My friend and colleague Albert Rosales offered the following report:
Location. Mekong River, Vietnam (exact location not given)
Date: March 16 1968 - Time: 23:20
The main witness who was on vessel security watch on this night and another crewman had both previously seen fireballs crossing over the river. So, on this night he decided to wave his flashlight at it. It crossed to the center of the river, always to the same spot, where they anchored their gravel barges. It sat there for about 10 minutes, just a ball of fire, soon the fire dissipated and the witness saw a disc-shaped object about 30 meters in diameter with a dome on top and a smaller dome on the bottom. The color of the object was silver metallic and it had rotating amber and white lights with a small greenish light on the bottom. It hovered for about 2 minutes and then started moving towards their vessel (a US Army 65ft harbor tug). The disc then turned off its lights and stopped at approximately 10 feet from where the main witness was standing. For some reason he felt no fear. There was absolutely no noise as the upper dome started to shift revealing a window-like opening which covered 1/4 of the dome, an eerie green light illuminates the inside of the craft. Suddenly an occupant peers from the side of the window, then 2 more appear just looking at the witness. He waves at them and they wave back. This went on for about 5 minutes or so. The occupants were pointing at his uniform and rifle, so he put the rifle down. He described the humanoids as about 3.5ft in height, with bluish green skin, large eyes, not almond shaped, but round with bright green pupils, slender bodies with 4 digits on each hand. They resembled small children, with small ears, nose and mouth which never opened. They appeared to be using hand language and were pointing at different items. The witness was trying to communicate but didn’t know how. So he gestured to them that he was going to get another crew member from below, so he went below and woke the skipper.
The skipper didn’t know what the witness was trying to tell him so he came topside and the disk had moved around the rear of the vessel, and the skipper was about to “chew him out” when the disc moved forward. At this point the skipper began screaming and began grabbing for the rifle. The witness fought with skipper, preventing him from shooting at the disc and kept yelling at the occupants of the disc to get “out of range”. Just as soon as the disc moved away from the vessel, the skipper started calming down. The disc then moved up the river and suddenly disappeared at high speed.
Source: MUFON CMS
-----
I've been intrigued by anomalous activity reported by troops during the Vietnamese conflict. Here is another strange encounter from John Keel:
The case was investigated by Don Worley, an experienced student of the unknown, who interviewed the witness in depth.
“He is a reliable observer,” Worley notes, “and he swears that this event is well beyond the capacity of his imagination.“
Earl Morrison, the witness, was serving as a private, first class in the marine corps in Vietnam in the summer of 1969.
He and two buddies were sitting on top of a bunker near Da Nang on a warm summer evening.
“All of a sudden—I don’t know why—we all three looked out there in the sky and we saw this figure coming toward us. It had a kind of glow and we couldn’t make out what it was at first. It started coming toward us, real slowly. All of a sudden we saw what looked like wings, like a bat’s, only it was gigantic compared to what a regular bat would be. After it got close enough so we could see what it was, it looked like a woman. A naked woman. She was black. Her skin was black, her body was black, the wings were black, everything was black. But it glowed. It glowed in the night—kind of a greenish cast to it.
“There was a glow on her and around her. Everything glowed. Looked like she glowed and threw off a radiance. We saw her arms toward the wings and they looked like regular molded arms, each with a hand, and, fingers and everything, but they had skin from the wings going over them. And when she flapped her wings, there was no noise at first. It looked like her arms didn’t have any bones in them, because they were limber just like a bat.
“She started going over us, and we still didn’t hear anything. She was right above us, and when she got over the top of our heads she was maybe six or seven feet up.
“We couldn’t do anything. We didn’t know what to do. We just froze. We just watched what was going over because we couldn’t believe our eyes. … So we watched her go straight over the top of us, and still she didn’t make any noise flapping her wings. She blotted out the moon once—that’s how close she was to us … As we watched her—she got about ten feet or so away from us—we started hearing her wings flap. And it sounded, you know, like regular wings flapping. And she just started flying off and we watched her for quite a while. The total time when we first saw her and could almost define her until we lost sight of her and were unable to define her was between three or four minutes.” - The Mothman Prophecies
-----
Here is a remarkable encounter described by a reader --> Lizard Beings: Encounter & Engagement This compilation offer a variety of incidents --> Strange Tales From Vietnam & Indochina
Of course, the lingering tales of the notorious 'Rock Apes' --> Soldiers' Stories: The 'Rock Ape'
Very Crazy, G.I.!: Strange but True Stories of the Vietnam War
War and Shadows: The Haunting of Vietnam
The Dragon Prince: Stories and Legends from Vietnam
