Strange Lights Over Northern Afghanistan
Lon,
Hi, long time reader first time writer to you. I'm prior service from the military and I served in the Army for five years, during those times, I never saw or heard or experienced anything out of the ordinary or unexplained during my time in service except for one incident which I will describe.
After I was honorably discharged in early 2009, I worked as a defense contractor for a small company out in Virginia, my job entailed deploying overseas for several months at a time. After being hired on I deployed to Northern Afghanistan to one of the Forward Operating Bases there. Ironically I ran across the story on your site about the alleged haunted outpost the Marines took over in December of 2009, a few days before the incident.
This was close to New Years in December of 2009. I was in the office and monitoring message traffic when I noticed a peculiar email and attached report. One of the Forward Operating Bases reported seeing lights near a valley adjacent to a nearby mountain top. One of the soldiers had reported seeing a series of lights during the evening hours as the sun was setting. According to him he thought they were possibly Coalition Aircraft and didn't pay too much attention to it. What ended up catching his attention was the fact that they were perfectly stationary and unmoving for several minutes as darkness approached. According to him the lights had a steady clear white glow to them.
Helicopters can be ruled out as the lights were near a mountain peak, and the strong wind currents as well as altitude would have made it pretty hard to keep a that sort of vehicle stationary let alone hovering safely. The terrain itself is very rugged and rough and the weather can be especially brutal at higher altitudes during the Afghan winter.
It was not an airplane either as the soldier could not make it any distinguishing characteristics or markings. After a few more minutes, according to the soldier as the sun had finished setting, the lights dimmed a bit and could not be made out as well so the soldier grabbed his night vision goggles to get a better look. (He didn't say specifically which ones he took, but most NVG gear will pick up near infrared light/heat sources if they are strong enough) He stated that the object was glowing almost "red hot" through his night vision goggles, and had an elongated cigar shape to it. Size was difficult to estimate but at least 200 feet in length.
There was no more description or detail of the incident as the report itself was spartan and the preceding emails to it were almost poking fun of the story (I honestly thought it was a prank at first, but the report had indeed gone through all the appropriate channels and was disseminated throughout the email chain). I have heard incidents similar to this before from other soldiers, but this is the first time I actually came across a real report that documented this. Please feel free to email me back with any questions you might have but this is the gist of it. Thanks...
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No Driver
Hi - In 1983/84 (?), when I was sophomore at Westwood High School in Austin, TX, I was in a car with 3 students and 2 teachers, coming back from a field trip with my Home Economics class. We were driving down Hwy 183 in Cedar Park, when we saw a gold sedan next to us with NO DRIVER in the car. We of course all crowded around the right passenger window, in amazement. We could clearly see through all the windows & could see the floorboards at all the seats in the car. There was NO ONE in that car. At all. We drove next to the car for 10-15 minutes. It turned with the road, slowed down & sped up, as if there were someone driving it. We looked for a remote control device, but the floorboards and what we could see of the outside of the car, were clear. Plus, to be remote controlled (at that point in technological history) it would have had to be controlled from another car nearby. And there were no other cars on the road with us. I wasn't afraid, I was amazed and excited. We were all trying to figure it out, it was fun! Eventually, our teacher told us to quit looking at it (???), then sped up and left it behind. I've never heard of another instance like this until today, online, when I found this - Human Enigmas
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Another Manta-Ray UFO
Lon - One evening last year around dusk, with a fair amount of twilight still in the sky, I stood out in my well-lit driveway waiting to be picked up to go eat dinner. As I stood looking around, watching the sky as airplanes flew in and out of the Charlotte, NC airport (30ish miles away), something caught my eye that was much, much lower in the sky than the airplanes I had been watching. Flying directly over my head, was a translucent/transparent manta-ray shaped figure whose speed and size would suggest an extremely low altitude, maybe a little higher than a telephone pole, and maybe an 8ft wingspan. This manta-ray flew and moved in a fashion that suggested to me that it was a living creature as opposed to an aircraft. I could see directly through it but was easily able to see its shape/figure. I watched it fly directly overhead in a straight path for maybe 10 seconds, then it completely disappeared, long before it flew out of sight.
I was very shocked to find other eye-witness accounts of this creature on your site, matching what I saw down to every little detail. What are these things?
Truly an incredibly surreal experience.
