Your True Unexplainable/Ghost/UFO/Alien Stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Well, this is SDMB after all… however it’s getting aaawfully hot out and I could use gettin some eery chill. These are true stories but for some reason I didn’t want to put it under GD. I’m not sure what might be the proper sub-forum.

I’m an atheist (non-militant :wink: ) but I was brought up a Christian. I never believed in ghost or UFO (sided with Sagan’s logic… back then). When I was in something like 8th grade I overheard my grand parents, uncles and aunts (they are not the kind of people) nonchalantly talking about how they were constantly harassed by ghosts in their old house in 50s as if they were talking about some run of mill buglers. At first it didn’t quite register as to what they were talking about but later on over the years when I overheard again a few more times of the same story it finally register in my head and gave me a chill.

Anyhow these are my unexplainable encounters:

  1. My best friend and I were driving on a two lane road (County Line Rd in South Barrington for those in Chicagoland) in a sunny summer midday about 10 years ago. It’s a long stretch of two lane rustic road with zero shoulders in a heavily wooded area. We were the only one on the stretch of road until we saw an all white minivan, with most windows whited out, coming from the opposite direction toward us. As the van approached closer and just about to go past by us we clearly saw what we assumed, at the moment, an all black motorcycle with the rider all dressed in black pulling out from behind the van. It was as if the person was tailgating the van and tried to pass the van but went back in seeing our car approaching right in front on the opposite lane. As the van passed us we both looked at the van because it was a close call; there was absolutely nothing behind the van. We both took a double take and then looked at each other without saying anything for a minute. There is no shoulder or room to pass to the right side to pass the van. It is then I realized it wasn’t a bike at all but some kind of a black box or container like object that peeked out; I swear the image of a vertical coffin painted in matt black or heavily sooted came to both of us. I tried to confirm to my buddy about what we just saw and said “did you see that? There was nothing behind that van!!” He is a big football player like dude but meekly mumbled with tiny voice “yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know.” His eyes were about to pop out of his eye sockets. And then he didn’t say anything and refused to talk about it all petrified. I’ve never ever seen him like this before and I’ve know him for very long time. I told him I should call the cops just in case someone or something went off the road. He was just frozen and then later told me to call if I wanted but still all spooked. So I did call the police dept. and told them exactly what we saw and that they should go out there just to check. I somehow got the suspicion that they’ve received very similar calls before at the same location. We didn’t receive the call back from them. It still baffles me and spooks me out every time I think about it or go near the spot as if a flying black coffin will show up any time in broad daylight.

  2. I was at a friend house for a week around Sandia Peak area of Albuquerque, NM. He was at work on this day so I sat out on his 2nd floor balcony drinking coffee and spacing out looking at the cotton candy clouds way up in the sky… deep blue sky with a few beautiful cotton candy clouds. This particular cloud looked like a triple decker ice cream cone. I was just mindlessly looking at the top section of the formation. I then saw a synthetic material looking, a top like shaped, thing slowly spinning and turning… partially came out of the cloud. Right then the sun ray reflected off this thing. It seemed like metallic but matt black possibly with certain rivet like patterns (or possibly small openings). It quickly spun back into the cloud but almost like slow motion. I freaked and mumbled something but I was alone in the house. I just couldn’t believe it. The top portion of this ice cream scoop shaped cloud didn’t seem big enough for a large plane to fit and was just about big enough for this thing to comfortable fit. I told my friend and he just ignored me and then later just took it as a joke. I told many people but no one believes me. Then I saw these UFO show on History Channel or some such channel and I saw the exact saucer I saw in the pictures taken in Mexico and Japan in one summer right about the time I saw it. Now I don’t doubt there’s something out there. I don’t know what capacity they have or what they might be doing. I absolutely swear on my father’s grave I saw this UFO or whatever that was and as far as I know we don’t have technology to build anything that move and can take flight like that.

  3. When I bought a townhouse (center unit of the 5) I heard that the one of the guy who used to live in the end unit recently died there alone and his estate was having hard time selling the house. From the get-go when I went down the basement of my new townhouse I felt like there was someone else there with me. But remember, I don’t believe in that stuff. All the basements of each units are are separated by a single cement walls. I set up my work studio in the basement where I spent considerable time almost every night. I have shelves built onto the wall and I keep all sorts of photography/art supplies etc. This feeling of someone else being there was pretty much constant although I continued to question validity of such thing and shrug off. One wee hours after midnight sometime this rectangular box fell out of the self after years of sitting there with all other boxes. The shelves were level, sturdy, deep enough and the box was, well, rectangular. When it fell off by itself it just gave me one of the biggest chill and made me just baffle over how it could happen. I looked at the box and the shelf every which other way to justify that it could’ve happened. No. It just defied all logic. That basement never felt right and I’m really happy I am not in there right now although I worked in there for some ten years. That’s another one I just can’t forget and I can still feel how it felt like to be in that basement.

