Night Lights

– or –

Dave comes out of the ‘close encounters’ closet

It can’t possibly be. That’s impossible. How can it … how does it … just … hang there? There has to be a … a helicopter or something!

Three giant perfectly round glowing spheres cannot just hang suspended 100 feet over the middle of I-4.  It’s impossible - but there it was, right in front of my windshield.

It was a clear, warm summer night in 1976/7 and I had just left work and was on my way to an after-party. My friend and I had just finished our shift as monorail pilots at Disney World Orlando.  I had taken my train off line and parked it in the maintenance garage for the night.

After I had changed clothes and clocked out, I talked to my friend to confirm our destination and the time we were supposed to be there. We jumped into our respective cars and headed out of the park toward Interstate 4 to head north to Orlando.

It was a very typical night, uneventful, but it had been a long day and I wasn’t sure I was up for a party but I had promised a friend I would stop by on my way home. And so I found myself driving the long winding roads that lead back to I-4 and the real world. Little did I know that this night would change my life.

We merged onto the major highway and joined the usual tourist traffic headed back to their hotels and homes with their Mickey balloons and Goofy hats and exhausted family members already passed out in the back. I could see my buddy Bill’s car still behind me and silently hoped if I started to take the wrong exit, he would flash his lights to keep me from making the wrong turn.

As we came over what Floridians call a hill, I saw a strange sight. Just above the 6 lanes of traffic were three big lights that seemed to be suspended there. Now, this is probably one of the largest tourist areas in the country, if not the world, so it should come as no surprise that there are helicopters in the area.

You could, and still can, stop by a local business located directly beside I-4 and pay a few bucks to take a helicopter tour of the local theme parks of Sea World, Universal Studios, and the Disney World complex. They tell me it is particularly brilliant at night with all the lights and such.  So it is not unusual to see a helicopter in that area at most any time of the day or night.

I reasoned that it must be a helicopter or maybe one of those blimps that come around for a big sporting event. But this was different than anything I had ever seen. It was much bigger than the lights on an aircraft and it too close to the ground to be a blimp.

The movie “E.T.” had not been written yet, but I must admit that I had read Erich von Däniken’s books on the subject and the one about Barney and Betty Hill’s close encounter and their ‘lost time’ experience (The Interrupted Journey, 1966) before I was a teenager so I was interested in the subject. However, at this point, I was in my late 20’s and had long ago given up the notion that I would ever see such a thing.

Still, here I was staring at an object that had to be at least 15’ to 20’ tall and 40’ or more feet wide. It reminded me of 3 giant Ping-Pong balls, perfectly smooth and round, connected at their center so that they were three abreast. They were not shining like headlights but were instead glowing blue-white. There was no door or window, no outside markings that I could see.

As we got closer to the object, traffic slowed to almost a crawl. I was frantically looking for some guy wires or something that this thing could be suspended from and looking and listening for the sound of the helicopter that must be holding it up there. I thought it had to be some kind of joke or a publicity stunt from one of the studio’s.

Funny, how your mind searches for a logical explanation to explain something that you cannot explain.

As I came close to this object my eyes could not see anything to explain this, and although I stuck my head out the window straining to hear some mechanical noise, all I noticed was a faint humming sound and that my radio had suddenly gone all static. I looked up as I drove under the thing only to see the other side of the spheres and hear static coming from my radio.

I wanted to pull off the road but traffic just kept coming, creeping though it was, and I followed it in my rear view mirror as long as I could and never did it move that whole time.

When we arrived at our friend’s house, Bill walked up to me and said, “Did you see what I just saw?”

“Yes, can you believe that?” I replied.

 “Good” he said, “I thought I was going crazy there for a second.”

We never spoke of it again.

In the Orlando Sentinel the following morning was a story that said a UFO was sighted over I-4 and some witnesses said it moved into a nearby field and sat down. It sat there for a little while, lifted up and disappeared in a flash of sudden acceleration.

Years later I spent some time at the local library going through the files to find that story but never could locate it. I eventually gave up and until today had seldom discussed it with anyone else.

Tonight I turned on the TV and found a story about people giving details about their encounters and it occurred to me that I had never written this story and it probably was time I did before I completely forgot it … as if that might happen. Anyway, I figured it was time I “came out of the UFO crazy story closet” and let the chips fall where they may.

If anyone actually reads this and has any additional information please contact me or leave a message on this blog so that I can find that story just to prove to myself that I wasn’t going crazy.

Hope you enjoyed the story my friends … oh, and you NSA guys too. Good night.

David Green

11 June 2013

P.S. - O.K. a quick scan with my search engine showed that;

 1) Fla., according to one source, has the most sightings of any state in the union.

2) There are and have been dozens of sightings over the years around Central Fla.

3) You can see several videos on YouTube taken from this area.

4) I still cannot find a report of the sighting that I witnessed even though there were dozens, if not hundreds of witnesses that night…very strange…or, maybe I was crazy.