The lead article in this morning’s Politico is entitled “Which Presidents Have Seen UFOs? Yep, It’s More Than One.” I wouldn’t be so quick to make fun of them, having had exactly one personal experience with a phenomenon I could not (and still cannot) explain. It is a story worth telling.
The other DrC and I were in our RV heading west on I-70 somewhere in KS or CO east of Denver, she was driving. The year was sometime in the 1979-1985 era, and the time was a late summer mid-afternoon as we were headed home to CA from a summer-long RV odyssey, being college faculty with summers off.
We were driving through empty, rolling grasslands and I looked out my side window and perhaps 5-6 feet off the ground and perhaps 150 yards north of the highway I saw a sheet of red flame perhaps 4-6 feet high and 20-40 feet long burning brightly in midair. Below it was dry pasture which was not singed or smoldering. I stared, turned to call the other DrC’s attention to it, and when I looked back it was gone, as though it had never existed. The area was empty pasture, no animals, piping or man-made anything within sight.
I don’t do drugs, wasn’t drinking, have no history of hallucinations. I know what I saw, have no idea from whence it came or how it could even happen. Was it a mirage reflected from elsewhere? I have no idea. But it makes me less quick to condemn those who experience the inexplicable. It happened to me.
