Post #192435 by Satan's Sin on Thu, Oct 13, 2005 3:40 PM

Well, Hallowe’en is ‘ponst us once again, and this time last year we had an interesting discussion concerning personal experiences with ghosts.

Now I think we should open the floor to UFOs. As everyone knows from watching The Simpsons, UFOs are full of giant green monsters with wiggling arms and evil designs, and if this does not put UFOs squarely into Hallowe’en’s camp, well then, may the Headless Horseman overtake me tonight!

And without further ado:

Long ago I was aboard a mighty warship, traversing the Pacific on important federal business. At the time of the, well I guess I’ll have to come out and say it, the “incident,” I was on the bridge of said man o’ war, serving as Junior Officer of the Deck (JOOD), the number-two guy to (and in training for) the Officer of the Deck (OOD), who job it was to ensure that the ship was going where it was supposed to be going and we weren’t running anybody over and that sort of thing. This particular guy was the lone black officer on the ship, a dour and taciturn man who seemed to be in a perpetual state of piss-off. I didn’t much like him, but we got along.

We had the 4 am - 6 am watch. Most watches are for four hours, but the early-morning and late-afternoon watches are broken into two mini-watches (or “dogs”) so that the watchstanders on both dogs can have breakfast and dinner. The OOD and I were both grimly tired but game for whatever might happen, which is the way things get for everybody after a few days at sea. There are many watches to stand (usually at least eight hours a day), and on top of that huge amounts of “regular” work and training and drills. Eighteen-hour days are pretty much the norm.

We were thousands of miles from the U.S. and hundreds of miles from the remotest speck of land. Our radar showed absolutely no shipping anywhere. It was just us out there, all by our lonesome. There was nothing for the OOD and I to do but stare at the empty ocean as we kept chugging along on a dead-straight course. The sun had just come up. It was very cloudy but not overcast; the clouds were small and flat, low in the sky, spread everywhere, the lower halves lit by the still-rising sun and the upper halves dark gray.

The OOD and I had long since tired of talking to one another. We were standing at the chart table and for some reason both sets of our bored, bored eyes happened to be looking at the horizon just to starboard of the bow when all of a sudden ...

... a round, cloudy shape formed on the horizon and began to rise up. It was the shape of a hot-air balloon, covered with a film-like mist of sorts but inside this mist it was bright, glowing. One half of the ball glowed a bright green, the other half a bright red. Like a navigational light. As it rose it left a cloudy trail beneath it, like the string of a balloon. It rose from the horizon and lost itself in the low-hanging clouds in the space of two seconds.

It was this size: stretch your arm out, look to the horizon, and hold your thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. An object that would fit in that space would be a good-sized cruise ship.

The OOD and I silently continued staring at the spot where this thing had appeared and disappeared. Talk about not being able to believe one’s eyes. This was the sort of thing that you obviously wanted to watch over and over at least a thousand times before you could make any kind of conclusion.

I finally looked at the OOD. He looked at me. And all I said was, “Should I ... log it?”

He quickly shook his head. “Naw.” And walked out to the port bridge wing for the 20th cigarette of the morning.

We never discussed it again.

The only explanation I can come up with is that it was some very weird ball lightning.

But I could be wrong ...

What’s your UFO story?