What Are These Things?

26m

Strange things seen by members of the military and others.

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Many of these observations of strange aerial lights seem to take place at night, while most of the daytime observations appear to be those not of suspended lights, but of actual airborne crafts of various shapes, whether cubes, diamonds, hexagons, egg or egg timer shapes, tic-tacs, and so on.

So perhaps what is being seen at night are the lights on the exterior of an aircraft of some kind, and the fact that it's dark prevents us from seeing the rest of the UFO.

Man-made aircraft is certainly a more rational explanation, but the slow hovering movement and the absence of sounds of engines or helicopter rotors certainly does seem to indicate these objects are defying gravity with some form of unusual technology that most of us are unaware of.

But if we are going to suggest that these lights are just lights completely detached from any sort of mechanical object, then what might they be?

Just a floating orb of pure light?

Like a miniature star?

What might we speculate to be the technology or purpose behind such a thing?

I am by no means well read on UFO theories, and I'm sure there are many of them, and I would be very interested to hear your own, because I certainly do not plan to discriminate between what we each believe in when it comes to finding an explanation for these strange observations.

So saying, I'm probably not the first to point this out, but considering the extremely fast movements described and possibly the appearance of control or intelligence behind these objects, I have yet to come across a theory that would suggest that some of these UFOs might be spiritual beings.

The first chapter of Ezekiel in the Bible describes four spiritual creatures called living creatures, which are otherwise known as cherubim or angels.

And in his vision of heaven, Ezekiel wrote the following: The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire, or like torches.

Fire moved back and forth among the creatures.

It was bright, and light flashed out of it.

The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning.

Scripture later goes on to explain that these living creatures perform various works here on earth, but I will leave it at that.

So whether everyone has been witnessing some sort of spiritual phenomenon or a bizarre thing of nature like a floating ball of hot plasma, the idea of a floating orb of light is certainly very strange.

So far the accounts we have seen have put these lights at a distance away from the observer and I had wondered if maybe a closer look at one of these lights might give someone a better idea of what they were seeing.

But as Robert Huffman's experience will tell us, perhaps seeing them up close would only add to the mystery.

He writes,

Remember in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when people are camped out on the side of the road, waiting for the UFOs to fly by, and when they do, there were those small orbs of colored lights trailing after them?

That's what I saw, on Mount Palomar, late one night, around 1986.

There was this kind of lookout point at the edge of the parking lot, and a friend of mine and I were standing there talking, and these two or three colorful balls of maybe the size of basketballs, little bigger, as I recall each one was a different translucent color, snaked by us, silently, maybe fifteen to twenty feet away.

It happened so fast and came out of nowhere and was gone in a second or two, we didn't even react until it was over.

He seemed to blow it off like it happens all the time, but I think he was really freaked out.

Every now and then I think back to that day and ask myself, what was that?

Ball lightning?

It was clear and cold on top of that mountain.

I remember that.

As for the location, if my understanding of where this event occurred is correct, the parking lot Robert mentioned is directly adjacent to an astronomical research observatory with large telescopes, the Palomar Observatory.

Along with Robert's experience, Nancy Jones appears to offer a similar and rather shocking experience.

I can't for certain say that she witnessed something similar to what was just described by Robert, but with the close proximity of the object that she describes, you would at least think that if the object was anything other than a ball of light or had any obvious mechanical structure, she would have mentioned it.

So perhaps these curious floating orbs of pure light aren't an uncommon thing to see, whatever they are.

Nancy writes, I had a UFO encounter, and the way the movements of the craft are described are just like the one that flew at me.

And what she's referring to at that statement is the object or the UFO that was seen over Fort Campbell, the diamond or cube-shaped object that was seen moving very quickly in straight lines and stopping abruptly.

She writes, it was during the day, and I spied it hovering between the trees across the street from my house.

As soon as it noticed me looking at it, it zipped over, stopped right in front of my face, and hovered for several seconds before zigzagging away.

It was about the size of a pizza and was the color of a sunset.

It gave me the weirdest buzzing feeling afterwards, and I'll never forget it.

Although no details were provided, Nancy Jones' encounter was confirmed by a second individual, DravianPN02, who responded to her comments stating that he or she also had a similar experience, although stating that the object was larger than what Nancy described.

As with these accounts along with many others, I couldn't begin to offer a theory as to what man-made object would look and behave so unpredictably like that, or what reason any object of any kind would.

Hovering, floating by, zipping in straight lines to and fro?

It sounds like the characteristic movements of an insect, if anything.

and I'm not aware of any insects that look like large balls of light.

But the behavior that seems to be more common in many of these UFO sightings is a light or object seen hovering in a stationary position or moving at a consistent speed and direction for a period of time before changing direction very suddenly or shooting off at incredible speeds and disappearing.

