In Need of Better Equipment

Once upon a time, I saw a marvelous and mysterious occurrence in the night sky between Kansas City and Topeka. I was on a date with handsome soldier who had been deployed in Vietnam as a medic. He was spending his last few months in the Army at Ft Riley. We had gone to Kansas City for a concert but the tickets were sold out. Instead of staying in KC for the evening we opted to buy wine and return home. (A lot less expensive for guy on a soldier's pay than partying in the River Quay area would have been.) If we had stayed in Kansas City, I would never have witnessed the only thing I have ever remotely considered as a possible UFO.

As we were driving back from Kansas City, I was slouched down in the passenger's seat, gazing into the northern sky. There was not nearly as much light pollution then as there is now so once we left Kansas City behind, I could see a few faint stars in the north. A particularly bright one caught my eye. There are no exceptionally bright stars in the northern skies but this one was not so bright or so large that I thought it was a plane or anything artificial. It simply looked like a bright star. For whatever reason, it kept my attention as we rolled through the dark night for about seventy miles. I just happened to be looking at the "star" when it suddenly turned bright red and accelerated in a razor straight line to the west, literally disappearing from sight in an instant. I was so astounded that I shouted, scaring the soldier, "Did you see that?!"

"What? What?" He was shocked by my outburst. I excitedly tried to explain what I had just seen. I am certain he realized I had truly seen something startling. He knew I was not lying about seeing something is what I mean, but he had not seen it.

I have seen falling stars many times. Though they are fleeting, they fall toward the horizon, toward the ground. You have a beat or two to witness their fall. This thing, whatever it was, shot out of sight supernaturally fast. It seemed to have disappeared into a point.

Since then, I have kept my eyes open, hoping to see something like it again, but the odds of seeing anything travelling that fast are infinitesimally small. If I had not been looking directly at that star when it turned red, I would never have seen it move and disappear. It was an amazing thing to witness. There might be some natural explanation. I have often wondered if it was a meteor falling toward earth that hit the atmosphere and glanced off. That might explain why it turned red and might explain why it shot away at such a tremendous rate. I am not sure if glancing off the atmosphere would cause it to travel at such a tremendous speed? If it had been falling toward the earth at the same speed that it appeared to have accelerated into the west, wouldn't it have appeared to be moving relative to the other stars, at least a little bit, before it turned red? I was looking at it for almost an hour before it disappeared.

Sometimes I think that if it was some sort of a spacecraft - just thinking here, not saying I believe it was actually a spacecraft - maybe they will come back for me some day. So, the other night when I turned north on Snokomo Road, I noticed a brilliant light low in the west that is normally not there. I took a photo of it with my phone but all it captured was this fuzzy orb. Venus is visible in the eastern sky right now, and Jupiter doesn't rise until 11 pm CST. My little phone takes good photos, but not nearly good enough to determine what this brilliant orb was. I need better photographic equipment! Alas, I do not think it was the mother ship coming back for me...