Name:
E-mail address: unknown
Early one afternoon, my boss, Mel Senior, told me to move a one-way plow to one of the fields a few miles southwest of the town. Mel said he had some business to attend to in town and that I should wait for him to come in the truck and pick me up. "Once you get inside the field, bring it back up toward this end, away from the gate", he had instructed. "But whatever you do, don't turn right and don't back up!", he warned.
Now, a peculiarity of a one-way plow is that, when pulling one with a tractor, there are only two choices -- go forward, or turn left. Any attempt to back up, or turn right, will cause the whole apparatus to jack-knife into the air and possibly come down on top of you.
I had followed Mel in the truck as he pulled the plow to a T-junction south of town, (the only right turn on the way to my destination) and had watched as he deftly executed the three left turns required to point the tractor-plow combination westward along the main highway.
I was to proceed west from the T-Junction to the first section road, then turn south and follow the dirt road to the field. Then left at the gate into the field, and one final left inside the field.
The field (a quarter section, I believe) had been left fallow that year. I had been there many times though, as it was often used as a parking area for trucks or farm implements, and as a staging area when work was being done on crops in other nearby fields.
Driving a few miles southward along the dirt section road, I would pass a large gully on my left -- there was a 20 foot drop right at the edge of the road there. Up a slight rise over the low ridge-line, on past the farmhouse on the right, then I would be at the northern end of the field.
******************************************* _____________________________________________ | | Path of | <-- Fence | Flying | | Object | <--North | \ | | \ | | x1 | Saw object | x2 | from here | x3 | \ | x4 / | \ | // |(b)<--------(a)<------<------<------\ | ## (c) /// | \ \ | Gully --> #### //// | Left tractor | | ##### //// | here Gate | | ___________###____///____|_____________________________________| | |___|____ (d) (e) ----------->--------------/ South--> ____________________________________________________________________________ /// Ridge-line --> /// _ // |_| <-- Farm house
(a) My position when object sighted (b) Dis-mounted tractor here (c) I intended to go here to check out the crash (d) I was most likely picked up here by my boss (e) Maybe this is where I woke up in the truck
(x1 thru x4) mark path of observed craft
Map of the area showing dirt section road, field, ridge-line and gully
*******************************************
All went well until I was inside the field, heading north, about three hundred feet from my final destination. Possibly I had looked back to check on the plow, anyway, I must not have been looking directly forward. Otherwise, I would surely have seen it sooner.
Right there in front of me, less than a thousand feet away, an airplane was coming down. It was going to land. No! It was going to crash! As I watched in near dis-belief, the craft descended, from right to left, at an angle of about 30 degrees, until it went behind the low ridge-line in the next field to the north.
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X1
Ridge-line X2
\ X3
__**%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%**__ X4
__**%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%**__
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Field of view facing North (x1 thru x4 indicate path of craft)
I fully expected to see big cloud of smoke as it crashed into the gully which was just beyond the ridge-line -- but there was none. As I continued to drive the tractor toward the northern end of the field, I kept watching the western end of the ridge-line to see if it came up again but it didn't reappear.
The craft was only visible for a few seconds, but I could clearly see a row of five or six (certainly fewer than eight) "windows" on the side. The color was white or light metallic, with the area between the "windows" being dark blue and forming a sort of wide stripe along the side. I had an almost perfect horizontal side view, so no wings were visible. Also, I have no recollection of seeing any kind of tail structure or stabilizer assembly. The tractor engine was unmuffled and loud, so I was unable to hear any sound from the craft.
Needless to say, I was rather excited and determined to go and investigate. What healthy 15 year old boy would pass up a chance to investigate something like this? I decided I would drive the tractor to the fence and then go to the crash site on foot.
[fade out]
I woke up sitting in the passenger seat of my boss's truck. I use the term "woke up' rather loosely here, for I hadn't been asleep. I had been siting upright with my eyes already open, but I had been completely oblivious of my surroundings.
It was rather disconcerting, as I realized that I hadn't the foggiest idea of how I got there or where we were going. After a sideward glance to confirm that the driver of the truck was indeed my boss, I pondered the situation in silence. Amnesia? Insanity? Was I loosing my mind?
We were now off the road and driving thru the field, heading north toward the tractor and plow. At a certain point near where I had observed the craft, the memory came flooding back along with the excitement. "I saw a plane go down there, just beyond the ridge." I blurted out. "It crashed into the gully!"
"Yes, and damn it all, you drove the tractor right up against the fence!" my boss shot back. "How many times have I warned you about that?" "Judas Priest!" "Now we'll have to make a trip back to the house to get a log chain before we can get it out of there." "There's no excuse for this!" "That's it, you're fired!"
He was pissed. He was *really* pissed. I had committed the cardinal sin of Kansas wheat farming. The tractor was now trapped between the plow and the fence, with no room to move forward, and no room to turn.
He got out of the truck and unhitched the plow from the tractor. After a few minutes he was able to get the tractor out from between the fence and the plow, but a log chain would still be required to reposition the plow. I wanted to get out and help him try pushing it around by hand, but he insisted that I remain in the truck.
The excitement of remembering having seen the craft go down had caused me to completely forget about waking up in the truck. Similarly, my consternation at being in hot water with the boss over the tractor's position caused me to put all thoughts of the craft out of mind.
My only concern now was keeping my job. After a bit of pleading as we drove back to town, he seemed to relent. As I got out of the truck in front of my quarters, he said, "Come by the house in the morning and we'll see about it."
I went inside, collapsed across my bed, and fell instantly into a deep sleep. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. The next morning, after a good 15 hours of sleep, I went to work as usual and things were just as they always were. The fact that I had been fired the previous day would scarcely cross my mind again for decades. In fact, I wouldn't think about *anything* that happened after I got off the tractor that day in it's proper context until the summer of 1995. The events wouldn't be forgotten, I just wouldn't think about them much -- 37 years of selective amnesia.
I did sometimes think about having seen the craft though, and had reason to speak to my boss about it again a few weeks later.
The wheat harvest was in full progress and we were running the harvester on a field a few miles further south along that same dirt section road. Late in the afternoon, and off several miles to the west, we could see a big wall in the sky moving toward us. A storm was coming.
I never did understand the whys and wherefores of what happened next, but it goes like this. There were three of us, Mel Senior, his son Mel Junior, and myself. We had two fully loaded, five-ton, flat-bed, grain trucks with us in the harvest field, and a utility truck had been left in the staging area -- the field from which I had viewed the craft come down.
Mel Senior had said he would make one more pass around the field with the harvester while Mel Junior and I went to fetch the utility truck. I haven't the slightest notion of why they deemed it necessary to bring the utility truck to the harvest field at that time, but they did. So we left for the staging area in one of the flat-bed trucks, with me driving.
When we got there, Mel Junior told me that his father would come along soon on the tractor and that I was to wait there for him. He then headed back to the harvest field in the utility truck. So I sat there in the truck and waited. Within 15 minutes the rain started. A real cloud-burst it was, too.
It rained really hard for the better part of an hour. Midway thru the storm, I saw Mel Senior drive past the gate on the tractor with his head bent against the downpour. I tried flashing the truck lights to get his attention, but too late, he was already gone. Obviously he hadn't been expecting to meet me there at the staging area, he was heading for home.
I knew I'd never be able to catch up with the tractor on the muddy road with a fully loaded truck, so I decided to wait the storm out. When the rain had all but stopped, I pulled onto the road and headed slowly north toward the main highway.
There was no problem until I got to the crest of the ridge-line and realized that if I stayed on the right side of the road I'd be passing only a couple of feet from the 20 foot drop into the gully. The road would surely cave in from the weight of full load of wet wheat I was carrying.
Instinctively, I let up on the gas and turned the wheel slightly to the left to ease over onto the opposite side of the road. But the rear of the truck started sliding to the right and, within seconds, the right rear wheels were off the road and in the ditch. Damn!
The truck had stopped a good 50 yards before the gully, but was now stuck in the shallow drainage ditch that ran alongside the road. Nothing to be done now but go get help. I remembered the farmhouse. What luck! It was the only house for miles, and it was only a few hundred feet away!
A young man about the same age as myself answered the door. He was quite tall -- tall and lanky. I quick explained my predicament and concluded with, "so I'd like to use your phone to call Mel Senior, to have him come and pull me out with the tractor."
Him: "We don't have a telephone."
Me: "No phone?"
Him: "No."
Me: "Oh... Are your parents home?"
Him: "Come in"
I was let into the living room of a large old farmhouse. It was well furnished and meticulously clean.
Me: "Are your parents home?"
Him: "They are not here."
Me: "I see."
Him: "I have a car. I'll drive you to town."
Me: "You can't. The road is all muddy, it's at least four inches deep."
Him: "Don't worry." "Do you like going to movies?"
Me: "Sure."
Him: "I have a car. Let's go to Goodland Saturday and go to the movies."
Me: "That'd be great. Sure, let's do it."
Him: "Saturday night."
With that he left me standing alone in the room. As we spoke I had begun to notice that there was something a bit odd about his manner. Aside from his Ichabod Crane like appearance, there was a certain stiltedness about his movements. And his speech... there was something odd about that too. Not the speech of a foreigner, and yet, not completely natural either.
And what about his parents? Were they away visiting somewhere? Or was he living all alone in this large country house? If the later, He really was a great housekeeper for the room was certainly tidy enough.
He *did* have a car. A 1958 Edsel -- the one with the gearshift buttons instead of a lever. As we drove to the farm, I quickly came to recognize that "Ichabod", however young, healthy, and intelligent he might be, was an absolute cultural retard. He knew nothing whatsoever of any of the teen lore of our time. He dropped me off in front of the farm with a promise to pick me up there at 5 pm on Saturday, so we could go to the movies in Goodland.
I went to the house and told Mel Senior of my misfortune with his truck load of wheat. "Well, you go on home now. Me and Junior'll go pull it out after supper." He continued, "Be here at sunrise in the morning, we'll have to dry the wheat out."
It was a morning of back-breaking work. Using buckets and shovels, we spread the wheat out on several large tarpaulins to dry in the sun. At mid-morning, while we were taking a short break, I said to Mel Senior, "You know that gully there by where the truck got stuck? That's the exact same place I saw an airplane go down."
"That's exactly why it happened, too", he replied. "It was easy to see from the way the truck was siting, you tried to get away from that gully and that was what started it sliding in the first place." "If you'd just gone straight, and not paid any attention to the gully, then everything would have been alright."
The point was debatable, but he was in a foul mood from all the hard work we'd been doing, so I let it go at that. To my disappointment, he had completely ignored my comment about the plane. A little while later, he said something I thought was totally offbeat.
"When I picked you up that day, you was just standing there along side the road shaking like you was having some kind of fit or something."
I hadn't a clue as to what he was talking about and said so. "You know exactly what I mean", he replied. "Just let me tell you this, I can't let you drive the tractor any more -- if that happened while you were pulling a plow, you'd fall off and be cut into a million pieces."
I fully understood the implications of his words, and found it totally inexplicable that he should say such a thing. I'd never had any kind of fit or anything. I certainly wasn't an epileptic or anything like that, so why on earth would he be telling me this?
We went back to work shoveling wheat.
I should note that, at the time of the above described events, due to my strict Christian upbringing, I was firmly convinced the notion of "Flying Saucers" had no actual basis in reality, and was nothing more than science fiction. It never once occurred to me that what I had seen descending into the gully could possibly have been something other than an airplane. Indeed, had someone suggested that I might possibly have seen a "Flying Saucer", I would have immediately rejected the idea as being absolutely silly.
A few years later, my narrow view on such matters was to be changed by an encounter that would shake my belief system at it's very foundations and leave no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, as to the reality of UFOs. It was a great shock -- not so much because I had seen a UFO, but more because the basis of my belief system had been demonstrably proven to be false.
If all the things I had believed until then were false, then what was the truth? From that day onward, in a search for answers, I devoted a great deal of my free time to the study UFOs and related subjects.
It goes without saying that, being keenly interested in UFO phenomena, I would sometimes think back to that day in Kansas and recall watching the craft descend -- maybe it hadn't been an airplane after all. And always, there was a feeling of regret that I hadn't gone to investigate what had happened beyond that ridge.
I had watched something, with what I took to be a row of windows, glide down toward the gully until it was out of sight behind the ridge-line. There should have been smoke from the crash, but none had been visible. I should have gone to investigate, but I hadn't. Other than the physical details of the sighting, that was it, end of story. In other words, I was failing to devote any critical thought to my personal circumstances regarding the sighting.
Perhaps it was a mental block of some kind, but for whatever reason, it was not until summer of 1995, when I was thinking yet again of the incident, that the following two questions took form in my mind. "Why hadn't I gone to investigate?" After all, the gully was only several hundred feet away. And, "If I hadn't gone to investigate, then what *had* I done?".
Imagine my amazement when I realized that I couldn't answer either of those questions. An interesting development. Only then did it occur to me how "out of character" it would be for a healthy 15 year old boy to observe what he believed to be an airplane crash in the next field, yet not walk over to check it out.
I reviewed the thoughts I had had at the time of the sighting. I had been surprised at first sight of the object. Then excited and concerned when I noted that it had seemed to be on a collision course with the gully. I had *definitely* decided that I would drive to the fence-line and then walk over to see what had happened. Then what?
I remembered that I had kept watching the western end of the ridge as I continued to drive toward the fence. I stopped the tractor at the fence, got off it, and... And what? Logically, I should have slipped thru the three-strand barbed-wire fence and started walking (or running) toward the gully, but I had no memory of having done so. In fact, I had no memory of doing anything after getting off the tractor.
I went over the whole scene again from the beginning, but with the same result. I still couldn't remember much of anything beyond getting off the tractor. But by now, I wasn't just remembering, I was trying to visualize. That's when it happened! I had been holding a mental image of the tractor stopped at the fence, when the memory suddenly came to mind.
It wasn't a memory of what I had done next, though. Rather, it was the memory of old Mel Senior jockeying the tractor back and forth at that same spot, trying to extract it from between the plow and the fence.
After that the pieces quickly fell into place, as the amazing process of associative recall brought them back in reversed order. My getting fired, the scolding, trying to tell about seeing the plane, the first memory of having seen it, even coming too in the truck. Now, for the first time, I was able to place these events in their true context.
Well, there it was! I had gotten off the tractor with the intention of going to investigate the "crash", and had then somehow wound up sitting in my bosses truck. Searching my memory for other bits of information, I remembered the incident of getting the wheat truck stuck which led to the memory of Mel Senior's offbeat comments the following day.
He must have come upon me standing beside the road shaking somewhere in the vicinity of the gully. The picture was now fairly complete. I now realized that he hadn't fired me that day because of the tractor's position at the fence at all, but because he was genuinely concerned over the risk that I might have an accident during a future occurrence of the "shaking fit" he had seen.
The events were as follows:
(a) Saw a craft descending toward the gully (b) Got off the tractor at the fence line with the intention of going to (c). (c) ? missing time (d) Mel Senior came upon me standing beside the road shaking. (e) Came too in the truck as we were on the way to the tractor. (a) Remembered seeing the craft due to being in the same position again. (b) Got scolded and fired for driving the tractor close to the fence.
[wherein (a) thru (e) correspond to positions marked on the map]
I have no memory of anything that happened between the time I got off the tractor and when I came to in the truck. The amount of missing time could be anything between 20 minutes and an hour.
I do have a vague memory of suddenly being blind and not in control of my body, yet conscious, and alarmed and confused over what was happening to me. Also, there were what seemed to be loud noises inside my head accompanied by a feeling of extreme physical discomfort. Unfortunately, I am unable to place this memory in any spatial or temporal context, so it could be entirely unrelated to this particular incident.
Now... the question arises, do I think I was abducted? Well, I certainly don't feel that I was in any way targeted for abduction that day. At most, something similar to the following might have happened.
Zwrx1: Oh darn! Now we'll never get all these soil samples aboard on schedule. That imbecile of an earthling farmhand actually turned around to watch where he was going long enough to get a good look at us as we made our final descent, and now he's heading this way.
Zwrx2: No problem, Zwrx1. I'll just scramble his brain a bit and have him go stand beside the road shaking till his boss comes along.
Zwrx1: Good thinking, Zwrx2. Get right on it, will you. He's already climbing thru the fence.
Not being the least bit suspicious that something out of the ordinary might have happened to me that day, I did not check for marks on my body afterward. I certainly didn't notice anything unusual, though.
As far as I know, other than causing Mel Senior to revise his assessment of my suitability as a farmhand, the incident has not affected my life in any way. I now regard it as an oddity and have pretty much accepted the idea that I'll never know for sure what happened that day.
One closing note: "Ichabod Crane" and I did drive to Goodland that following Saturday to go to the movies. The theater was closed, so we didn't get to see a movie, but it was a rather interesting evening all the same. He was not only a cultural retard, but also the most bizarre person I'd met in my life up until then.
I decided that he was a bit funny in the head, and that it would be better if I didn't have anything more to do with him, so we never met again after that. One of the factors contributing to my decision was the way he said, out of the blue, that he knew flying saucers were real.
-Tinbox