Missouri UFO Sighting

If I had reported this to MUFON it would have been a short read: Southbound
from Springfield to Branson, Missouri, sighted a light of the approximate
magnitude of Venus on the southern horizon, moving east to west without
showing acceleration or deceleration, later moving west to east on same course
with red and blue running lights visible to either side. Passing through the same
area later in the evening saw a row of luminous globes floating beside the road
about twenty feet above the ground and forty feet from my vehicle. No craft visible.
Globes were red, green, white, yellow, and blue; about one yard in diameter; spaced
evenly in a horizontal plane approximately twenty feet long.

That sort of information is all that the reporting centers care about, just the nuts
and bolts of direction and speed and whatever mechanical details might have
been discovered. For someone like me, the lack of interest in the rest of it is very
frustrating. Writing on a MUFON message board a few years ago about what I
know are related events, I was asked by several members to leave and seek
psychiatric help. I left. I don't require help.

This is the rest of the story:

July 1994 7:30 p.m.

It's my day off. I've been out driving, browsing some bookstores, having a
restaurant meal just for something to do, and now in early evening I'm going
south in the national forest country between Springfield and Branson. There's
not much for about forty miles but oak and hickory forest and billboards for
Branson music theaters, not even a gas station. I've turned the radio off and I
think about things instead of listening to music. It's a habit I have that comes
from having plenty of unusual memories. I've never seen anything unusual in
this area even though I've had many dreams about it. A few miles back I passed
one of those places, a cave where I woke up one night, puzzled by the strange
waves of light passing over me, the repetitive roaring coming from outside and
below, until I got up and staggered to the edge of the bluff and saw the
highway a hundred feet below. Sometimes dreams like that mark a place of
importance, a place where something will happen, or a steppingstone to
someplace else. This country is filled with them.

But as I said, I've not seen anything unusual there, even though over the years,
I've seen fifteen or more unusual objects, strange enough to qualify as UFO's.
It's been several months, maybe closer to a year, since I saw the last one. I
wonder why, as I come up over the top of a southward facing ridge and see a
bright star on the horizon, in a place where no such star should be. I tell myself,
it's just a star, probably Venus. If it was a UFO it would do something strange.

As though in response to my thoughts, Venus moves a quarter of a mile to the
West, starting and stopping without accelerating or decelerating. Venus is now
directly in my path, some ten miles ahead of me, and I have to pass beneath her
to get home. Suddenly I'm not so sure I want to go home. Maybe I should head
east, take the back roads and go the long way around--but no, that's very
desolate country out that way. Less chance something bad will happen if I stay
out in plain sight, with other people. I keep going south, expecting every time I
dip below a ridge that when I crest the next one the star will be gone.

It stays where it was. As I get closer I can see red and blue lights to either side of
the main, white light. It's a helicopter, I tell myself. The side lights are blinking,
it's just a traffic chopper hovering at the edge of Branson. As I finish that
thought, it does another of those sideways movements back to the east, faster
than an aircraft could travel, with that same eerie lack of inertia, and all the
time the lights never change their angle towards me. I know a little about
aircraft, especially helicopters, from the time I spent in Vietnam. That's not how
they move.

I move up behind a long line of cars hauling tourists to Branson and settle in
with the herd. Maybe they won't be looking for me. But I don't really believe
that. I already had a warning, or actually two.

In the afternoon the day before I was sitting in the living room looking out
towards the west and wondering why my life had gone strange, when the roar
of aircraft flying low shook the house. I ran outside in time to see three fighter
jets disappear over the treetops, too low to be legal. From the yard I heard them
turn in a sharp 180 and come back north over the ridge west of the house. It
would be crazy to think they were checking on me, I told myself. The planes
were low and close enough that I could see the sihouettes of the pilots, the details
of their flight helmets, and that the lead pilot turned to look at me as they rode
north. A chill went up my back.

It's not the first time that ever happened.

