🛸 The Night We Encountered a UFO, or Was It the Jersey Devil?

On a dark Pine Barrens night, the three of us were terrified when we were shaken in our boots by a UFO

Was it an alien spacecraft or the Jersey Devil?

I remember how pervasive UFO movies were when we were young. It was a big time for aliens and their antics. Sucking up people from the earth, probing their you-know-what’s with their whatevers and the like. We loved those movies, but did we really believe there were aliens from outer space?

You have to be careful on the wording. A UFO is an unidentified flying object. Doesn’t have to be from another galaxy. It could be a blimp or one of our experimental planes we couldn’t identify.

An alien spacecraft is just that. A spacecraft housing some being from another place or time (Are there time travelers?) visiting the earth.

There was a time in the late 60’s when I was a quasi-hippie (still had a job), and enjoyed all the pot smoking, rock n’ roll and pleasures of the era.

One night an acquaintance, Joe, my brother, Tom and another friend hopped into his VW bus headed into the dark world of the pine barrens. We followed a dirt road that was probably a fire break until we had sufficiently hidden ourselves and felt safe, and we cranked up the volume on the radio and lit up a joint. We were in the process of getting hammered when suddenly we felt a vibration, at a distance at first.

It caught our attention and we all paused like rabbits. The vibration got stronger, and built until we heard it shaking the trees around us. At that point we started losing it. The vibration force rolled right over the van, shaking it and scaring the hell out of us. We had no idea what it was.

Joe ran to the driver’s seat, started the van and we high tailed it out of there. Once out, we all tried to figure out what the hell it was.

The force couldn’t have been but twenty or thirty feet above us as it shook the van. It wasn’t a helicopter because we would have heard the distinctive, puka-puka.  So what was it?

Being a bit high we speculated it was probably either the Jersey Devil who haunted the pine barrens (probably not). Or a UFO, which it obviously was because it was an object and was unidentified. But was it an alien craft? We laughed about it and lit another joint.

It did shake us up though, although we never could figure out what it was.

So progress from the days of those super-duper Sci Films we got to see for 25 cents like

·      The Day the Earth Stood Still

·      War of the Worlds

·      Forbidden Planet: with  Ann Margret my first erotic idol):

Ann Margret in Forbidden Planet was my first erotic idol

·      Invasion of the Body Snatchers

·      The Blob

·      The Thing from Another Planet

·      Invaders From Mars

·      and in 3D It Came From Outer Space

·      And many more

To what kind of encounter did we have? I found there are Five kinds.

• The First Kind: You spot something in the sky and it leaves no evidence.

• The Second Kind: A UFO leaves some physical trace: burns on the ground or broken branches.

• The Third Kind: You make contact with a U.F.O, you see some alien pilot aboard one or other life form.

• The 4th Kind: Aliens kidnap us like they did with the Alien Abduction: Betty and Barney Hill. In 1961, Betty and Barney Hill encountered a UFO on a deserted New Hampshire highway. When the story leaked, they gained fame as the first widely reported alien abductees.

• The 5th Kind: We’re having regular conversations with aliens.

You can log onto You Tube and find a ton of alien encounter videos of all kinds, UFO sightings, conversations with beings from other planets, etc.

However, we didn’t see something in the sky, we felt it. We found no physical trace of it on the van, so not that. We didn’t make contact with some alien and have a conversation, so no 3rd kind. We weren’t kidnapped so no 4th Kind; and we didn’t converse with any outer space guests. So, I guess it was a 6^th kind.

Why this all popped into my mind is that there has been so much publicity lately about aliens and flying saucers outer space recently, and even the government is getting involved. They’re holding hearings in the US Congress.

Three military veterans testified in Congress' highly anticipated hearing on UFOs, including a former Air Force intelligence officer who claimed the U.S. government has operated a secret "multi-decade" reverse engineering program of recovered vessels.

He also said the U.S. has recovered non-human "biologics" from alleged crash sites.

Retired Maj. David Grusch, who went from being part of the Pentagon's UAP Task Force to becoming a whistleblower, told the House Oversight Committee's national security subcommittee that he had been denied access to some government UFO programs but that he knows the "exact locations" of UAPs in U.S. possession. 

While he refrained from sharing any further information in the public hearing, Grusch offered to disclose details behind closed doors. However, he has not seeen aliens personally but interviewed 40 people who have.

The subcommittee also heard testimony from former Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves and retired Cmdr. David Fravor about their alleged encounters with aircraft of an unexplained origin. Graves recounted an incident with a flying object off the coast of Virginia Beach in 2014.

While flying an F-18, he said, he came upon an aircraft that looked like a "dark gray or black cube inside of a clear sphere" that he estimated to be five to 15 feet in diameter and unlike any aircraft he has ever seen. Grave claimed the UAP could remain stationary despite hurricane-force winds

There is a tiny town in Bonnybridge, Scotland that is known as the epicentre for UFO sightings, with around 300 incidents reported each year since 1992. The area has been labelled the 'Golden Triangle' due to its high levels of extra-terrestrial activity. Locals have reported seeing flying saucers, mysterious lights, and even claimed encounters with aliens.

The problem wit all these sightings is they aren’t very clear. Blurred blobs and such in the distance. If the government has a clear photo of an alien or craft, they certainly are hiding it well.

Some have questioned, with all the recent publicity, are they trying to scare us so we continue fund an obscene military defense budget.

My bottom line—alien beings are possible when you consider the universe is billions of years old with trillions of galaxies and in that time an intelligent civilization could have invented technologies we couldn’t even contemplate: that they could have a mature technology that can move at beyond light-speed through wormholes…whatever to get anywhere they want in a blink of an eye. The universe has to be filled with life.

But honestly, I can’t get my head around it. Until I see it clearly in person, I have to reserve judgement despite my frightening UFO encounter in the Pine Barrens of NJ.

What’s your UFO story?