My First UFO Sighting

[Dejael]

Greetings, everyone.

I am new here on this forum, and this is my first post. I'll start off by saying I was born in 1947, a little more than a month after the Roswell UFO crash event. I was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, and grew up in, and have lived most of my life in the Los Angeles, California area. I now reside in the great state of Texas.
I have chosen a particular UFO picture as my avatar symbol because it looks like, and reminds me of, the UFO that I saw when I was a boy of 12 going on 13 on July 4th weekend, 1960 at Mt. Palomar, in southern California.
Here is a full recounting of my sighting: it was a 'daylight disc' sighting at close range, which falls into Dr. Hynek's classification of "Close Encounter of the First Kind". The object was solid, clearly shiny silver metallic, the classic "flying saucer" shape, and moved very slowly, about 20 feet above the 80-foot pine tree tops near the Strawberry Flats campground about halfway up the road to the Mount Palomar Observatory, which my family visited, later the same day.
My family in our family car, a 1956 Ford Country Sedan station wagon, reached the campground after dark the night before, a Friday, and I had my sighting between 7 and 7:30 AM on Saturday, of July 4th weekend in 1960.
The object was a disc-shaped craft with a domed top, which I first noticed as a result of being the first one to awake in the morning, got out of my sleeping bag, and needed to go to the outhouse. Afterward, I heard the rushing water of a nearby creek and decided to go find it and get a drink of fresh mountain spring water from the stream. After doing that, which involved crossing the road and going about 100 yards or so from our campsite, down the mountain side, I looked up and saw the morning star, Venus, shining in the clear morning mountain blue sky. I turned around and heard a noise like a motor whining at high speed, very faint at first, but the noise grew in volume until it was like the level of a truck passing by.
Then I caught sight of the craft, which I at first assumed to be an airplane or helicopter, at first appearing as some gleaming shiny silver metal reflecting the sunlight through the faraway treetops. I came to a clearing with some large granite boulders, where I could get a better look at the object, and it suddenly came into full view, accompanied by the noise like a turbine engine. I was so startled and shocked by what I saw, that I nearly fell over with my mouth open!
The object's outer edge appeared to be spinning at a high rate of speed, and it had no lights. I was so scared, I hid behind the nearest large tree trunk. I was by myself, cut off from my family, and very frightened.
Then as I beheld the object, flying at a low rate of speed above the tall pines across the clearing from me, about maybe 100 yards from me, it was flying upwards toward the observatory on the summit of Mount Palomar.
The object appeared to be about 60 feet in diameter, about 12 to 20 feet in vertical dimension at its center, and I could see three dark openings on its lower side which I assumed were probably depressions for landing gear to deploy from, or for lights to shine down at night, or perhaps both?
It was the color of bright brushed stainless steel, very shiny and silvery, but not reflective like chrome. I was thinking of the brushed stainless steel I had seen on late-1950s Cadillacs, or a stainless steel pot, something like that.
At its nearest to me, I could discern the sounds the object made were two combined into one: a high-pitched whine with a low pulsating hum. And at its nearest to me, the sound now seemed like it was inside my head, between my ears, as well as coming from the object. Then the sound began to alternate from inside my head to coming from the object. Very strange!
I watched the object until it was at last lost from my view beyond the trees in the distance, then I high-tailed it up that mountain trail from the creek back to the campground, and excitedly told my family all about it.
As I crossed the road toward my campsite, I saw a man driving by in an early-1950s Chevy pickup truck, looking like he had seen a ghost! He was just staring straight ahead with a blank look on his face, like something had really scared him. He must have seen the UFO also!
My Dad thought I was making the whole thing up, but my mother believed me. My two brothers just looked at me and scratched their heads, and my sister thought I was just being a weirdo.
Later that day around noon, we all got into the car and Dad drove us up to the Mount Palomar Observatory where we saw the huge 200-inch telescope. There was an astronomer there, and I asked him if anyone had reported anything strange like a flying saucer, and he said yes, some people had said they saw something strange in the sky and got in their cars and left in a hurry, before he could ask them for details. Then I told him what I saw, and he said "Maybe you should report it to the authorities, son. It might be important!"
After we returned home from our camping trip, we called the newspaper, and they didn't want to run my story, but they gave me the phone number of the U.S. Air Force, but since it was a toll call, my Dad wouldn't let me call the number. However, a few days later, my mother finally relented and called the Air Force, and they took our names and address and said they would mail me an official UFO sighting report form. My mom helped me fill it out, and we sent it in to the Air Force, where they put it into the database of Project Bluebook some time in 1961.
Cheers,
Dejael

[Jane]

Hi Dejael. Really enjoyed reading your story there. Sounds like it's still really vivid to you all these years later.
Have you had any more encounters over the years, or was this the only one?

[dejarma]

Hello Dej <love the abreviation btw> well explained sighting; thanks for taking the time....
Most claims of this type usually suggest total silence... Could have been some kind of black ops craft on a test flight. Quite possible it was a craft controlled by unknown sentient beings too. Frustrating to know you'll probably never know what it was!!!

Originally Posted by Dejael

There was an astronomer there, and I asked him if anyone had reported anything strange like a flying saucer, and he said yes, some people had said they saw something strange in the sky and got in their cars and left in a hurry, before he could ask them for details.

Did these people tell the astronomer because they felt he was in a position to have seen it? Was there 'any' local news coverage at all?

Peace.

dej...

[Nimue]

Welcome Dejael. Thanks for sharing your experience with us.

