Growing up in the 50s and 60s, in a tiny little town in the Texas Panhandle, my eyes have always been drawn to the sky. My earliest memories include laying on my back in our yard watching the clouds drift by. Our little town must have been beneath a flightpath of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, because daytime viewing routinely included jets refueling at high altitude. It was common to see two (or even three) planes refueling from the same tanker at the same time. I didn’t know it then, but believe now that the planes were probably B-47s.
Sputnik
One evening, soon after Sputnik was launched, I was fortunate to see it pass overhead because our neighbor, Mr. Frazier, was apparently keeping up with sighting opportunities and invited me and my family outside just in time to see it. (I was not quite 7 years old.)
Meteor
I knew very little about the location of the planets and constellations, but was an avid stargazer just the same. One evening, when I was 9 or 10, I was walking with my parents from our car to my grandparents’ front door and noticed an unusually bright “star” almost directly overhead. It was stationary and was rapidly growing brighter. Within 2 or 3 seconds of bringing it to my parents’ attention it split into two pieces which then moved rapidly away from each other (one to the west and one to the south). The smaller of the two pieces burned up within a couple of seconds, but the other continued on until my view was blocked by trees at an angle of about 25% above the horizon.
Unidentified Flying Object
On a moonless summer night in 1963, my friend Brad and I were in his backyard looking at the stars from reclining lawn chairs when we spotted a large oval-shaped light in the NNE sky.
Brad jumped up, ran into his house, and closed the door. I was eager to follow, but had removed my shoes and was frantically feeling around on the ground for them while watching the object move steadily and silently across the sky in a straight line from NNE to WSW.
After a few seconds, I gave up on finding my shoes and ran to the house. When I discovered that the door was locked, I knocked and shouted wildly. While waiting for the door to be opened, I was able to watch the object until it was blocked from my line of sight by trees at an angle of about 20 degrees above the horizon.
It made no sound and was nothing more than an oval-shaped lucent object. It was approximately 10% of the brightness of a full moon and 1-1/2 full moons wide by just less than 1 full moon in height. Its edges were well defined. It left a barely visible trail of about 3 times its own length. (Like heat waves across a distant horizon on a summer day.)
I would guess that its closest distance to me was no more than 1/2 mile and that its altitude was between 500 and 1000 feet. It moved across nearly half of the sky in what I would guess to be about 25 seconds. I have never claimed that it was an alien spacecraft, but it was most certainly a genuine UFO sighting. Nearly 50 years later, I’ve still not seen anything even remotely similar.