What The Hell Is That Thing?

Remember that Steve Martin skit on SNL? The ‘what the hell is that thing’ skit? Fucking hilarious.

Anyway, I had one of those moments last Saturday morning.

I sat on my deck drinking coffee around 7:00 AM. The heat felt manageable and the sun shined through the trees. Which is amazing, because I think Ohio lost it’s sense of self this summer. I think Ohio thinks it’s really the Pacific Northwest. Pretty sure Bella and Edward are going to be moving into my neighborhood soon.

Oh, don’t get your panties in a bunch over the Twilight reference. 

Anyway, I leaned back in my chair and way up in the sky I spied a small white contrail. Except the contrail wasn’t moving, so it wasn’t a plane. There were no other clouds in the sky and I thought what an odd shape the teeny little cloud had.

Then I noticed a light undulated left to right over the shape. This is where I said out loud “What the hell is that thing?”

I am getting old and don’t always trust my sight, so I watched the movement for a while. The contrail hovered with it’s white light moving back and forth.

I ran in the house and got Randy out of bed, which is another amazing thing that happened on Saturday. I can count on one hand the number of times I have gotten up before Randy in the twenty years we’ve been together.

I told Randy to come outside and ran back down the steps. This is when I said “I hope it’s not gone. What the hell is that thing?”

I opened the door to go out on the deck and looked up. My perspective changed.

Standing in the door way, I could clearly see a spider web suspended between two dead branches at the top of a big tree.  The sun reflected on the web as it shifted back and forth in the mild breeze.

I should find a way to get in touch with Steve Martin, because now I know what the hell that thing is and I bet he never found out.

I did, however, legitimately see something odd in the night sky once.

In 1999, Randy and I lived in Independence, Kentucky. Zach had a chipmunk voice and Joey still wore diapers.

We lived in a condo that sat in front of some woods.

Our living room, at the back of the condo, had a huge picture window looking out at the trees.

We were sitting in the living room and I looked out the window when I saw lights.

I spent a good second trying to reconcile what I was seeing through the trees.

There was an orange light, then a pause. Another orange light. A pause. Then, another one. The three orange lights were followed by a green light. At least 5 – 6 seconds passed as I watched these lights. Whatever the lights were, they were attached to something enormous.

About halfway through, I said something. More than likely, I said “What the hell is that thing?”

Zach and Randy saw the tail. Just the green light. The green light could have been anything.

Well, maybe not anything. It couldn’t have been a meatball sub or Donald Trump’s hair. The green light could have been a helicopter, though. Or maybe a Macy’s Thanksgiving day parade balloon of Kermit the frog gone awry.

Zach and Randy teased me the rest of the evening about the UFO I saw. Assholes.

I forgot about the lights until the next morning. I had to work the following morning. I drove to my client’s site and listened to the news. The radio news guy said that bright lights had been reported over five states the night before. Then he said it was being explained as space junk entering our atmosphere. Whatevs. I know what I saw.

I fucking knew it.

I got to work and when I saw the IT director, I said “Bob! You are never going to believe what I saw last night.”

Which was a strange thing to say because his name was Dan. 

He said, “I saw it too.”

He told me that a friend on the West side of Cincinnati called him and told him he just saw something in the sky that was the size of a football field. Dan, who lived on the East side of Cincinnati, went outside and saw what I did. A series of lights.

I have recently figured that sighting out as well.

Since I heard the news about that Kepler planet, I decided what I saw was some sort of intergalactic tour bus.

The tour guide probably said something like “Ahhh….hello…this is your captain speaking. If you look out the left side of the tour bus, you will see a strange, blue planet. From what we can tell, the planet is stunning. Don’t bother getting your passes out, we won’t be stopping. Lunch will be served on board. We don’t get too close to the Earth because the inhabitants bite.” 

Only the tour guide probably said it whatever language Kepleronians speak.

I am pretty sure we are the Lion Country Safari of the universe.

Okay, so hit me. Some of y’all have some UFO stories to tell me. I’m not the only freak, right? Right?

 

 

 

49 Thoughts.

  1. I’m still reeling from “contrail” …. Contrail…. Really?…
    How does a word like ‘ contrail’ come to be in one’s everyday parlance?

  2. I’m always on the wrong side of the tour bus so I would have missed seeing the blue planet – hopefully lunch was good tho’
    We rarely have contrails in Australia so I had to google it to make sure it was what I thought it was. Life is weird and I’m sorry it wasn’t aliens – it would have made for a massive blog post if you were typing it from the mother ship! ~ Leanne

  3. Apparently, there is a whole community of “contrail conspiracy theorists” who believe that foreign (or in some cases, our own) governments are dropping aluminum shavings and other chemicals from planes, which result in those very long lasting contrails. Supposedly, these governments either want to cause global warming or it’s a side effect (I can’t remember exactly) — but they claim that the aluminum is causing deforestation and killing fish, etc. That has nothing to do with UFO’s — but apparently wonky contrails are a “thing”.

    Alas, I have no UFO story to tell. I dreamed about being abducted by friendly aliens as a child (I’ve got a whole post about that), but they either wisely avoided me and my mercurial moods or they just never flew through Mormon territory.

  4. sadly, I;v never been lucky enough to see any UFOs…but HAVE seen my share of ghosts—does that count? My favorite line is the one about Lion Country Safari. I can totally relate to this since I live only an hour’s drive from one. 🙂

  5. As a kid I was obsessed with UFOs, but have never, in my entire life, seen one. I was obsessed after seeing the movie “Close Encounters”, which I’m pretty sure I saw around the time I saw that SNL skit, which I don’t want to say was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen in my life because I hadn’t been alive that long at that point. But it’s still hilarious even though saying “hell” isn’t as risque as it seemed at the time.

