Sun City Center, UFO

Sun City Center, UFO

The Old Folks at Home

I was recently reading about some of the current UFO cases in the news and it made me wonder whether to report my sighting at all. It seems almost insignificant now, but for what it is worth here it is.

It happened while I was training a new employee in one of my delivery trucks. He had been with me for about two weeks, and we had gotten to know each other very well. I was almost ready to turn the area over to him.

It was about five o’clock in the morning in Sun City Center, FL. A magic place where people go to retire with a little style and dignity. We had stopped to get a cup of coffee, at a very rural location about a half mile from our first scheduled stop. As we pulled out of the convenience store, with my hot coffee in hand, it was not yet fully daylight, and my helper was driving.

To my right and across the street about fifty feet over the only house there at the time, I saw a small triangular craft hovering about six feet above a protruding garage. I remember saying as I pointed to it “what the hell is that?” My partner replied with a question, “a kite?” Then he gave a peculiar chuckle. I wondered about his strange response but my eyes, and full attention was fixed on the weird craft.

Suddenly, lights appeared at the extremities of the angles. I realized then that the tips were not completely pointed but rounded at the ends. The lights were red and amber, and they extended around the corners. I also seem to remember some green in the lights, but I cannot be sure. The craft was at least fifteen feet across from tip to tip. And a little longer, five feet longer, at what I decided was the length. It appeared a dull aluminum, but then turned a darker metallic as it began moving slowly, without a whisper of sound, out into the middle of the small side-street.

In the middle of the road, it slowly flipped on its axis. Now it was perfectly perpendicular and appeared like it was hanging on an imaginary clothesline. I calculated the depth at the center of the vehicle at about five feet. It was then that the craft quickly sped away, towards the horizon, at a tremendously high velocity while maintaining its straight up and down positioning like a pencil. I recognized that there was still no sound even with the new burst of speed.

As it zipped away, at the last moment, there remained visible one light at the top and one at the bottom confirming that the craft never flattened out—as one would expect a regular aircraft, or any flying object to do.

I wondered—how can this thing stay aloft and maneuver in such an unconventional manner, never considering the bizarreness of the strange sighting itself. Suddenly, it was only a dot in the horizon that quickly disappeared. One would think the sighting was extraordinary enough, but the oddest part was that from that moment on my cohort and I never mentioned it again to each other. And we trained together for at least another week.

This happened sometime around 1995, I sold the business in 1998 and I am writing this piece in 2020. I remember the excitement I felt at the time it was happening, although it did seem perfectly natural. And no, we never spoke to each other again, about the encounter. In my case, I never mentioned it to anyone else for at least five years after the sighting, and I cannot imagine why. As for my trainee I do not know whether it affected him as well.

After much deliberation, and I speak from one side of a two-sided event—us and the craft inhabitants, of which I am sure there must have been at least one. If I were asked why this incident was never recounted, I would have to say that it was because it was such a normal natural feeling at the time of the encounter. It was much like hearing a door slamming loudly in the distance without seeing it. You would not talk about it because everybody knows what a slamming door looks like and there are so many other things going on in our lives. This episode was something like that—seeing a strange flying object with no noise attached to it. It was an eerily but strangely common feeling that you would not necessarily expect to talk about. If you can imagine the comparison, it is somewhere in the middle.

I chose Sun City Center as my retirement locale. I live within walking distance of where this encounter took place. That is strange too—when I think about it. Sometimes, in my stillness I get a fleeting glance of that supernatural craft that visited me, and I somehow know that life is but a breaking through of one dimension into another. Better said, from Glory to Glory.

Ta-ta, Lad