We were sitting around the table after a nice Sunday dinner. The grandchildren were talking about various things and I had nothing to add. All of a sudden they started talking about UFOs.
“I’ve seen them,” I said.
The family looked up in disbelief. My eldest grandson said, “Really, Grandma?”
In the mid-1960s, we were living in Bremerton. It was a hot and humid August, and all the windows of the house were open. There was no air conditioning. The children were asleep in bed. My husband was out at a meeting.
Our house was on a hill. From the living room we had a beautiful view of the flatlands of Kitsap County with Hood Canal in the distance and the Olympic Mountains on the horizon. In back of our house was a large Assembly of God church parking lot. The hill went up another two blocks to the ridgeline. People on the other side of the hill saw Seattle and the Cascades.
We had a small porch off the dining room at the back of the house, and I was sitting there enjoying the night breeze. Then I felt something.
I looked up to the northeast to see a large round disc in the sky. It was slowly cruising to the southwest, making no sound, until it was lost in the darkness.
To the north was the Naval Torpedo Station. To the southwest was the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. We could not see the shipyard from our house, only its lights in the distance at night.
The next day I was reading The Bremerton Sun and read that many people called into the authorities to report seeing a UFO. Local authorities said it was a weather balloon. But I looked up what weather balloons look like and laughed. It was not a weather balloon.
The humid, hot weather continued. The next night I was sitting on the porch enjoying the breeze again. My husband was once again out at a meeting. This time I brought out his low-powered binoculars. I thought, “I don’t expect the disc to come again, but if it does, I’m ready.”
I again felt something and looked up, and there was the UFO. I put the binoculars to my eyes and started to look the craft over. It was round. There seemed to be a small level on top, then a larger level. The large level had lights on it. I thought they must be windows. The underside of the UFO was the reverse of the top.
The size of the UFO was difficult to judge, but it seemed to be larger than the church parking lot behind our house. No lights appeared on the back of the UFO as it continued silently and slowly skimming the treetops and rooftops as it moved toward the southwest.
If you’d seen it you would know it was not an aircraft. It was a big, round metallic object. I was shocked. I was not interested in UFOs at the time, I was too busy raising a family. But now I believed in UFOs. I expect it was scoping out the torpedo station and the shipyard to see how advanced our civilization was.
This was a big secret I had kept from my family, and it took me until 2021 to tell the story.
“Is this true, Grandma?” my grandson asked.
“Yes, it is,” I said.
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