[Skeptical]

I love cases like this - they are so different and so much more satisfying than the "lights in the night sky" reports we get nowadays. Have you ever tried to look up your case in the Project Bluebook archives?

S

[Miss Deetective]

Hi Dejael...welcome a board. Thanks for sharing your sighting with us. You provided a lot of detail and that is important.

[Carol Nistri]

Hi Dejael and welcome,you see that,allll these years later and you havent forgotten the event,I say its because it was profound and you knew it was,you cant forget whats profound and your story proves it,that was an enjoyable read btw.Ive read over and over again that if one is close enough when a sighting occurs there is a sound,those like myself that saw ufos four of them recall them as silent,but they were thousands of feet up and not nearly as close as yours.I sure wish we had the answers but all we have is more and more questions.

[Dejael]

Thanks everyone, for welcoming me here and for your comments. I'm sure my sighting is in the Bluebook Archives somewhere in Huntsville, Alabama, I believe. I would like to follow up and get a copy of it.

Yes, I have had other sightings in recent years, quite unexpectedly, and of course,
just as startling and surprising as my first. I don't know why some people go their
whole lives without experiencing something like this, or something paranormal, while
others do. I guess it's just the randomness of life. Those like me who have seen UFOs
just happen to be in the right place at the right time, and there they are. I didn't choose to have these sightings. It's like a car wreck, it all happens so fast, and there you are. If you stay cooped up in your house or apartment watching TV all the time, and don't get out in the wild to enjoy God's green Earth, then you will miss out on a lot of the mysteries of life and the universe.

For many years I was a card-carrying member of both NICAP and MUFON, and it has
been a fantastic experience delving into the unknown with all those people. I have been a UFO investigator myself for MUFON and it has been both a frustrating and rewarding experience. It's always frustrating when you come up against a blank wall and can go no further to understand what really happened in a case, or what the object or so-called alien entities are; but it's rewarding that you can actually come up against the unknown and find it challenging, baffling and mind-boggling, and a challenge to your own concepts of life, the universe and everything.

Like Fox Mulder, I know that the Truth is Out There - UFOs are real, and some of them are some type of advanced spacecraft from somewhere else, and no one can convince me otherwise. And I have also seen much valuable evidence that proves to me that the U.S. Government is lying to the public, not only about Roswell, but UFOs, aliens, and Mars as well. That first UFO I saw was a solid, 3-dimensional metal craft built by intelligent beings from another world. Nothing any government on Earth had in 1960 could come anywhere close to what I saw. I had that object in my view for probably up to 10 minutes, and I could hear it as well, at very close range.

There was a man from Poland, I think, who was in Canada at Falcon Lake in 1967 who had a very similar encounter to mine, except that his was a CE-2, and he was burned by radiation from one of the saucers he got too close to, and hospitalized as a result. I'm lucky I wasn't that close to it. I have had discussions with scientists on what form of propulsion and radiation these craft use, and most say electromagnetic propulsion, or nuclear, with microwave radiation. Something way beyond our primitive rockets.

I have worked at NASA as a technician and designer on systems for the Space Shuttle program. I have had many interesting discussion with NASA personnel, including scientists, about UFOs and ETs, and life on Mars. I met Dr. Chris McKay of NASA Ames
Research Center back in 1988, and have kept in touch with him over the years. He is an expert on the planet Mars. His opinions about UFOs, ETs and Mars are quite a bit different from the official "party line" at NASA, which tends to want to say nothing to the public unless they have to. I have spoken to Seth Shostak at SETI and it is just as Stanton Friedman says it is, that they are looking "out there" and don't believe "they're here". The NSA (No Such Agency) is in control of the flow of all UFO-related information in the US Government, no matter what you may have heard otherwise. I have been shown a lot of classified and confidential government information, which I can't talk about it here, but I can tell you that they are doing everything they can to stay in control, and not allow things to get out of hand. Just listen to Timothy Good and Nick Pope, for example - they know what's really going on, not only in Britain's MoD but the USA Pentagon.
I really don't think the ETs are interested in doing anything with us but conduct experiments, and make tests, to further their own knowledge, and don't have a real anti-human agenda. (Perhaps they are doing DNA experiments, who knows?) They leave us alone, most of the time, and only interact with us when they need to. Perhaps, like Stanton Friedman has suggested, this is the garden vacation spot in this part of the galaxy, like we think of Hawaii, and all the aliens from our sector of the Milky Way Galaxy are coming here to relax, or do experiments.
I think once we get farther along in exploring the Moon and Mars we will have some basic answers to these earth-shaking mind-boggling questions. And there's always the "high strangeness" of the phenomenon itself, and the crop circles, and cattle mutilations, and chupacabras cases, that keep up a lively mix for study, discussion and debate.
If anyone has questions about my sightings, please feel free to ask.
Cheers!
Dejael

[Miss Deetective]

Dejael
Is the govt preventing scientists from releasing information about any evidence they may have analyzed or studied?? Many skeptics claim there is no such evidence and scientists will not touch the subject of ufo's. What is your knowledge of that??
Also, what do you think of the theory that aliens manipulated our DNA millions of years ago and we are the result of that intervention??
I'm sure that I, and others here, will have a lot of questions for you!!

[Carol Nistri]

Dej said in part,"Most claims of this type usually suggest total silence... Could have been some kind of black ops craft on a test flight. Quite possible it was a craft controlled by unknown sentient beings too. Frustrating to know you'll probably never know what it was!!!"

Dej,the year was 1960,were there Black Ops that far back?
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