Laugh at Gov. Bill Richardson all you will. Disclosure would cripple Islamic Fundamentalism, and of course the rest of organised religions.
I put my ass on the line here; what follows is a post I made here at FR, in a thread that began and ended as it should.
"Every now and then, my mother and I would take our dog on his night walk
to the Parade Ground, a flat park of baseball and football fields.
We went there because at the time it was being renovated, and the
fields were being partitioned and fenced. This gave us some
confidence to allow the dog off the leash to run free for a change.
The Parade Ground is just across Parkside Avenue from Prospect Park.
It is August, 1965. I am ten years old.
The dog was having a good run, and once we saw that he wasn't
about to run off completely, we relaxed and gazed upwards to
view the night sky, trying to find various constellations.
In those days, the street lights in Brooklyn emitted a white light,
and not the beige-looking type now in use. If you went to a park,
you could get a decent view of the stars, but of course not
anywhere near the view if you were upstate in deep woods.
Suddenly, as I looked to the left of me, I saw what I first
mentally equated as a submarine perhaps two storeys
off the ground higher than the six storey buildings beneath it.
"Hey Mom, do you see what I see?" She did.
Here comes this thing, slow and steady and silent. It is huge.
It is dark grey - not "battleship grey," but as grey as can
be before you rule it black. There is no shine to it.
The front of it was round; I'd seen pictures of submarines,
and that is what came to mind. It is actually shaped more
like a very long medicine capsule.
As it proceeded to float past us, we observed its right side.
It is solid. It is a perfect and very long dark grey cylinder,
and it just keeps coming very slowly and steadily.
Obviously, we can't see the top of it, but so far, we see that
even though it is almost black, we sense a light behind the
darkness. This does not make sense, as my mother and I later
reckoned. The best I can come up with is that my eyes saw
dark grey, but my mind knew the cylinder was emitting light.
Dark light!
This was no blimp. No lights. No sound. No windows.
No gondola beneath. No visible markings. No nothing!
It is just a cylinder 300 feet longer than the Intrepid
aircraft carrier now docked in the Hudson River going by!
This thing was so huge, that even from the height above me,
(200 Feet?) it was clearly visible; visible enough to see
even the slightest imperfection clearly, if it had any.
At the same time, we are not in any panic. We are unusually
serene. As if it's no big deal somehow. Maybe we were in
a stupor beyond awe.
Finally, the end of the ship passes. I ran to see the back of
it. I see it is as round as the front with an opening in the
center. To this day, I'm not sure if it was square or arch-like.
I am convinced that at least the bottom of the opening in the
back of it was flat, so it was square or arched. I remember
thinking that 3 buses could easily drive inside at the same time.
On the other hand, I've seen jets low to the ground on approach
to JFK Airport, and thought that "my" cylinder was at least 3
times wider at the same height.
This is the only time I experience apprehension. I worry for a
moment that whoever is flying this cylinder might see me.
I ran to a to where I could see the other side of the cylinder.
It is exactly as perfect and unremarkable as the other side
and the bottom.
I have been struggling with my memories for years as to whether
there was a single tiny light, blue or red atop the opening
in the back. I add this item, but I am not sure. Inside the
opening it is absolutely pitch black.
The cylinder was in the order of 1200 feet long. I did not know
this at the time. When I saw the cylinder completely, it
was "crossing" Stratford Road, and the back of it was at Buckinham
Road. The distance between these streets on Caton Avenue
according to street maps is about 1200 feet.
I rejoined my mother in the original field, and we watched this
thing float over the Prospect Park POLICE STATION, heading west
until it faded from sight about half a mile west of the Parade
Ground. No newspaper, radio, or TV station mentioned it. For
that matter, we didn't even tell my father!
As I first accessed the Internet, I ran a search for
"cylinder ufo," and plenty of links came up. Even pictures!
I wasn't too surprised, because I know damn well what I saw
was real, and other people MUST have seen something as well.
I told some close friends. They gave me the jaundiced eye.
I could hardly blame them. I guess its just one of those things
one must see to believe."
One night, my daughter came running to us, yelling that there was a UFO right outside her bedroom window "over the woods over there!" She was about 10 years old.
At the time, we lived near the Missouri River in a small farm suburb, still not too far from McDonnell Douglas. To reassure her, we said that if it were a UFO (as opposed to helicopter, small plane, etc) the jets would scramble after it.
10 seconds later, they did. Four of them. Never heard a word about it.
Incidentally, I think that the idea that the discovery of extraterrestrial life would somehow "invalidate" religion is groundless. C. S. Lewis' science-fiction writings are centered around the concept of Christianity expanded to encompass otherworldly life.
Re: post # 14 - pinging!
Cool story!
NO trouble believing your story totally.
A reasonably common form and size as I understand them.
I saw one very similar to what you saw. It had that "submarine" look, was gray/black, and moved slow and low. Ours was a daytimes sighting. A little before 9 AM -- a totally non-spooky time.
My sweetie has seen two UFOs in his life. (Not necessarily aliens, but UFOs.)
The first was long before I ever knew him. He and his sister were kids and went outside to see Skylab. They saw Skylab cross the sky, then right behind it, saw another object cross in the same path. He describes it as a round light that followed Skylab all the way across the sky as far as he could see.
The second was just a couple of years ago. He saw a metallic, reflective, round object hovering beside a cloud over the bay near our home. He watched it for a while, and it moved side-to-side beside the cloud. He went and got my son (then 12 years old) to come and look at it, too. While they were watching it, both of them saw it flatten out and accelerate across the sky. As it passed through the edge of a cloud, they could see the outline and it appeared as a dull, metallic, oblong shape.
He's a goofball, but he's not crazy. And others have witnessed both things he saw.
I never get to see anything, though. But, I keep looking.
Its not any fun to have your friends think your crazy but its one of those things where if they haven't seen it they can't understand it or believe it. It is much easier for some people to discount witnesses as nuts than it is to actually believe it.