnny, Tom’s teenaged brother, to accompany me.
Johnny had a hard enough time being sixteen and sans drivers license without being seen with a little kid like me. Consequently, he walked about seven paces ahead, so in case one of his friends drove by, he could pretend that he didn’t know me. That didn’t bother me, really. What bothered me was that instead of walking on the sidewalk like a normal person, he decided to take a shortcut behind Mr. Thomas’ funeral home (left).
Already creeped out about the darkness, I kept my eyes to the ground, thinking that if any ghosts came out of that mortuary I wouldn’t see them. I continued to look down after we finally made it to Stewart Rd. As we approached the intersection of Stewart and Montgomery Rd., Johnny’s feet came into view. For some reason, he was standing still.
“Look at that,†said Johnny, his voice barely above a whisper, not a hint of emotion in it.
I looked up, and saw my guardian pointing to a large, silvery disc, approximately 100 feet in diameter, as it hovered over the intersection, it’s midpoint directly over the entrance to Mr. Hurley’s Sohio (Standard Oil of Ohio—the local gas station; as you can see in the photo, it’s now an AAMCO transmission shop).
Everyone else at the intersection (some twelve to fifteen people) had gotten out of their cars to look at this thing long before Johnny and I had noticed it. We watched as it began a swift, completely vertical climb.
If you’ve studied enough psychology, then you’ll know that whenever you see something totally anomalous, your mind tries to identify the spectacle as something familiar. Such was the case here. A woman, in almost the same calm tone of voice as Johnny’s, asked, “Is that a helicopter?â€
“Maybe,†said a man from another car.
For one brief moment, I felt relieved to think that this thing over my head was nothing more than a helicopter—never mind that it didn’t look anything remotely like a helicopter. My relief was short-lived, however, for another man immediately pointed out the absence of rotor noise. It finally dawned on us that this thing was completely silent.
About five seconds after it began its ascent, the disc booked down Montgomery Rd. at a speed I’d never seen before or since. We followed its journey with our eyes, until it blended into the stars of the night sky.
For the next fifteen minutes, a dozen or so stunned and confused people camped out at the corner of Stewart and Montgomery–their cars empty, in the middle of the street, and with engines off—asking each other variations of the same question: “Did we just see what we just saw?â€
That’s a good question, for factors supporting a hypothesis of mass hallucination did exist. In that year, 1973, literally hundreds of UFOs had been sighted and reported, with a lot of the activity occurring in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Stories of flying discs and other UFOs of varying shapes and sizes, crammed the pages of the local newspapers all that year. Even Ohio Governor John Gilligan saw and reported one. With all of the awareness from press reports, local citizens could have conceivably become more prone to mass hallucinations. If people are curious, and hoping to see one of the flying discs they’ve been reading about in the paper, then it’s possible that they could imagine one before their very eyes, even if it were in a group setting. In fact, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, stated his belief that the desire for humans to see UFOs could actually lead to mass hallucinations among various groups of people.
One thing that severely challenges the mass hallucination theory in this case, however, is me—or more specifically, my fear of UFOs. The first time I had ever heard of one was on Christmas Day of 1969, when, staying at my cousins’, we watched a late, late movie about them. Filmed sometime in the early-1950s, the movie centered around an Air Force investigation of unknown aircraft. Unlike such movies as The Day the Earth Stood Still, and It Came from Outer Space, this one was unsensational, mundane, and pedantic. In fact, you hardly see the flying saucer at all. The realism of the drama scared the hell out of me, and my aunt and cousins had to spend the rest of the weekend convincing me that it was only a movie, and that flying saucers don’t exist. Period.
The last thing I wanted to see at 9:15pm, October 17, 1973 was a flying saucer. Yet, there it was hovering over me. True, that doesn’t automatically discount the possibility that we were joining each other in hallucinations. But any alleged hallucinations we might have had were certainly not for the reasons outlined by Jung. Furthermore, if I were to have seen it alone, then hallucination becomes more probable, as it can be explained as psychosis. Of course, I’ve never been diagnosed as psychotic, nor do I exhibit any symptoms of psychosis. I don’t hear voices. I don’t see little green men. I don’t believe my loved ones are in any plot against me. I have yet to experience the long pro dromo stage associated with psychosis. And I was stone cold sober—which is not hard for an eleven-year-old to be. Most important, I didn’t see it alone.
At some point, I have to trust my eyes and ears, especially when they’re validated by other people’s eyes and ears. And I don’t mean the dozen or so people with me on that corner. According to the Enquirer’s October 18, 1973 edition, Cincinnati police fielded over 2,500 calls on this thing before automatically shunting all inquiries on the disc to a Cleveland, OH number. If you called this number, you would hear a tape-recorded message left by some whacked-out psychic in a typical Criswell-like voice. The front-page story covered the outrage expressed by numerous citizens over the cops not taking them seriously.
Also on the front page that day was a story about two Mississippians, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker.
“Who are they?†you ask?
I’m afraid that’s for another post.
How could they be discriminating against their own kind? Reliable sources (aka their own customer service dept.) report that the S’bux symbol, the double-tailed siren, is a cross-continental pagan symbol of strength and used in going to battle. (Perhaps to take over the world?)
I thought that police would be in denial of UFo’s–even if one abducted a patrolman’s behind, he’d rather say his ass was simply “stolen”, but in Xalapa, Mexico, even the governor witnessed a massive ufo fleet, and 
Between two mountains, on the edge of the Rio Grande, sits 
a pledge from the candidates in the recent election (another conspiracy, too many votes in each zone) to put a stop to the corruption in the police force and justice system. This has barely been acknowledged by the candidates.
