I think I saw some extraterrestrial flying vehicles (EFVs) once. (I don't like to call them Unidentified Flying Objects. I had a little brown bird nesting under the deck that I couldn't identify. It flew. That's a UFO.)
When I lived on the Sage base, on the mountain, I spent a lot of time in the woods and field, or riding my bicycle on the highway. I didn't have a watch, so I kept track of the time by the commercial airliners passing overhead. There were certain flights in certain directions at certain times of the day. So when I was outside, I was very conscious of the sky.
One morning I was alone at the rifle range behind the base, and caught the glint of sunlight on metal in the sky. There were three airplanes passing directly overhead, in a tight triangle. It couldn't be commercial flights, of course, not together in formation, so I figured they were probably Air Force. We got a lot of USAF flyovers -sometimes guys from the base getting their flight time in - sometimes just because.
I immediately realized there was something odd about these planes. They were exceptionally long for their widths - like darning needles. Second, they were going VERY fast - from directly overhead to over the horizon in less than 10 seconds. Third, they were VERY high. With my index finger at arm's length, they were the width of my finger. So, if I underestimated their height, if I put them low enough that their speed made sense, then they were impossibly tiny. If I assumed a reasonable size, then they were impossibly high. If they were that high, they were impossibly fast. I braced for the sonic boom, and it never came. There was no sound at all from them. No trails, either.
I still had the clearance for the towers, so I went to the Sage tower and asked the airmen on duty, how fast were those planes going? They didn't know what I was taking about. The radar had not picked up any airplanes.
That night at dinner I mentioned it to my father. (He was the base commander.) He got thoughtful, and as soon as he was finished eating, he went back up to his office - something he never did - and didn't come back before my bedtime. Somehow, I knew not to bring it up again the next day.
So, you're thinking - SSTs! Yep, right shape, height, speed. But nope. The year was 1960 or 61. The first discussions about the SST were in the summer of 1961. The first flight of an experimental miniature SST was in 1964, in France. And even if it were a fold in time, and those were SSTs I was watching, SSTs never fly in a close formation.
Satellite? Echo was the only satellite that could be seen with the naked eye. It went up in 1960, but I had seen it a few times, and this wasn't it.
Falling pieces of satellite? There wasn't anything up there big enough, and since satellites were so new, one falling would have been all over the news. Plus, my father would have been aware of it.
So. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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A kind of corollary to this story:
In 1964 into '65 my father was "stationed" in the hospital at Wright Patterson AFB while they tried to figure out what was wrong with his heart. He was allowed to leave the hospital on weekends, so he came home occasionally. I was in college then, and sometimes I was also home on the same weekends. He was going crazy with nothing to do while the doctors were watching him and waiting for a heart attack, so Wright Patterson gave him something to do.
He worked on Project Bluebook.
He brought files home with him. He'd leave them on the diningroom table, "Top Secret" stamped across the covers and on every page.
Could you resist? I couldn't. I learned enough about the Air Force "investigations" that I take everything they say with a grain of salt. When they say that an incident was proven to be such-and-such, what they really mean is that they found some possible explanation, therefore that must be the explanation.
That's their story, and they're sticking to it.
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