Along with the strange fast-moving, glowing, cone-shaped objects seen on the day of the Mantel UFO incident in 1948, whatever these objects are, they do seem to pop up all over the place, this next one being in Oklahoma.

Maureen Gunney writes,

I've only had one odd experience relating to an object in the sky which I could not identify.

My wife and I love taking road trips across the country from Virginia to Southern California, which is where I'm from.

We always take the old route systems out and then the I-40 back, U.S.

Routes 60 and 50 to name a few.

On our way back in 2017, we were making our way through Oklahoma, had started out that day in Flagstaff, Arizona, so it was pretty late, around near midnight.

I asked my wife if there was any campgrounds nearby, and after a search on her phone, she said yes.

There's a reservoir named Foss, and it's a state park with camping.

It's not too far off of the interstate.

Found a spot at Sandy Beach Campground, parked the jeep, and set up our tent.

Then I noticed we were the only ones crazy enough to camp in what felt like 95 degree plus weather.

This was in July, by the way.

I head out to the bathrooms there to brush my teeth and was just looking up at all the stars when I noticed what I thought was a planet, except it twinkled more like a star.

I stood there staring at it for about a minute or so, when it suddenly streaked across the sky and was gone.

Kind of gave me a chill down my spine and thought, you know, maybe it was just a meteorite heading straight for me, and then when it hit the atmosphere, it deflected off in a different direction.

Then I got to thinking, I've seen meteor showers before, and nothing like that had ever happened.

I don't know what it was, but I feel fortunate to witness something that I can't explain.

And for this next similarly strange account, as if it's any surprise, we find ourselves back in Kentucky.

Red-Eyed Patriot writes, My parents ran a family care home for disabled veterans for 35 years.

Growing up where we live on top of a mountain in Kentucky, I saw weird lights on more than one occasion.

This was the mid-90s.

There was a light that barely moved, but hovered like a drone, but was completely silent.

It followed me to my grandpa's and back, and then just took off like a bat out of hell.

About six months later, I saw it again.

We're 15 miles from the Bluegrass Army Depot.

My grandfather retired from there after 30 years.

The same exact thing he described is what I saw, only no flash from the bottom, but moved quickly, exactly how he described it.

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Far from North America, being the only place for such sightings, Deep Ranger 930, a veteran of the U.S.

Navy, submitted the following story from his time in Spain.

Around 2006, during my time in the Navy, I was stationed in Rotas, Spain.

I spent one evening alone.

when I pulled a watch shift at the end of the main pier, up in a small observation tower.

I liked this this watch since it meant I could play around with the one set of night vision goggles we had been given at waterfront security.

I liked to look up at the sky and see all the stars you can't normally see with the naked eye, as well as the satellites passing overhead.

That night, I was watching the sky through the lens and I caught sight of what looked like a satellite passing overhead, moving along the same path I was used to seeing them.

But as I watched it, this one, suddenly and without changing its speed, pulled a perfect loop, breaking off to one side and making a complete circle.

Then, once it had finished this loop, it just continued along the same direction it had been heading and eventually disappeared out of sight.

I just stood there wondering what I'd just been watching.

Satellites don't move like that.

It made absolutely no sense.

I felt like someone was messing with me.

While writing this episode, I noticed that a viewer by the name of Skintek asked a question on the last Smokepit UFO episode that correlated to Deep Ranger 930's story.

It's just something of a strange coincidence that he made this comment.

He states that while listening to the Coast to Coast radio program, he heard one of the guests say that through night vision goggles, people can see actual UFOs fighting right above the Earth.

Now, I have no idea what fighting would mean.

Does that mean seeing actual gunfire being exchanged, like a Star Wars battle?

Or just what appears to be UFOs zipping around each other, which was then assumed to be something like a World War I aerial dogfight.

Like Deep Ranger 930, during my time in the Marines, I myself spent a fair few hours staring through my NVG lens during night patrols, and when I had time, yes, up at the night sky.

It's beautiful.

I'm with him on that.

It never ceases to amaze me how many stars there really are.

While using NVGs, I have experienced some pretty wild hallucinations, probably because of sleep deprivation, but as many satellites passing space debris and other unremarkable objects as I've seen through a night vision lens passing overhead, I've never seen anything like what Deep Ranger or Skintech described.

And certainly, I have seen nothing like alien death punches following observations.

He writes, I used to work at my local airport.

In the early hours of my morning shift doing doing my rounds out in the airside, I noticed a light descending slowly that then shot off roughly 45 degrees off the horizon and disappeared.

Another time my co-worker and I were outside taking a smoke break during the night shift.

We spotted a low-orbit satellite, a light no brighter than a star moving at a constant speed and movement that had a weird blinking light that was following it in a fast zigzag pattern.

