by Jim Harold
On the evening in question, we were finishing the walk, coming down the end of my street back to the house, and all of a sudden my dog starts looking at the house across the street from ours. It had a heavily wooded lot with trees and very tall grass. The lawn wasn’t cared for very well.
Paxie started to really growl very aggressively. At that point, I’d had her for about three or four years, and I had never heard her growl. She was almost to where she started to bark and jump towards the area that she was looking at. She was a Brittany Spaniel; they’re hunting dogs, so they kind of point when they want you to look at something.
At first, I said, “Come on, come on, Paxie, let’s go. We’re almost done.” I didn’t look at what she was seeing. I tried to tug her a little bit, and she started to growl even heavier. She started to bark really loudly too. So, I finally looked at the woods to see what she was growling at, what had her so upset. Initially, I didn’t see anything, but then I saw it. It may have been maybe six or seven feet in the air, this pair of bright red eyes just staring at the two of us.
I stopped in my tracks for a good couple of seconds. I was staring, and wondering, “Are those eyes? What am I looking at?” As Paxie started to bark and growl more, the eyes became darker in color. It seemed to be a response to my dog’s aggressiveness. Well, I booked it. I pretty much had to drag Paxie the couple feet into my house. I opened the garage door, ran into the house, and into my bedroom. I had all the lights off and was looking out the window to see if anything had followed me. If there was, I saw nothing.
I kept checking throughout the whole night. I would look out the window and see nothing. I have no idea what I saw, but it was so creepy. I’m 28 years old now, and I still remember it like it was yesterday.
The Weird New Jersey guys put a book out about all the things that they had discovered throughout the state, and my sister brought it home from the library. I was looking through it, and they wrote about something called “The Big Red Eyes”. Apparently, in New Jersey, there have been a lot of other people who have experienced a set of red eyes just staring at them from a wooded area. Whatever is responsible is about six or seven feet tall, and mostly up in Sussex County. I grew up in Ocean, which was closer to the Shore, so I didn’t know if anyone in my area had experienced anything like this.
I really don’t know what it was. I listen to a lot of Bigfoot stuff, and people say Bigfoot has red eyes, but I really don’t see how it could’ve been a Bigfoot. The area I grew up in is highly populated. You can’t have a large animal like that just disappear and have nobody see it.
To this day, I have absolutely no idea what I saw. When I think of it, I still get chills running down my back. There were these two eyes just staring at us. The thing that really made me so on edge was how my dog was reacting. She would cower away from a mouse, but she was ready to go at it with whatever this was. It was very, very creepy.
I do wonder if I’ll ever run into it again. I have to be honest. I currently live in the northern part of the state now, and even now when I go to bed, I turn off all the lights in the yard, and I look outside. I look for a pair of red eyes staring at me. I still look for them, because it’s just like I want to see them again, but I don’t want to see them again, you know?
-Luke, New Jersey
PART FIVE: THEY COME FROM THE SKY
56. Castle in the Sky
This is a short story, but one that was very memorable. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody else mention anything like it. This was about 30 years ago and I was with my family at Daytona Beach on vacation. My dad, brother and I were walking on the beach, no big deal. It was late afternoon. We just had arrived at the place we were staying and we were looking around. There were all kinds of clouds out over the ocean and we were talking about how pretty they were. Well, I looked up and one of these clouds looked like a castle and I don’t mean like, “Oh, that one looks like a bunny.” It looked like a real castle made of clouds!
I could see every brick, I could see the chains on the drawbridge, I could see the shape of the windows. It was amazing. I didn’t know what I was seeing. The thing of it was, my brother asked, “Do you see that?” I said, “Heck yeah, I see that. What is it?” We stood there and looked at it for a long time, and my dad didn’t really act like he saw it. My brother and I just stood there with our mouths hanging open for a little while. Then, we just kind of went on about our business.
I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. He remembers it too. It was beautiful, and I don’t know what it was that we were seeing, or why we may have been seeing it, but it was definitely different. I wonder if anybody else has ever experienced anything like that.
-Lisa, Indiana
57. Out of Body, Out of this World?
I was about 16 years old. One night, I was summoned out of my body by a sound. I would say that the sound was more like a low energy hum, maybe more like a feeling of a sound rather than the hearing of it. It was like the feeling that you get when you’re close to a power plant, energy that’s in the ground and in the air. So I got up, and I distinctly remember looking at myself sleeping. I was outside of my body, yet able to see it.
I stepped through the wall out onto a second story porch. I looked back across the roofline of the house to a light that was the origin of the sound and I felt, not heard, a message that I interpreted as, “Come” or, “We have something for you.” Then, I felt this tugging and pulling at my chest, like my energy body. I didn’t trust this light, so I thought, “Show yourself. Who are you?” or “What do you want?” I started screaming or saying in my head, “No, no, no.” I’ve been told I can be headstrong. So, I was put back into my physical body, the pulling stopped and the experience ended. This is as clear to me today as it was the night it happened and this was quite a while ago.