That night I had a strange dream. I was sitting in the living room in the heat of
the afternoon when I heard the engines again, roaring overhead. I ran outside,
thinking a plane was about to crash. In the sky above the house two planes
were dogfighting. One was civilian, unarmed and outclassed, trying to evade
the machine guns of the vintage fighter by dodging and diving through the
clouds. The unarmed plane was familiar, the pilot was a friend of mine, a
woman I knew. I watched in horror as her plane spun out of control and
vanished below the treeline, a plume of smoke rising from the crash site. The
fighter leveled off and flew low over the house, close enough that I could read
the tail numbers. I ran inside to the phone, to call in the crash and report the
plane.

Inside the house, someone jumped me from behind, wrapped arms around my
shoulders and legs around my waist and hung on. I stood still and laughed. It
was strange for humans, but not for them. I thought you were dead, I told her
as she jumped down to the floor and faced me. So do they, she said with a
smile.

We had serious things to discuss and not much time. Both of us sat crosslegged
on the floor and I listenly intently without saying a word as she outlined the
plan for tomorrow. They were coming through the blockade, and I needed to be
ready.

Now it was tomorrow, the light of Venus was only a couple of miles away, and I
did not feel ready at all.

Going through the valley and the town that sprawled through it I lost sight of
the lights on the ridge, and when I came up on the south side again I thought
they had gone away. It was only a little disappointing. I don't look for these
things to happen, but I've held out some hope that if they do, I'll learn
something useful. This time the whole thing appeared to be a bust, until I
passed another of those dreaming points, a valley where several times I've met
people of importance in my dreaming travels. As I glanced out the driver's side
window, I saw the lights.

Now there were five, and close enough to show detail. The light globes were
about three feet in diameter and not transparent, glowing in primal colors of
red, green, white, yellow and blue, floating in a horizontal row about fifteen feet
above the ground and only about forty feet distant. In the seconds that I saw
them before having to turn my attention back to driving I could tell that they
were not moving and that no structure between or behind them was apparent.
The sky was still bright enough to silhouette anything solid, like an airplane,
had anything been there. All that was visible were the five globes of light.

Almost immediately I looked back, but they had disappeared. Nothing behind
me, nor to either side; no engine noise. If it had been a plane, coming in low on
approach to the community airport, I'd have heard the engines as it passed
overhead and seen it as it flew over the ridgeline. Whatever this was, it seemed
to have simply vanished.

Or had it? Looking back, I noticed that the cars which had been crowding my
bumper moments before had now fallen back several hundreds of yards. If they
were avoiding something, that I couldn't see . . . . I looked up at the roof of the
car, wondering. I could see a faint glow of light on the pavement around my
vehicle. Was something up there, above my car?

I looked at the clock and hoped I'd remember the time. If anything did happen,
I wanted to know. I wouldn't make it easy for them; if they wanted me they'd
have to take me on the run. Not that this would be a challenge for them, since
an acquaintance of mine claimed to have been lifted from a road late one night
in a moving car and replaced, on the same spot and going the same speed,
hours later. I'd always been skeptical of that, but we shared too many strange
memories and experiences to discredit one another's stories out of hand. As I
drove, I watched for anything unusual.

A subtle blue light began to fill the car, hardly visible at all. I felt light, almost
weightless, and a strange euphoria washed over me. I seemed to rise up out of
the seat, floating slowly towards the roof--then there was a break in
consciousness, a very brief glitch in the memory stream, and I settled back into
the seat. It took a couple of seconds for me to get back into driving mode and
actually steer the car. I'd wandered a couple of feet over the center line, but no
traffic had been coming at me. I looked at the clock again; no time seemed to be
gone, but I couldn't recall what time it had been. The light around the car was
gone. Had nothing happened?

I concluded that nothing had, until two days later I noticed a new pain in the
palm of my left hand, and a small object shaped like a spear point, only about
three eighths of an inch long, embedded there. This was the second one to
appear in that hand, the other one already encased in scar tissue and hidden
beneath callous. The new one matched the old, a half inch distant from it.

That same day as I drove home from work I passed the spot where I had seen
the lights hovering. A military helicopter flew across the road in front of me at
this exact spot, flying low. Moments later it reversed course and crossed in front
of me again. The helicopter repeated this maneuver several more times before
falling off to my right and gaining altitude, but shadowed me for the next
twenty miles, continuing south after I arrived home. I stood in the driveway,
leaning against the side of my car as I watched the chopper fade into the
horizon, and wondered if all this was too much to qualify as simple coincidence.