Well, now it’s your turn. What is your unexplainable encounter/story(s)?

2

Ugh oh god why am I reading this thread in the middle of the night when I have a ghost phobia? WHY?

3

About twenty years ago, late one night I was sitting in my hot tub looking up at the sky when this strange light passed overhead, from southwest to northeast. It was largish, bigger than an airplane, and had a soft white, fluorescent kind of quality. It made no sound, and moved too fast to be a plane, but much too slow to be a meteor. Of course, I don’t think it was aliens or anything, but I’ve always wondered what the hell it was.

4

Man, I haven’t thought about this in years…

My grandfather owned a ~3000 acre wheat farm in northern Montana, northwest of Havre. When he died, my parents agreed to temporarily take over the farm and run it until a buyer could be found.

Two things to know. First, the main house was a relatively modern farmhouse, but on the property was an old homesteaders shack, still standing and in relatively good condition. Second, running through this property was a small coulee (sort of like a small seasonal creek).

So, one night in October my mom is in the kitchen after dinner and me and my dad are in the the other room. Suddenly she lets out a holler for my dad to come in there. From the kitchen window you could see the old homestead shack, maybe a mile and a half away. And, what the hell? There’s LIGHT coming from one of the windows! It had that distinctive Coleman lantern look to it (campers will know what I mean. Gas lights look unique). Now this is October in north central Montana, which of course means cold, snow, and more cold. And its seven o’clock at night. My dads thought is that some idiot was hunting pronghorn illegally and got trapped by a snowdrift, and headed for the nearest shelter. So dad goes and gets into the big Ford four-wheel-drive and heads out to see who’s out there and get whoever it is into the main house before the serious cold of the night sets in.

Now for those of you unfamiliar with the hayseed lifestyle, most farmland is divided into ‘sections’, or plots of land one mile to a side. My grandfather owned sever sections as part of his farm; all the access to each section was down dirt tracks that ran between each one. Think of a big grid. So to get to to this old homesteaders shack dad had to drive about a mile and a half down a section line to where the building stood.

Now this is the great plains. It is FLAT country. The Bearpaw mountains were some 80 miles away, but the looked like they were only a few miles because of all the flat land.

So. It’s snowing and its cold. And absolutely black. We have to drive a mile and some to get to this shack, but no biggie, you can see the shack the almost the entire time. And yeah, someone is definitely there, there’s a light in one of the main windows. Stupid hunters. Too late to legally hunt antelope and very good chance of being caught on the prairie in a snowstorm. Idiots. But my dad will be damnned if he’s going to let someone freeze to death on his watch.

Remember the coulee? Of course you do. Now, to get to this shack with the trespassing hunter holed up in it, the road dips down and across the draw made by this coulee. So for a few seconds the pickup is out of sight of the shack while it makes it through this gully. Dad takes it slow, not wanting to get stuck. When we crest the top edge of the coulee, the light in the shack is out. Simply gone.

So we finally get to the old shack, and there is no pickup or car or anything. Ok, maybe the guy was on foot, which makes sense if he needed emergency shelter from the snow. But man is it dark out.

Dad gets out a big 4D maglite and heads toward the shack, hollering out ‘hello!’ every few steps. My ten-year-old self is waiting in the cab of the pickup, wanting to go home and getting mighty sick of sitting in the middle of BFE looking for lost morons. Dad keeps on toward the shack. No lights on in the shack, remember, even though there had been up until just a few moments before.

So dad is looking around with the big maglite. Nothing. So he makes a big loop around the building. I see the flashlight beam moving slowly around on the ground and occasionally I would see the beam shine through one of the windows as dad, on the other side of the building, shone the light in, looking for whoever was there. This went on for maybe five minutes as dad circled the building. He walked up and looked through the windows at least twice that I could tell.

So he comes back to the pickup, empty handed except for the flashlight, climbs in without a word, and slowly drives back home, only the engine and the windshield wipes making noise. I ask what happened, and he simply shushed me quiet.

Back at the house, he tells me me to go in my room and play or read or something. Of course, my mom expected us to be returning with a third person. I listened at the door to ky room. Dad told mom that he had circled the building twice. The snow, at least 10 or 12 inches deep, was completely undisturbed around the shack. He told her he had looked in the windows and saw nothing but dust and debris. He said it was obvious nobody had been in that building in years.

But less than half an hour earlier all three of us had seen a bright light in the front window of the shack. That was not a fluke and all three of did not have the same hallucination. Something was in that building.

