Photo of similar beam from a 2010 sighting
Black UFO Shoots Light Beam to Ground
MUFON CMS - Tennessee - 01-14-11: I had just returned home from a little late night shopping at Wal-Mart around 1:30 AM. I was getting settled in and ready for bed, and had just come out of the bathroom from brushing my teeth.
As I walked from the bathroom down the stairs to my bedroom, I heard this extremely loud buzzing/humming, almost grinding sound coming from outside that was so loud the windows of my house were rattling.
Curious as to what it was and expecting to open the door to see a helicopter flying too low or a low flying jet passing over, I opened the door to look outside, only to see something I couldn't have ever imagined in my wildest dreams.
Peering out from the front door of my house facing south, directly in front of my point of view, there was a large (guesstimating 150 ft. in diameter) metallic, solid black sphere hovering about 150 yards from where I was standing and maybe 150 - 200 feet in the air.
Directly in the dead center of the sphere was a blue-white sort of laser-like beam spread out from the craft, and rotating back and forth and up and down very slowly as if it was searching for something, and as I was standing there this beam passed directly over me.
I didn't feel any heat, or pain from it, I was only slightly blinded for a split second... but this was well after I'd gotten a good solid 20 - 30 second view of the object.
The sound emanating from this object was this intense humming, grinding, almost like the sound made when you run over a tree root with a lawnmower, or when a construction worker is using a pile-drive minus the chipping sound, or when someone presses down on an object too hard with a grinder, but consistent and continuous, and again, loud enough that the sound was rattling my 2 story house's storm windows.
I'm shocked it didn't wake up the whole neighborhood.
After watching for a good 20 - 30 seconds, I wanted to document it somehow, so I ran into the house to grab my iPhone with the hopes that the object was low and close enough that the resolution on my phone wouldn't have trouble capturing the object, as it usually does anything from a distance at night.
Here's where things get even weirder. The entire time I was in the house to grab my phone was all of 15 seconds. Mind you, when I came outside at first the object was not moving, just hovering.
Within that span of 15 seconds I was inside, I came back outside to find that the object was gone from its original spot, but I could still clearly hear it.
Thinking that it had to be nearby, I looked around, and then ran (as fast as I could in house shoes) around to the back of the house to find that the object had traveled at least 2 miles away, and all I could see was the faint remnant of the beam, still moving as if it was searching or scanning for something, before the object disappeared behind the ridge line.
I didn't bother trying to film, I knew it was too far away for me to have any chance of capturing. Here's where it gets even more odd. As I'm standing watching it disappear behind the ridge line, I hear another loud sound of a craft, only this one is familiar. I turn around to see 3 black helicopters in formation, flying very low, and hauling ass, with only their spotlights on facing directly in front of them.
They followed the exact same direction I saw the craft travel. Now, I have witnessed strange lights I couldn't explain in the sky before, I have even had one UFO experience in particular that altered my whole perception of how a viewed physics, reality, religion, and what I perceived as possible and impossible, but this... this was different.
With all of those other sightings I got a sense of excitement, wonder, and even at times warmth and comfort. What I felt when I saw this object was an almost sickening sense of fear, discomfort, and dread.
With all the other sightings I WANTED to see it again, I was excited to have seen them. This thing... I wished I hadn't seen it, and it had me so uneasy I had a lot of trouble NOT picturing it when I was trying to sleep.
Everytime I got the image in my head, and remembered that sound it made, it sent chills up my spine.
I'm asking the UFO community, anyone who reads this who has seen this object whether in person or in some kind of video they've seen to share their experience with me, as I'm hoping to find some answers as to why or even what this thing could have been.
Thank you for your time, and keep watching the skies!
Thanks to Tammy for the heads up!
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Follow Up: Bigfoot Howls
The following is a response to a previous post - Fortean / Alternative News: Bigfoot Reports and Updates
Listening to the Bigfoot howls the first one is very faint at best the second one with out a doubt I have heard that one myself... My parents live up in Placerville Foothills of the Sierras here in Northern California....We had BFRO come out to my parents one weekend a few years back along with Kathy Moskowits Strain and her now husband Bob Strain... I showed them the tree breaks I had found which they thought were excellent and the sounds we had heard... Late in the night we blasted some sound recordings they brought and got a return call... Kathy looked at us with a big smile and said is that what you have heard.. I told her yes it is... She smiled and said yup you have one or more that are in the area...
