Just for fun, I am going to relate my first UFO sighting. I can remember the date easily, because the day this occured caused me some confusion as to what I saw.
It was July 4th, 1969 and I was 15 years old. I lived in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, about one mile from the Atlantic Ocean. Every year on the 4th of July, my town would have a huge firework display that would attract huge crowds. Jacksonville is a very large city about 20 miles inland from where I lived, but our display dwarfed their's. So many people would attend this display (and still do to this day), that if you drove to the beach you could expect to get stuck in traffic jams for an hour or more after the show.
Anyway, it was late in the evening, maybe an hour before sunset, I guess maybe 7:30- 8:00 PM. I went out in my front yard to see if it was starting to get dark, I wanted to walk down to the beach (maybe a 20 minute walk) in time to see the show which starts as soon as it gets dark.
The sun was not quite set, but it was below the trees to my west (my house faced north). So, it was still quite light.
As I looked at the sky I heard a noise behind and above me. I turned around (south) and looked up. I saw a very odd object. It was a very simple object. It was shaped like the letter V flying with the point going forwards. This object had 7 bright red flares. There was a red flare at the point, and 3 flares down each leg, with a flare at the end of each leg. The flares were evenly spaced apart. Connecting these red glowing flares were what appeared to be black narrow tubes. I remember that this object reminded me of Tinker Toys, the wooden toys we had as a kid. If you took the round wood pieces and connected them with the narrow tube-like pieces of wood, this was how this object appeared. It did not have any body whatsoever, it was just these bright red flares connected by these narrow black tubes.
This object was very low, no more than 100 feet altitude max. And it was flying very slowly, I estimate between 20-30 MPH max. I think I could have kept up with this object on my bicycle, that is how slow it was moving. This object was not large at all, I estimate it's wingspan to be at most 15 feet. So, this did not look like an object that could be manned whatsoever.
My first thought when I saw this object was that it was some new type of firework that I had never seen before. After all, it was the 4th of July. But this object was very strange, because I could not figure out what was making it fly. It was not shooting fire or sparks, I could not tell how it was propelled. And I could hear this object, it was making a sizzling noise, similar to bacon frying in a frying pan. And there were very faint wisps of black smoke floating off of the flares. But this faint smoke was not shooting backwards, it was just floating off of the flares, the way steam rises off of a cup of hot coffee or a bowl of soup.
This object passed directly over my head, and I turned to watch it as it continued north. Where I lived was very flat, and I could see a great distance to the north especially. We had a Naval Base (Mayport) about 5 miles north, with binoculars I could see the masts of the aircraft carriers based there. I just tell you that to give you an idea of how far I could see from my home to the north.
Well, as I said, I thought this was some new type of firework. But it did puzzle me as to how it flew. I continued to watch, and kept expecting it to eventually fall to the ground. But this is what really caught my attention, it NEVER came down. Now, I do not know of any firework that can stay aloft like this. I watched this object as it slowly flew away, I watched it for at least 2-3 minutes. I could easily see the red flares as they were very bright.
This object never did fall to the ground, it just flew off into the distance to where I could no longer see it. From the first moment I saw this object, if flew a very level flight at a very steady speed and altitude.
I do not know what this object was. It did not look like a manned object whatsoever. It had no body, and was relatively small. Perhaps it was some experimental military craft, but this was 40 years ago, and I still have never seen anything like it.
So anyway, that was the first unidentified flying object I ever saw. It was completely unlike all the other objects I saw later. In fact, none of the objects I have seen looked similar, they were all very different from another.
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