The Switch Pitcher

by W. Leon Smith

  “You are driving down the road,” he began, tell me what you observe.”

  I mentioned the strange farm equipment in the distance and at one point blurted, “Turning a curve, trying to look at it. Now lost sight of it, dang trees in the way” when the view was temporarily blocked. This was followed by “I can see it now.” At one point I commented about meeting a car as we approached and then said, “It is getting bigger. I’ve never seen anything like that before, weird.” (at the 28:52 mark)

  “There’s a three-quarter dimension to it,” I said. “Let me get closer to it.” At the 31:11 mark I said “It’s gray, almost silver, a really dark silver. It goes to a sharp point on each side about like a football but not as much diameter in the middle. It is hovering in a field, probably 250 yards from us across the highway. It is kind of like a big cylinder, cigarish. It has a shadow across the bottom of it and along the top, maybe reflection from the sun. There’s a little bit of markings along the bottom, a little ways up. Symbols maybe. They are kind of like windows, but too thin to be windows, not all the way to the bottom, portals maybe.”

  At the 33:24 time mark I was asked to count the windows, which I completed at 33:52, saying aloud each number as I saw them. “Looks like maybe 20,” I finally said. “In a way this looks something like a jet liner, but with no wings or tail.”

  I continued, “It is eight o’clock or 9 o’clock as far as height goes.”

  “Sense anything different or weird?” asked the officer.

  “I need to turn around,” I said. “All’s clear, I’m turning around. Wish I had a 35mm camera so I could have it up here with us.” A few seconds later, “I’m getting out of the car. Crap.” I looked to my friend. “What was it? Look for it!” at which time our heads were craned toward the sky. “Man, it’s gone. Hey, I want a picture.” We found it zooming away toward the north, at extreme speed. I opened the back door to the car and pulled out my camera, then quickly checked my settings and aimed at what was left of the object, just a speck in the faraway sky. I snapped a picture knowing I was too far away and feeling handicapped because I did not have a zoom lens. The clock is now at 41:19.

  The officer suggested that if I liked, I could now draw a picture of the object. I could open my eyes and pull my chair up closer to the desk, upon which had been placed a piece of paper and a pencil. I was told to visualize the object again, and make a sketch of it. At the 48:10 mark I had finally completed the sketch, after which I was told to close my eyes again and quietly replay the entire experience with the UFO, raising my left index finger when I was done. The finger went up at 54:11, after which the officer began a one to five countdown to wake me up.

  “How’d I do?” I asked, straining my eyes.

  “Did great. You remembered a lot of details. You might have a hypnosis hangover a few minutes, which is natural.”

  “I feel pretty good, but yeah, I might have a little hangover. I’m trying to get my bearings again.” I reached over and took the telephone lines off hold after I heard a beep. “You know, I don’t remember hearing the beeps when I was under. They vanished at some point.”

  “It comes while you are relaxing and concentrating on the subject at hand. It’s called model idealism.”

  He continued, “I was really struck when you described the small symbols and as you got closer changed it to windows or portals, as though you were really there, trying to figure out what they were. You made several comments throughout that made me believe you were really seeing something. Do you remember doing the sketch?”

  “Vaguely,” said I.

  He had it in his hand and offered it to me. “Here, count the windows,” he said.

  I studied the drawing a second or two and the started to count. “I count nineteen,” I said.

  “When you counted them earlier, prior to the sketching period, you said, ‘Maybe twenty,’ and when you actually put these on paper you did so left to right, very quickly, without measuring in advance.”

  “What was interesting to me,” he continued, “is that you took a very long time thinking about what you were going to draw. You had a frustrated look on your face, as though you could not determine where to begin, this object perhaps being so big and all. Your actual sketching time was about a minute, very fast. Then you stopped and closed your eyes again for several seconds and then went back to the drawing and added that one tiny line in the lower left corner, maybe an antenna or something. To me, that was significant. I didn’t detect any conflagurations. Your emotions fit what you were seeing.”

  The “under” session lasted 57 minutes and 11 seconds. The officer asked how long I thought it took and I responded, “about fifteen minutes.”

  He said that most people he has hypnotized respond similarly. The concept of time tends to go away during the session.

  This report on the true story of the UFO encounter is being written about six years after my session with the hypnotist, so the sighting occurred over 40 years ago now. I think of it occasionally. I try to replay it in my mind in the event I notice something new, which I haven’t.

  As a “why” person I wonder what it was doing there. Speculation is a mile long with possibilities, from drawing nearby pond water to fill the UFO’s radiator to using the body of water as a sewage dump, to going for a quick swim. Or the Martians could have broken their Garmin and gotten lost. “Recalculating.”

  Based on the hypnosis session, we apparently were not secretly abducted by little green men and forced to graze on a bowl of Martian spinach while they checked us out, to us disavowing knowledge of it. I guess we scared them off. Perhaps they did not want to tussle with two alien college students in a powerful and intimidating GTO race car that had turned in their direction like a bull seeing red, so they ran through the air as fast as their legs would carry them to escape.