When I tell this story, a lot of people ask if it was a UFO, and if it was an attempted astral abduction? If they abduct you in your astral state, while you’re sleeping, rather than in our physical state…well, let’s just say I hope it wasn’t the light.
-D, Wisconsin
58. Big and Silent
This happened back in ’99. I was in high school in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is about 15 minutes outside D.C. I was driving my best friend back to her house. The road that we were on is heavily wooded. We were driving and all of a sudden she said very loudly, “Oh my God, look at that!” She pointed up, and almost directly above us, was this giant triangular-shaped UFO.
When I say it was above us, I mean that I had to bend over my steering wheel and look up to see it. It was moving very slowly and cruising around. Being crazy teenagers, we said, “Okay, let’s follow it.” So, we turned down a side street and we’re cruising at about 15 miles an hour, watching this thing. The triangle was three equal sides, but one of the sides was slightly bowed, just a little bit curved. The curved side was glowing just a little bit.
When I look at other UFO sightings that have been reported, they’re always the three-sided triangles, but they have the three dots. This wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t following us, we were more following it, because it was just slightly in front of us. We did that for a good two minutes, at about 15 miles an hour. It was just right above the tree line. We ended up losing it because the tree growth is so thick there, and it just went to an area where our car couldn’t follow. No roads went in that direction.
If I were to compare it in size, it would be about one-half to two lengths of a 727 airplane.
It was completely silent. That’s the crazy thing. The place where I live at right now is in Nevada and we’re very close to an airfield, so you can tell when a plane is flying nearby. The TV gets a little fuzzy, you hear a little bit of rumbling. We were so close to this, that if it were an actual plane, we would’ve heard it. It was just kind of lazily floating along.
I looked all over to see if there were any reports after this happened. I looked on the Internet and watched the news. No one reported anything.
We told my friend’s father, who actually works for the military. He said just to hush up about it, and not to say anything.
-Marissa, Nevada
59. The Giant Eagle
This was during the early 1990’s. I was about 30 years old and was visiting New Mexico. I had friends there at that time. As an aside, my parents had worked on and met during the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico so visiting there was like a pilgrimage in many ways. I could tell you all kinds of interesting stories from my parents, not paranormal necessarily, but about that time in history from their point of view. It’s pretty fascinating.
I flew to Denver, rented a car and headed south towards Albuquerque. The drive down to New Mexico from Denver is just an amazing drive. I’d never been in that part of the country before. The skies were huge. At one point, south past Colorado Springs, I could see about 30 miles in front of me and 30 miles behind me on the highway, and there was nobody else on the road. I was about as isolated as I had ever been, or at least it felt that way.
When you cross from Colorado into New Mexico on that highway you travel through Raton Pass. You go up this east/west offshoot of the mountains, and then you come down into New Mexico. At the crest, there’s a sign, “Welcome to New Mexico.” I came down around the bend, and then I could see there was this huge vista of northern New Mexico. What really got me was that I saw something in the sky, and the first thought that came into my mind was, “Huh, I wonder how they did that.”
It was a cloud formation, but it wasn’t just “oh, that cloud looks like an eagle.” It was a giant 10-mile-wide eagle made of clouds. Sometimes you can look at clouds and kind of say, “Okay, I can see this in the cloud, I can see that.” But this was detailed. It was as though somebody sculpted an eagle out of clouds.
I can tell you it was miles wide, and again, I can’t emphasize this enough, I just kept looking at it and saying, “I don’t understand how ‘they’ did that.” Then I realized that there is no “they.” There was just a huge eagle, I started to laugh, because it was absurd. I thought, “That’s impossible. What I’m looking at is impossible.” It was there. Of course, back then, I didn’t have a cell phone camera, or I would’ve taken a million pictures of it, because it was there for about 15 or 20 minutes. To this day, when I think about it, it still makes my head feel funny, because it was so disorienting when I saw it. It was as if somebody sculpted it and put it in the sky.
-Jim, New York
60. UFO over Manhattan
I’m an artist and a designer. In the summer of 2003, I was working in an art and design studio on the corner of 27th and Fifth Avenue in New York City. There were about six of us designers who worked in our office, and the way it was set up is that our window faced north. We were on the 12th floor, and everything across the street from us was lower than we were, so we could see the Empire State Building, perfect view of it, all day long. Great big windows.
All of the designers were sort of at one big long table, and we’re all facing in, just working away on our computers, with our iPods on. One of the designers had her desk situated differently from everybody else, and so she faced the window.
It was about 4 or 5 pm on a Friday. All of a sudden, the designer with the desk pointing out to the window just started screaming, “Oh my God, oh my God, a UFO, you guys! A UFO!” We were all so busy working, so everybody was sort of dumbfounded. The six of us looked up and asked, “What are you screaming about?” She jumped up and pointed frantically at the window and said, “Look, look! Run outside, there’s a UFO!”
We all got up and went to the window and we looked out towards the Empire State Building. I’d say this UFO was about halfway up the building, just to what would’ve been my left –– so it would’ve been floating right above the upper west side of Manhattan, the Central Park area, perhaps. It was big and bright red and sort of like a kidney bean shape. It was just about halfway up. It was a little overcast, so it wasn’t like there were distinct clouds. It was that kind of overcast cloud cover, so that the sky looks kind of white, but it’s very thin cloud cover. Anyway, it was sort of odd to just see this very bright, big red lozenge thing.