Until you hear it yourself in the mountains or woods you can't get a true appreciation or feel for a Bigfoot... Every time I hear someone laugh or say there is no such thing.. I tell them I would love to see you way out in the middle of the forest especially at night and hear a howl... I guarantee they will change their tune along with their underwear....
Here is the link to the report I initially filed with BFRO....http://www.bfro.net/GDB/show_report.asp?id=8650
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Atlantic raft expedition update
telegraph - At the age of 84, Anthony Smith is crossing the Atlantic on a raft. This week his crew battle with a broken rudder, and enjoy life atop an ocean of food chains.
To be on a raft at sea is to be on a snooker table whose frame rests on a bouncy castle. The structure stays happily intact, but the actual angle at any moment is the castle's choice. As for the poor balls, they go wherever gravity dispatches them, be they a desired pen, a pair of specs, a pan of food or the mere human in pursuit.
Unfortunately it is only the four of us who can grab a passing handhold. The pen, specs, food and whatever are only halted when some other thing gets in their way, whether mast, cabin, water barrel or circumferential netting.
The human balls change their colour according to circumstance. A black period definitely ensued when I realised a pernicious pharmacy had sold me a stack of hearing aid batteries all empty of energy. From now on, I will live more with my own thoughts than those expressed by others. Further blackness ensued when the toilet roll, neatly encased within several plastic bags, managed to acquire water donated by a passing wave.
Of course, there are better times too. Sunset and sunrise are always a joy, whether pink or blue or just suffused with yellow. Reds are the most common. The sun is the dominant feature of our days, though at night a zillion stars try to outdo in their numbers the single globe that highlights day.
As expected, there seem to be few fellow travellers on these waters. A single cruise liner has been spotted; a few aircraft have strobed their passage through the sky; and a gathering of dolphins once graced the water ahead before departing, sad perhaps that we had no great bow wave with which to impel their bodies into extra bursts of speed.
No whales as yet, and it might therefore seem that the ocean is a lifeless place.
Not a bit of it. We placed a plankton net in our rear, waited five minutes, and then hauled in a cornucopia of living things. There were little shrimp-like copepods and amphipods, each paddling so busily until warmth, I assume, got the better of them. There were Volvox lookalikes, round balls of little creatures fused together to make a sphere of life rather than a separated quantity of what books like to call animalcules. Undulating past them were the smallest of jellyfish, less than a millimetre in diameter, but precise replicas of their bigger brethren we may see when swimming nervously among them or treading between dead giants washed up along the shore.
An ocean, in short, is alive with food chains. The smallest, perhaps mere eggs or larvae, are eaten by those a trifle larger. These are then consumed by creatures higher up the ladder, and so on, until major animals are doing all the eating. It is a world on its own down there, beneath our raft, beneath the turbulence, and whose apparent lifelessness is nothing of the kind.
All of this was forgotten when our rudder broke last week. A steel pinion snapped and its attached marine ply then broke, half of it to float away. Tragedy? Yes, but not without a happy remedy.
My three crew members jury-rigged a replacement, more of a steering oar than a rudder, but in fact the four daggerboards suddenly proved their worth.
More like tabletops with us than any weapon, these have been constructed in ancient Peruvian fashion near the four corners of our craft. We immediately discovered, by lowering one or two of them, that we could steer effortlessly in the required direction.
At the moment we are heading more or less south-west to gain advantage of the trade winds which will take us towards our destination on the ocean's other side. Our snooker platform is therefore doing as it should, even if the balls sometimes go merrily elsewhere, whatever their colour and the time of day.
That is the nature of the craft with which we are voyaging so contentedly. Being on a raft is amazingly pleasing, whatever the turbulence.
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2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal
On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.
On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. (See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")
Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.
But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.
That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away. Continue reading at 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal