Strange Lights

It happened almost thirty years ago, on a cool December night.

I was twelve years old. My family had gotten home fairly late after some engagement. Dad drove up to our house in the Pinto station wagon, pulled in to the driveway, turned the car off. We got out, and he, my mother, and my brother went in to the house.

They didn't see what I saw, and expressed absolutely no interest, positive or negative, when I pointed out the flying craft to them. They all just went in to the house, and let me stay outside.

It was a clear, calm night, warm for December. There was no snow on the ground. I don't remember the time, but it was later than I would have been allowed to stay out. I walked out in to the street, my gaze staring upward at a forty-five degree angle or so. Our house faced south on an hill going east-west, and I first spotted the object in the northeastern skies.

There were two lights, one red and one blue. And between them flowed streaks of white light from one to the other, often in pairs adjacent to each other. Occassionally the two lights would reverse positions by flipping, one over the other, slowly, and stay that way for a while, until flipping back. If there was a body attached to these lights, it was too dark to see in the night sky.

I followed the object up and down the streets in my neighborhood. Although I had no way of knowing for sure, it seemed to be only a hundred feet above me. It moved slowly, meandering through its own route above our homes, nonchalantly going out for a night-time excursion. Sometimes it seemed to gain distance on me, though I sensed no sudden acceleration, and then it would turn back towards me.

Did it see me? I do remember I was fascinated - what could this thing be? - a little scared, nervous, but overcome with curiosity. I felt brave enough to come out from tree cover, walking out in the middle of the deserted street, daring to make contact with the craft. And when it would slowly approach I did get the sensation that it knew I was down there, following it, wanting to wave and shout but a little too ... cautious to do so.

After a while, about a half-hour or so, I guess, the craft seemed to lose interest in me, and slowly began to recede in the distance. It headed north, over a block of homes, and then over the woods way behind my house. Eventually it faded from sight. I stayed out in the middle of the street a while longer, waiting to see if it came back. It didn't.

I went back inside the house, but oddly I don't remember saying anything about my encounter with my parents. I do not remember if they were even up, or if my brother was. But I did go upstairs to my bedroom, and recall making a vow to myself that I must remember this date. Something important happened on this date, and I must remember it! I forgot to burn the date in to my memory. I just know it was probably wintertime, 1978 or 1979.

The next night I set my telescope at the window at the top of the attic stairs (my brother and I shared a refurnished room in the attic). I was going to spend all night scanning the skies with it for my friend. I even made a point to make sure I was looking at the window at the exact time, 24 hours later, that it appeared, whatever time that was. However, despite my preparations, I saw nothing. I do think it odd that despite my enthusiasm for a second look, I gave up rather quickly. But the telescope was not in a very comfortable position.

I was always into the whole UFO phenomenon as a kid. My mother was a librarian, and I would go there, spending hours in a low-traffic aisle at the beginning of the Dewey Decimal system. Where all the "strange phenomena" books were. UFOs, bigfoot, oddities like Atlantis and mermaids, sea serpents like the Loch Ness critter. Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of" was possibly my favorite show at the time. "Close Encounters" was tied with that guy Lucas' film as a summer favorite. So the ground was fertile, no doubt about that. The question is, did I see a UFO because of all this reading and TV watching? Did I mistake a blimp for a UFO?

I've given the possibility a lot of thought over the years when I think about that night, and the blimp hypothesis is probably the closest natural explanation I can come to. Yet that just doesn't sit right with me. It was the way those lights shifted position. The best way I can describe it is something like this: picture a big eighteen-wheeler truck, and imagine that its rear tires are actually three tires in the shape of a triangle. That is, when you look at it from the side, two tires are on the ground next to each other, one in front of the other, while the third hangs between them about five feet off the ground. Put a tread around the three wheels like you'd see on a Sherman tank. Got it? Okay, now see that truck barreling down the road at sixty miles an hour, and you're in a car next to it watching those rear wheels, that set of three. Every so often, the triangle formation would rotate; that is, the third wheel above the other two would rotate forward and land on the ground in front; the front wheel would slide back to the rear; and the rear wheel would lift and now become the suspended wheel a couple of feet above the others. Not too hard to picture, right? Now here's the analogy: take out one of the wheels, and imagine that one wheel has a red light, the other a blue. They changed positions in the same manner as those wheel on the truck. Also imagine that the tread around those wheels suddenly had groups of yellowish-white light, looking like "equal" signs from a math equation, cycling back and forth between the two lights. Hopefully this will describe a little better what I saw the craft doing.

Which is why the rational part of me, desperate for a rational explanation, has to reject the blimp theory. I have never seen a blimp with lights that moved like what I just described. One possibility which still keeps the blimp hypothesis alive is those scrolling messages that you sometimes saw on the Goodyear blimp from that era. That could account for the yellow "equal" signs, but doesn't explain the red and blue light. And what the heck would a blimp be doing out in the middle of the night over northern New Jersey, miles and miles away from the nearest airport? And how does one explain the odd disinterest of my parents? A blimp, over our house, and no one, not even my father, is even curious? Mildly interested?

And so I pose to you this question: What was it that I saw that night???