Nothing too special.

It's just something I've seen coming from a country that UFOs aren't heard of, and I'm not sure which country he means by that.

The slow descent and rapid departure of the first object he saw sounds similar to those objects seen near the Kentucky and Ohio military bases in 1948 during the collective events of the Mantel UFO incident.

But as of yet, I have no amount of knowledge to offer a reasonable speculation for what any of these objects are.

And speaking of Kentucky, our next account takes us us back to an increasingly familiar military base, Fort Campbell.

Like our friend Robert in the Strange Lights episodes, Freddie Corona is also a U.S.

Army veteran who served with the military police at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about 25 years after Robert's time on the same base.

Freddie also worked the night shift.

He shared the following experience.

I was an MP at Fort Campbell from 2010 to 2012 working midshifts, the midnight shift I mean, driving patrols around the base in the dark.

One night I got a bit bored of driving around and decided to stop and take a break to stretch my legs.

I got out of my patrol vehicle, grabbed my coffee, and started scrolling through Facebook to kill some time.

I then looked up at the sky.

Stars were out, and overall it was a pretty clear night, reminding me the Oklahoma nights back home.

But then I noticed something unusual, a distinct green light overhead.

It would have been difficult to spot if not for its color, because it otherwise blended in with the rest of the stars.

Now that I noticed it, it looked very much out of place in the sky.

As I stared at it, it became very bright, and I was startled when it suddenly shot off, like a shooting star.

Made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.

I had just started my shift, so I didn't think I was tired enough to be imagining things like that.

After taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I looked back up again and suddenly saw a little bird flying over me, like it was chasing after something.

Honestly, the strangest thing.

Freddy's story reminded me of the one shared by Maureen Gunny, because the object behaved in a similar way, appearing to remain stationary or, as Gunny speculated, approaching directly toward him from a far distance before shooting off sideways in a perpendicular direction.

After reading Freddy's story, I certainly wondered about the bird.

Perhaps it was just coincidental timing.

And if not a bat, considering the event taking place at night, I wasn't sure what to make of the bird he mentioned or how it might have been involved with the object that he witnessed.

But as it turns out, Freddie wasn't the only viewer to share a story about seeing a green light zipping around in the skies over Kentucky.

Carla Short also lives in Kentucky, more than 130 miles northeast of Fort Campbell and much closer to Fort Knox, only about 30 miles east from the base.

Like Freddie, about seven or eight years after he spotted one, she too saw a green light in a clear night sky.

She writes, I live in Bardstown, Kentucky, and a couple of summers ago I saw a green light about 6.30 in the morning while I was walking my dog.

The sky was clear, and of course it was dark, and I seen this green light in the sky, and as soon as I seen it, it was gone.

So, I don't ever know what it was, but I've never seen anything like it before.

As for explanations, I personally don't recall remote-controlled drones being very popular around the time of Freddy's encounter in 2010 to 2012, but in either his or Carla's case, if these lights just suddenly zipped off at high speeds, the idea that it could have been a drone seems far less plausible.

But like many other UFO observations we've covered, it does at least seem worth pointing out that Freddy's observation took place directly over over a military base, and Carla's at least took place within a relatively short distance from one.

Malter Dwight, a fellow Marine Corps veteran, saw another strange object, this one near another military base, an American naval installation.

Like the diamond-shaped UFO observations over Fort Campbell, this object also appeared to have the ability to make very fast movements and cover large distances in a matter of seconds.

He writes, I served in the Marine Corps from 2003 to 2010.

I was a PRP Security Forces Marine for my first two years in service, and during the spring of 2004, I watched a UFO while standing in our evening formation at approximately 8 p.m.

This was on the small naval annex, Naval Support Activity Hampton Roads, where the Marine Corps basic security guard training occurs in Chesapeake, Virginia.

While standing in formation, I saw a blinking light, which was situated north of the base, in the direction of Norfolk maybe five to ten miles away hard to gauge the distance I pointed it out to some of the guys around me and we watched as it would slowly blink on and off before disappearing and then reappearing a significant distance away in a different location It was likewise hard to estimate the distance it traveled, but it was almost instantaneous, as if the object could move at incredible speeds.

That is, if it was just one object.

I assumed it was the same object because there was only ever one blinking light visible at the same time.

After about 10 minutes, it disappeared, and we never saw it again.

Malter also mentioned that the naval annex is home to an array of large communication antennas.

Considering the location of the strange object was some distance away from the antennas, rather than hovering directly above them, as the cube-shaped UFO Roberts saw before Campbell did, it's difficult to speculate whether those antenna had anything to do with the object's activity.