5

When I was about 13 , year about 1956, a friend and i walked out my parents front door about 10 O clock. it was dark. We lived on a street with a open park across the street. We both saw a car moving very rapidly down the street toward us. He said, man that car is hauling ass. It was very bright and moved at street level like a car. When it got close to our house, it soared into the aiir and took off like a shot. My first thought was, it soared just before it reached electrical lines.
I ran into the house and asked my parents if they saw anything. They were in the kitchen and did not. They we ran out to the street looking around for someone who saw it so we could talk about it. The streets were empty. We knew then, it would be pointless to tell anybody. Too bad.

6

Keep up the stories!! I love them!! I come from a long line of people who see and hear things that others don’t. Makes life interesting – especially before the children have learned to grow a filter around other people. Mom learned the hard way not to take me places, like Old Ironsides, when I was a toddler. I ended up screaming about the “bloody men”. Three-year olds do not know Revolutionary War history. There was one nice old man who sat and talked calmly to me…not that anyone else could see him.

7

In '85 I saw something strange on Sandia Peak near Albuquerque. I was walking along a trail with my father and I saw an old man on the overlook staring at the scenery. I turned to look at where my feet were going and when I turned back a couple seconds later the man was gone and there was a raven hovering in the place he’d been standing. There wasn’t any place the guy could have hidden.

Yeah, not unexplainable but I was a wee bit alarmed.

8

I saw the red lights reported here - southwest suburbs of Chicago, I was in Tinley Park or Orland Park at the time, don’t recall which. My husband and everyone else at the party saw them as well, as we were outside. They seemed to be tiny, and some people thought they were moving very, very slowly. There were three, and were not flickering/pulsing that I recall.

I haven’t the faintest idea what they were, and will only call them “UFOs” in that they were unidentified. Probably a plane or something, seen at such an angle/distance so as to confuse observers who had no distance cues due to seeing something at some undefined distance in the sky.

9

Forgive me for nit picking, but that’s what they are.
UNIDENTIFIED flying objects.
Could be a plane, a bird, a bug, swamp gas, Venus or a space ship, but it is unidentified and seems to be flying. :slight_smile:

10

FWIW that’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever read. As much the setting as anything else.

11

I made that distinction because many people seem to assume that “UFO” = alien space ship, and I have little reason to believe that extraterrestrial life was involved. I saw a probably-flying object (or objects) that was unidentified, so a UFO in that sense, not in a woo-woo UFO sense.

12

Cool.

13

No ghosts/aliens, but a puzzling UFO story.

Many years ago, we were flying back from the folks house late on a clear cold night. The kids were asleep in back, the radio was quiet, the autopilot was on, and the Mrs and I were just enjoying the night sky through the windshield. After a while, I kept noticing that one of the “stars” ahead and above us seemed to be brighter and moving. At first I attributed this to minor corrections by the autopilot, but eventually I could tell it was moving in relation to the other stars, not just the airplane. I called Mizpullin’s attention to it and we watched it for a while, even turning off the panel lights to see it better. We watched it for 10-15 minutes and eventually it faded away.

Never did figure out what it was. It seemed to be really far away, like it was a really bright star. It was just weird that it moved relative to the other stars that night.

14

pullin - Might’ve been a satellite. They don’t twinkle, are often brighter, and will move noticeably, IIRC.

15

Probably was (a satellite). The movement was slow, and there was nothing eerie about it. It just confused us. The short-lived nature of it (fading out) probably points to a satellite as well. It probably moved/orbited to where there it stopped reflecting.

16

Back in the mid-70s, I was a deputy sheriff. One very cold, clear morning, about 0200, I had to take a leak. I stopped in the middle of nowhere, turned off the lights, and stepped to the side of the road. While whizzing, I saw a bright red, unblinking light moving toward me in the sky. It got about nearly straight overhead, then suddenly veered back almost 180 degrees and shot out of sight. I have no idea to this day what it was.

17

The latest thing to happen to me was I was at home baby sitting my cousin. He was sitting with me upstairs. Down stairs, to your left is the backdoor. to your right, there is a door that separates the garage and the laundry. in the garage, there is a door to the granny flat.

I start to hear the granny flat door bang. I first shrugged it off as my dog (Who was in the granny flat) banging her tail on the door. But then it stops, and I hear the laundry door open and close a few times. Then I hear banging on the back door. The banging then starts to happen on the walls of the stairwell. The banging stops for a while and really, really loud banging starts on the garage door.

No way was I going down there, when there was only me a little boy, but when the banging was happening in the stairwell, I moved the curtain and looked down and nothing was there (we have a gate and curtain at the top of our stair well.)

and when my family came home, I went down and my dog was still in the granny flat, but she was hiding under the bed, shaking.