  Rod & Reel Snapshots

  Everyone knows that when you go fishing, you fish for fish. Some of us fish for adventure as well, even if the results are merely the “little surprises” that are memorable.

  When I was a toddler, my first rod and reel was actually a cane pole with green string that was tossed out of a rowboat. My father would push the oars to the perfect location in a farmer’s water tank and we would fish. Usually, his main objective was to reel in a “yellow cat,” which is a type of catfish, but any kind of fish would do, from perch to bass and everything in-between.

  It was on one of these early excursions that I learned to bait my hook. I had observed my father baiting my hook many times already and had come to depend on him always doing it. However, I had recently begun catching a few fish so my first lesson was at hand.

  He demonstrated. “Hold the hook in your right hand and hold the worm, like this, in your left, then…”

  I turned away, concerned about what the poor earthworms must be going through.

  He put my mind at ease. “Oh, they love it,” he said. “They think it feels good to be put on a hook.” He nudged the worm into the proper position.

  “See, he’s wiggling with joy. He wants to help us catch some fish.”

  Soon I graduated to my own rod and reel. It felt in my hand like an extension of my arm as my fish count went up.

  Often, we would put out trotlines on the Leon River, again by rowboat and usually accompanied by another father-son team. The lines would go in just before dark and be run very early the next morning, since the parents had jobs and a certain time to be at work.

  We usually caught catfish – yellow cat and channel cat mainly. However, on one excursion we caught a rather large snapping turtle. He was pulled into the boat right next to my feet. The rest of the trip was spent with me dodging his snout as he kept trying to snap at my toes.

  A few years ago, my younger brother and I decided to take his canoe down a six-mile stretch of river in Central Texas and try to catch a few sand bass along the way. The idea was to launch from the old iron bridge near a bluff and follow the river flow eventually to a where we were going to camp over
night.

  A greenhorn to the thrill of riding in a canoe, I was a little concerned about its lack of width and my personal abundance of width prior to the trip.

  I was told, of course, not to worry.

  Upon arrival at the bridge and primed to start the expedition, we unloaded the fiberglass canoe, which looked as though it had been through a war zone. My brother explained that I shouldn’t worry, even though there was about as much patch as there was canoe. It wasn’t until we cast off that I noticed two empty coffee cans inside.

  I was told that there might be some rough places on the river and water might come in over the top, but not to worry. As we floated in the watery cauldron amongst bobbing branches and jumping fish, the floor of the canoe quite often prompted use of the tin cans.

  It’s funny when you wear waterproof shoes that water is able to flow in but it does not leak out. Strange! I guess it’s like water leaking into a canoe and not leaking back out.

  We made good use of the cans and the trip proceeded without disaster, but one noteworthy “surprise” surfaced. Not only did the jig-and-minnow combo provide a good catch of sand bass, a few tosses of an old-fashioned black spotted yellow Shyster with a spoon caught us a few small black bass big enough to keep for supper. The biggest surprise, however, was catching a couple of channel cat on Rapala lures. Who would have guessed!

  It reminded me of my first positive experience with plastic worms. I had tried them on occasion but no strikes. I knew I was doing something wrong and had convinced myself that no true bass would go for a slice of plastic over the real thing. In fact, a glob of plastic worms and plastic lizards had melted into a heap in a corner of my tackle box and had become dust magnets.

  My grandfather was an avid fisherman. That day, he and I were fishing on the shore of a very large tank on a farm that boasted of big sun-perch and numerous schools of largemouth bass. I wasn’t having much luck with my earthworms and complained loudly when my last one got robbed by a sneaky perch.

  “I guess that does it for me,” I told my grandfather. “All I have left are these plastic worms that won’t catch anything.” I pointed to the mass of melted remnants that had found sanctuary in my tackle-box.

  He seemed surprised that I had not been using them.

  “Let me show you how to do it,” he said. He then proceeded to show me how to rig one of the un-melted black worms onto the hook, how to play it in the water, and explained the feel of multiple strikes that might occur – the little staccato tug -- and when to set the hook.

  From then on, I frequented that tank with black plastic worms. Caught some nice bass!

  My grandfather was always full of surprises when it came to fishing. It was in his blood to make every adventure uniquely interesting.

  Once, when he, my father, and I worked at drilling water wells and cleaning them out, we were driving from the rig to the gate of a ranch way out in the boondocks, having finished laboring for the day. At the gate, my grandfather would get into his car that had been left there and then proceed west while my father and I would go east, both parties arriving again the next morning for another laborious day. On the way to the gate, we spotted a small stock tank glistening in the sunset. My grandfather said as he squinted out the window, “I’ll bet there’s some fish in that tank.”

  I said something about it being a pretty small tank and registered some doubts. Nonetheless, he said that before we finish the job in a couple of days and head out to another location on our list, we needed to give the tank a try. He would make it a point to pack his fishing gear.

  Next day, while conducting my job of retrieving water with a bucket from the main water barrel to dump down the well hole in advance of the cable-tool bit moving up and down on the Fort Worth Spudder water well rig, I was surprised when a gigantic black bass jumped out of the barrel toward my face. He lofted himself about two feet above the top of the barrel before splashing as he returned to the confines of the container. He had to be a three-pounder!