    I’m convinced aliens regularly visit Earth but they’re jerks. Now I want to go and re-watch the “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space'” episode of The X-Files. ROSWELL! ROSWELL!

  6. Holy crap, my husband and I used to own a house with five acres right next to Lion Country Safari! No WONDER we had the weirdest experiences up there (not UFO related, totally PEOPLE related, which is even weirder!) and decided to return South to the “big city”! Haha! My husband’s late brother once saw unexplained lights in the sky over New Jersey back in the late 60s/early 70s. I myself have only had one encounter with that phenomenon—as a child, my friends and I saw turquoise streaks of light in the early evening summer sky. Many people were calling TV and radio stations, frightened and hysterical. I believe they explained it away as “a failed missile test launch” at Cape Canaveral, although the lights appeared in the Western sky and you’d think it would show up in the East, seeing as how that’s the coast we AND Cape Canaveral were on. Strange situations and even stranger explanations—just how many weather balloons DO people still use these days? Haha!

    Oh, and I’ve also had close encounters of the Michelle kind, too! The spider web in the tree had me laughing out loud! Was Randy laughing good-naturedly after you woke him up to come see a spider web contrail? 😀

  7. I wish. I would love to have a UFO sighting.
    Last night while doing yoga on the grass I saw a weird looking plane that looked like something I used to make out of paper (and it wouldn’t fly), but I am guessing it was just wishful thinking.
    Of course I always think spiders are a UFO and the FREAK ME OUT!

  8. I have one, and I have witnesses too. In 2012 I was working as part of a team for a Gordon Ramsey Hotel Hell tv show being filmed in our town, and since us worker bees weren’t allowed in the building, even thought it was FEBRUARY and freezing, I was standing outside with two other wedding vendors, waiting to go in and cleanup.

    We were chatting and staring at the night sky when we all sort of focused on the fact that there were two fairly large white lights very low in the sky above us. It was rainy, so they were below the clouds. They looked like the white light you’d see on a plane or helicopter I guess, so we didn’t think much of them, until we realized they were NOT MOVING. They just hovered there for the whole time.

    We started to actually watch then, and we were all kind of nervously laughing about it, because they didn’t move or leave, but then we got the signal that the film crew was done inside, so we went back in and started tearing down the TV wedding we’d set up. It was hectic, so I think we all just forgot about it, but at the time it was definitely something weird.

    You’re not alone.

    Or maybe …WE’re not? Lol

  9. Just goes to show that spiders are evil. I saw some lights in the sky in Trinity County (read that: the boonies) in the late ’70s that I never satisfied myself by way of identification. I don’t (and didn’t at the time) think that they were space aliens, though. I really like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s answer to the “do you believe in UFOs” question.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSJElZwEI8o

  10. Absolutely adore Steve Martin. Thank you for reminding me of this delight. My mom saw a “what the hell is that?” thing when she was about 12. It was during the night and she was with her dad. A fellow given to believing in all things unidentifiable, he pronounced it a UFO. Perhaps from Kepler …

  11. About ten years ago I started having “what the hell is that?” moments while driving at night. And it always turns out to be something perfectly normal, which just makes me sad! Ok, first relieved, then sad. Because I used to love driving at night. And now I’m just old and my vision is fucked. Sigh. One can only hope to see a spaceship. Maybe I’ll hang a little one from the rear-view mirror.

  12. I have no UFO stories, not even from my days as an impressionable young lass watching the X-Files as it came out 🙁 I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or relieved, frankly.

  13. Me! Me! *raises hand frantically* I saw a UFO once. I was with a friend who also saw it and later we talked to people who saw it from 60 miles away. I’ve always wanted to write about it but the story involves me smoking a joint while driving up a mountain and I’m scared my kids might read it and think that it’s ok to smoke and drive. Or smoke. Or drive up a mountain late at night with a friend… and no, the pot had nothing to do with what we saw. It wasn’t even good pot.

  14. I enjoyed the read, but I’m still left wondering – how did Randy react to your excited introduction to the spider? : )

  15. Darn. No UFO’s spotted in Connecticut that I know of. Then again, we can’t completely perceive what’s around us. We could be little specks to some huge beings out there, like when we look at ants. I guess anything’s possible.

  16. I’m SO glad some people asked about Randy’s reaction. That was my first thought, too, because my husband calls me out on the deck ALL the time to look at something amazing (in his eyes).

    I LOVE reading about UFOs for some reason.

    My brother in WA state did some landscaping for an older guy friend who worked at NASA when the boys landed on the moon. I once had the opportunity to ask him (as I was standing outside talking to him and looking at the stars) if he (as an ex-NASA engineer/scientist [or whatever you call them] believed in aliens or beings out there, and he said “I don’t see why not”). That was good enough for me! 🙂

    • When I made my way outside, I noticed Michelle’s excitement had deflated. She told me what she had seen and, of course, I gave her the obligatory eye roll. With that being said, I spent my first 35 years not noticing much of anything. Since meeting Michelle, I’m amazed at the things we’ve seen together.

    • When I made my way outside, I noticed Michelle’s excitement had deflated. She told me what she had seen and, of course, I gave her the obligatory head shake & eye roll. With that being said, I spent my first 35 years not noticing much of anything. Since meeting Michelle, I’m amazed at the things we’ve seen together.

  17. I have never seen any UFO’s, but I have seen enough weird things around my neighborhood to make me think that ghost might be real. I used to jog in Cheeseman park every morning for years. There was a few times I would swear I would jog along the path, see someone standing 50 feet in front of me, blink, and they would be gone. Here a link about some of the history on chesseman. It’s a park now but it used to be the old Denver cemetery. http://www.legendsofamerica.com/co-cheesmanpark.html

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