18

My father was on a hunting trip somewhere in the wilds of Canada years ago. The party was with a guide at a camp in the woods, and one night they all saw what seemed to be a UFO. Orange-ish lights, about a dozen, slowly spinning around in a circle up in the sky. It lasted about 2 minutes and then just disappeared. That was all, and it was more curious than scary. Jacques said he’d never seen such a thing before…

19

I’m country. I’ve hunted coon in the woods at night. I’ve frog gigged on dark lakes where the moccasins swim up to the boat and have to be pushed away with a paddle. I’ve camped countless times from an early age, sometimes alone, as much a part of nature as any animal of the woods. I don’t believe in supernatural stuff as a rule and my general nature is to go see what the noise was. It’s the only way to know. Fear just didn’t enter into how I feel about being deep into uninhabited country at night.

All day I had been filling in with a shovel around a culvert big enough to stand in that I had pushed into the creek on a hundred acre wood divided by it. Once filled I would have a road to reach the back half without wading and climbing banks. It was on a piece of property I bought cheap with a thought toward putting a cabin and a lake on it. I could have borrowed a dozer to do it but hard work does a body good and I enjoy the solitude of the woods. Odd things happen. I saw a king snake cross the road in front of me that must have been 15 feet long. I watched an armadillo trundle across an open field and straight into my leg as if I were invisible. On that same note a deer once jumped a fence and began to eat grass five feet away only looking up at me from time to time as if he couldn’t tell if I were real. I can stand stock still for a long time. If anything I felt like a ghost when in the woods.

It began to get dark but I wanted to get done and admire my work. I did but it was total dark as I headed back to the truck. I made my way up a hill surrounded by the oddest cacauphany of whipporwills. There must have been hundreds all out of sync trilling thier crazed call so imperitive. I’ve not heard anything like it and felt lucky to have been there to witness it. Once I got to the top of the hill I turned to stare back where they were unseen in the dark trees and they all stopped at once. It creeped me. I thought perhaps they saw my slihouette against the starry night sky atop the hill and continued on.

Patches had been cut of timber a decade or more back and the piles of leavings littered the way in places but they were too large to risk burning all at once so I would burn part of them pulled off the piles until they were gone and I decided to do that. The dirt road was the most bare so that’s where I lit the fire. Lots of things go through your head as you stare into a fire. You remember things and take stock of life and your reactions to situations and you become lost in the flames for a long while. Then the noise happened.

It was as if someone really strong had pulled back a thick live limb in complete silence until it broke with a loud pop about 10 or 15 yards directly in front of me. It got my attention. There was no wool gathering from then on. I was hyper alert. I began to go over the various things it could be discarding most and doubting those I considered. I stared intently into the dark unable to make out a thing and listening for any movement. If it were a bear or wild boar then I wanted to keep the fire between us. I was unarmed and vulnerable. I thought of a lot of things, even that I had imagined it. Some trick of sound that made it seem so loud. After maybe 5 or 10 minutes I figured I had imagined it.

It happened again. 10 feet to the right of where the first was. I couldn’t deny it. I listened like I’ve never done before. No movement in the thick brush, no snap of twig or rustle of dry leaves to give away footsteps, no night birds or sounds of any kind. Nothing. After a bit it happened again 10 feet further. Loud. A slight straining protest of wood before an awesome pop. I could feel every hair on my body. It seemed to stay the same distance from me so that meant it was circling. I stared at the place it would happen next but didn’t know when it would. That made it seem like a long time but it was always about 5 to 10 minutes and never a sound of movement between. But very deliberate. POW! Then I would stare into the dark where it would happen again and listen. So deliberate, unlike an animal.

That is what was scarey. Conversely it pissed me off and fascinated me as well. It had to be a person trying to frighten me but I could never catch a footfall or snicker, not a breath or any sound. The limbs seemed so thick that broke. It did that about a dozen times always with the same amount of time in between until it had made it to within 10 feet of completion and back where it started and I listened long and hard for the final pop that never came.

I waited until the fire had burned to coals which seemed an interminable time and cleared a fire lane and pissed on the coals as best I could. Then I tried to walk back in the dark the last 300 yards. I didn’t make it more than 60 feet before I was running. I made it to the truck on a flat out flying run and shamed myself. I’ve never done that before. I figure I’m the baddest thing in the woods on any given day or night but there is no way I could bend a limb until it popped like that. Maybe it was the two bachelor brothers who lived closest at about 4 miles away and they worked in tandem. But I never heard a footfall and I have keen hearing, particularly then. I’ll never know.

It bothers me.

20

SPOOKY! Love these! Keep ‘em comin’!