  “Got here early and thought I’d do a little fishing,” my grandfather said, with a laugh. “I was right. There are fish in that tank!”

  Another time, my grandfather and I had just anchored a wide yellow-and-white Deckboat amid some trees at a cove on large glossy blue lake. We were catching some gar and a few sand bass. It was a hot day, so we meandered the boat toward a tree jutting out from some cliffs on the east shore. Shade at last.

  The air was very still and few waves were hitting the side of the boat, but below us among the cliff formations were fish. You could see them at times and I was attempting to put my bait in their path. The downside, however, was that in the nearby tree that was scraping against the boat we had conjured up the interest of some yellow-jackets, wasps whose stings are very painful. I had begun waving my arms to keep one of the rovers away from me and he took off toward my grandfather on the other side of the boat.

  The wasp landed on the thick edge of the boat beside my grandfather, whereupon my elder promptly slapped it with his bare hand and then thumped the carcass into the water and went back to reeling in his line. A minute or two later, a second yellow-jacket lighted near the same place next to my grandfather. Again, he slapped it bare-handed and promptly thumped it into the water and nonchalantly continued fishing.

  Now I am a person who is very sensitive to wasp stings. I had once been stung on the hand by a yellow-jacket, which was painful and caused substantial swelling that lasted several days. I still have a scar fifty years later where the stinger went in. I was amazed at how my grandfather was giving these winged witches little thought and was actually attacking them. “Aren’t you afraid you’re going to get stung?” I finally asked.

  He looked surprised that I would even ask.

  “Nope,” he said. “I hit them on their head. Not on their stinger.”

  He was fast, he was accurate, and he took chances. That’s why going on expeditions with him was always an adventure.

  The Legend Of Fleddie Peddie

  Searching For Mr. Goodbear

  There’s little that is as enduring as the magic of a Christmas bear, for with the right bear the feeling can go on for years and years. I know, because I have been there.

  Back – way back – in 1956 my sister and I were each awarded Christmas bears by our grandparents. I was three at the time, my sister about 1½. This particular set of grandparents lived out in the country, in a small wood-frame house with two bedrooms and no running water. The outhouse was behind the live-in quarters.

  In the small living room of the house was situated a wood-burning cast-iron stove, upon which my grandmother would place pots to heat water and small hand-held irons to be used for taking the wrinkles out of clothes. There was a padded rocking chair next to the front door, then an entrance to a bedroom, followed by a leather recliner in the corner where my grandfather normally sat. However, this season his chair had been relocated to another room and a misshapen cedar Christmas tree took its place. It had a string of big electric bulbs, green, red, blue, and yellow, and a few glass ornaments adorning it, with a wire star wearing yellow sparkling fringe around it on top. The main ornaments consisted of strings of tiny colored balls angling the tree back and forth atop branches, and what seemed like thousands of thin metallic icicles draping over the branches. Several ended up on the floor, which meant they had to be picked up and tossed back onto some branches.

  Next to the tree and straight ahead when entering the room was the entryway to the kitchen, then the area where the stove lay was to the right, followed by two adjacent walls on the far right with a couch lining each. It was on one of these couches that I slept under a homemade quilt during our overnight visits there, with the crackle of the wood in the stove nearby.

  When Christmas day came, I was the second person to arise, all excited about what was under the tree. My grandmother had awakened around 4 a.m. to begin cooking breakfast. She was always an early riser. The smell of sausage made me hungry, as did the sounds coming from t
he kitchen which echoed that good things to eat were on the horizon. Shortly, with some coaxing from me, everyone had awakened and we decided to raid the tree.

  Out of a handful of gifts, mainly clothes, one stood out in prominence — a teddy bear in a square box peering out at me under a see-through plastic cover. My sister had gotten a duplicate bear among her other gifts.

  The two bears were both manufactured in the same cub maternity ward, but the stitchers who delivered them apparently were not the same person, as the two bears had strikingly different personalities, although otherwise they were the same.

  My sisters’ bear’s nose was inset more into the face, as though sneering, and the eyes were positioned in a way that rendered its personality as angry and cunning. He would have been an admirable mascot for a football team featuring bear cubs. My bear, on the other hand, had an expression similar to that of Mickey Mouse. Innocent, smart, harmless, adventurous.

  Later that Christmas day my mom, dad, sister, and I ventured to the home of our other grandparents, whereupon we feasted on beans and cornbread and other goodies, including ribbon candy and lemon drops. They, too, had a tree, a small silver one sitting on a table, below which were stacked a few gifts. Mine was a stuffed dog, about a foot long and eight inches high that was anchored to a metal base that included wheels on each corner. The dog also had amber glass eyes that splendidly reflected the light, short ears, a slightly elongated brown snout, and a brown tail. The rest of the body was off-white with short fur. The dog had a red plastic collar and a red leash made of the same material. When you pulled him along the floor, his tail would wag. I simply called him “Dog.” I immediately considered Dog and my new teddy bear as great friends. In fact, my bear would often sit upon Dog much like a man would sit on a horse. The dimensions were correct.