But this story does otherwise seem similar to a story shared in the last episode, where a blinking light was seen at least four times every Wednesday night at the same exact periods of time for almost a month, hovering near a military base in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Comparing that story with Malter's, aside from these blinking lights or objects appearing at around the same time in the evening, the only other similarity I can point to is that both of these military bases are located along the United States' eastern coastline, very near to the ocean.

And before we head back over the Atlantic Ocean to more UFO sightings in the United Kingdom, our viewer's stories take us back to the border region along the increasingly bizarre states of Tennessee and Kentucky.

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I gather that a large number of Kentucky locals watched the episodes because of the familiar title, Strange Lights Over Kentucky.

But since Tennessee shares a sizable border with the state, I'm not surprised to see that Tennessee has its fair share of UFO sightings along with its northern neighbor.

Although he appears to have too many sightings to elaborate on, The Dog of War writes, I can't comment about Fort Knox area, but I've seen just a crazy amount of UFOs along the western edge of Tennessee into the western edge of Kentucky.

For about a decade, I drove a semi-truck in the evening into the night, mostly along U.S.

Highway 51.

After a while, I started recording where I was, at what time, and what those things looked like.

I probably made at least 70 or 80 reports to the National UFO Reporting Center over the years.

In response to his comment, a London native, James Little, expressed his desire to witness something along the likes of these many encounters, wondering if he might have to travel all the way to Skinwalker Ranch here in the U.S.

just to see one.

And one of his fellow countrymen, Znaught Z7, responded and was kind enough to offer him encouragement that it was very possible for him to see a UFO much closer to home.

Evidently, Zednaut spotted a UFO flying over the south coast area of the island nation.

And this wasn't just any UFO.

Its unique shape was similar in appearance to the 2004 UFO sighting off the coast of California by two U.S.

Navy pilots performing offshore flight operations from their nuclear aircraft carrier.

the USS Nimitz.

The video recording of this object caused a stir among American media just recently when the U.S.

government came forward to acknowledge their confirmed existence of UFOs.

Zednot Z writes,

I live on the south coast, Dorset, and I've seen two things I cannot explain.

One was one of those cigar-shaped objects, although I'd say it looked more like a huge antibiotic capsule.

It was a sort of silvery-white color and had five elongated black vertical ovals down its side.

It was heading in a northeastern-ish direction towards our local local airport where I worked for a couple of years and quite slowly climbed up into the clouds where I lost sight of it.

Four of us witnessed the thing and one of us got really frightened.

As we were in a moving vehicle, I lied and told him it was just a huge Russian aircraft that often visited the local airport as I didn't want him to freak out and cause us to crash.

I've no idea what it actually was, and I've wondered about it ever since.

As these following two accounts would indicate, Zednot was not the only one living in or traveling in close proximity to the UK that saw something like the object he witnessed.

Andrew Walsh, a native of the neighboring nation of Ireland, also writes, I seen a tic-tac just sit in the clouds above Dublin, was just in the same spot for 20 minutes, then I lost it in a cloud, like it just floated away.

Another time, I seen a white, basketball-sized white orb fly over the roofs of the houses behind mine, mine, explode into eight baseball-sized orbs, and they all fly off in different directions.

It happened so fast in under two seconds from start to finish, there wasn't a sound, not even of the air displacement.

Whiz.

After reading his second account, it does seem to lend more credence to the idea of flying orbs, those without any mechanical design to speak of, although I'm not certain if what he saw took place during the daytime or at night.

And perhaps we have another tic-tac UFO sighting.

Mark Caswell's shared observation does seem unusual.

He writes,

The only strange light I've seen was on a daytime commercial flight from the UK to Portugal a few years ago.

I was in a window seat on the right side of the plane, about halfway through the flight, and bored.

So I looked out of the window and saw a bright metallic object flying on a parallel course maybe a half a mile away.

It didn't look like another plane, and I thought, would another pilot's flight path be this close?

I lost sight of whatever it was after a couple of minutes.

Was it another plane?

I don't know, but it was unusual.

Thank you all for sharing your stories.

I hope I have done them justice in their retelling.

Certainly since the last episode was released, you guys have been generously sharing even more of your stories, not only about UFOs, but also other strange encounters.

So now we have quite a bit of material piling up concerning personal cryptid encounters, UFO sightings, and beyond.

If you're comfortable sharing them, keep those stories coming.

You do not need to ask my permission before commenting or emailing them to me.

It might take me some time to respond, but the channel's email is wartimestories.yt at gmail.com, and that contact information will always be posted in the description section of each video for future reference.

I've got some closing thoughts coming up in the credits, but if you came here for the stories and, well, a little bit of analysis, I will see you in the next episode.

Until then, keep your eyes on the skies.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Acascio, and and Witt Lacascio.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stiddam.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Cloxen Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

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