We’re all staring at it and we’re thinking, “That’s not a UFO.” Then we discussed, “Well, what is it?” Someone said, “Well, it’s obviously not a balloon, because there isn’t any visible means of any way that anybody could transport it.” It wasn’t like there was a basket or anything underneath it. It wasn’t a blimp because of the odd shape of it. So we’re all just standing there. One of us said, “Well, it kind of looks like a parasail,” but obviously nobody’s parasailing over New York City, to the west of the Empire State Building. None of us could figure out what it was that we were looking at.
A coworker ran to grab a digital camera, and while she was away, I realized that there was another identical shape just above it, but transparent. I said, “Look, look, there’s two of them!” It was like a mirror image exactly above it, maybe 20 or 30 feet. The same exact color, size and shape but transparent. You could just barely see it. My coworker came back with her digital camera, and she started snapping pictures. It was very interesting, because we all looked at the pictures she was snapping, and while we were all clearly seeing something that was bright red with the naked eye, the image on the digital camera was fuzzy and gray. It didn’t look at all like what we were seeing with our own eyes.
It was really strange. We’ve all seen blimps; we knew it wasn’t a blimp. So we’re all staring at it and trying to figure out what it is, and nobody can think of what it is, so we all pretty much decide, “Well, it’s an unidentified flying object, because it’s up there and none of us can identify it.” Then, the transparent one just disappeared completely, and then all of a sudden, the bright red one was gone too. It didn’t move up; it didn’t move down; it didn’t move from side to side. There was no movement. It had been completely stationary in the sky, and then all of a sudden it was just gone.
I looked for other reports, because I was just so mystified by what we had seen. We were all puzzled. It was up there for about I’d say 10 or 15 minutes but I never heard any other reports. I never heard anybody else comment on it. I’ve done web searches, Googled “UFO over Manhattan” for that time frame and there is nothing.
While this was happening in NYC, one of my coworkers was on vacation out on the West Coast in Seattle or Portland, something city like that. She came back the next week, and I said, “Oh, you missed it. You’ll never believe what happened. We all saw a UFO.” She said, “Oh, don’t tell me – it was bright red.” I said, “Yeah, how did you know?” It turns out there were reports of bright red UFOs in the city that she was visiting. I can’t remember if it was Seattle or Portland, but she said that it actually came out in their newspaper. At the same time that we were seeing the red UFO in Manhattan, people were seeing red UFOs over in that city in the Northwest.
I hope somebody else saw it, because it was a very strange thing for us to experience, and yet to be the only ones in Manhattan to see it…bizarre.
-Loretta, New York
61. Retro UFO
After I began listening to the Campfire podcast, I started talking to my family about the paranormal and UFOs. My mother told me this story that my grandfather and great-grandfather had experienced way back in 1939 or 1940.
One night on the old family farm in Pike County, Illinois, they were both riding in a single horse-drawn carriage, going down a dirt road. Suddenly, it looked as though there were two car headlights coming at them, but they were, as my grandfather explained, like fireballs or orbs of light. They came down the road right at them, almost collided, and then one broke left and one broke right. They took off over the carriage and over the hills. They made no noise.
My grandfather was a real salt-of-the-earth kind of guy -- an outdoorsman. He’d go out into the woods and hunt and kill snakes. He wouldn’t really have any reason to make anything like this up. From what they told me, these things came so close to them th
at they actually were brushed back in the carriage. There was definitely something there.
-Rich, New Jersey
62. Knock Three Times
My story occurred the year I graduated high school. We lived out in the country in rural Oklahoma. We were country kids. We were used to hearing all sorts of things outside at night, owls, the wind and birds and whatever. My bedroom was in the corner of our house, and during this one peculiar summer there were a series of knocks on my window that occurred on multiple nights. This happened quite a few times and built up to one really strange evening when everything culminated.
The first time I heard it was after I went to bed one night. I’d had my closet light on so I could read. After I was done with the book, I got up, turned my light off, and laid back down in bed to go to sleep. When I did, I heard knocking. It was a series of three knocks, repeated three times. I basically convinced myself that it was nothing, it was my overactive imagination from being exposed to a lot of scary stories.
I heard it again a couple of nights later. I decided at that point to look out the window. There was nothing there, absolutely nothing. By the third time it happened, I was starting to get a little concerned, I thought, “Hmm, what the heck is this?” That summer my sister and I were actually switching bedrooms. I was going off to college and she was going to have that corner bedroom. I had not told anyone about what I’d heard.
It ratcheted up a notch when my sister Shelley and I were going to bed another evening; I was in the middle bedroom and she was in that corner bedroom. Mom, Dad and our little brother were asleep. She and I were just talking back and forth. Then Shelley asked, “Shanna, did you just knock on the wall?” I, of course, said no. She said, “Then something’s knocking on my window.”