Submitted by Cynthia Butler
I’m a baby boomer, raised during the 1950s when horror and science fiction reigned supreme at the Saturday movie matinee. Never at any time did I believe that flying saucers, or UFOs as they came to be called, existed in the realm of reality. They were simply good Entertainment: a step above cartoons. In the late 1960s we watched Star Trek and Project Blue Book on television. It was watching Project Blue Book that first made me aware that people believed UFOs were factual, that people believed they were visiting earth from other worlds. It was also watching Project Blue Book that taught me what people took for
UFOs were usually natural phenomena such as the planet Venus when it is very close and low in the sky. I understood everything that was said and firmly believed the government was correct. UFOs as reality were nonsense.
In February 1974 my husband, infant son, and I were driving home from a friend’s house after an evening of cards. While standing in the kitchen pulling my coat on I looked at the clock. It was precisely 1:00 a.m. I was amazed. My husband is a very early riser and usually hits the sack by 9:30 every night. Our friends live in south Renton, Washington, which was a twenty-minute drive to our home in Covington. My husband was driving, our son was sleeping in his car bed in the back seat, and I was leaning against the passenger door window looking up at the sky. It was a very cold crisp clear night. The stars were incredibly bright and clear. When we’d been driving about ten minutes we drove past an old farmhouse that had a line of trees as a windbreak along their driveway.
When we got past the line of trees, there, just hovering about ten feet off the ground next to the farmhouse, was a UFO. It was about 30 feet long, metallic gray; there was a line or seam its full length half way up with airliner-like windows in a row down its length above this line. There were no running lights at all. From the side it was completely dark.
I was a bit frightened when it started following us. It wasn’t following actually; it paced us and kept up our exact speed. As we drove along it came closer to the car until the only way I could see it was to lean into the window looking up. It was about 30 feet above us and I could see that it was cigar shaped. Its surface was dull and nonreflective; there were no lights or light fixtures that I could see.
Feeling very knowledgeable after watching Project Blue Book I went down a checklist of things to make sure I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing. I had my husband turn off the interior and exterior lights to see if it was a reflection on the glass. It wasn’t. I turned off the radio and rolled down the window to find it made virtually no sound at all. By this time I was really getting nervous so I was relieved when we stopped at the next stop sign and it kept going and went up over the hill where I could see it cross over the road at tree top height.
A few minutes later as we were coming up to the next stop sign I saw it coming down the hill towards us. Again it was about ten feet off the ground and was moving quite slowly. I could have walked and kept up with it. At the front was a windscreen that covered the entire upper half of the vehicle. Behind the windscreen was a dark, humanoid figure standing there as if at the controls, backlit by fluorescent green light. I completely lost what little hold I had on my control at that point and yelled at my husband to get us out of there. I was hysterical. We made the left hand turn with tires screaming and traveled about 50 yards up the hill and then my memory ends.