Posted: February 8, 2009
Date: Mid 1970's
Time: Approx: 10:00 p.m.
I also want to say what a great job you have done and how much your efforts are appreciated. As (very) partial repayment, I'm forwarding my one and only significant story. The short version of which involves myself and my best friend from my teenage years (mid-1970's; I'm also an "old" guy...) on a backpacking trip in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, which we did fairly frequently during those years. Two mildly unusual events occurred one evening after dark when we were camped in a very remote off-trail area. In the early evening (just after dark) there was an extremely high amount of static electricity, so much so that we could create persistent "glowing circles" on our insulating sleeping pads by rubbing them rapidly in circles with our hands. At the time, this just seemed pretty 'neat', and we dismissed it (I had never seen this before (or since). While in the tent, a few hours later, maybe 10PM, we had a candle lit and were talking.
Suddenly a sound occurred, close by, that I have tried to best describe as maybe 2 yodelers working in conjunction, sort of slow-modulating a more-rapidly modulated sound up and down (this definitely sounded living, and not mechanically-created). It was so odd that both my friend and I initially started laughing, and then suddenly became terrified (within about a 1 second interval) when we realized that no human (not even 2 professional yodelers) could not have been making the sound we were hearing and that this was not a human or any normal animal for the area (I still remember the rapid expression change from laughter to terror on my friend's face - wish I had a videotape of both of us at that instant - something to laugh about today).
Anyway, we immediately blew out the candle and lay quiet. As odd as it sounds, we both then fell asleep after what seemed a fairly short while (no more noises occurred during that time period and I recall we both fell asleep with our knives held in our hands). So far, and for many years, this was the entire story and I thought no more of it, except to try and find out what may have made that sound (I had always assumed an animal, and it still could be.)
Part 2 of this is that my friend's family moved to Florida later that year, and we gradually lost contact with each other for the next several years. I had gone to college and he had sort of drifted all around the U.S., doing everything from odd jobs such as house painting in the South and California to working on ranches in Montana. As I understand it, he did a lot of hitch-hiking to get from place to place and was often camping alone in remote areas during his travels. I spoke with him around 1986 or 1987 after he had returned to Florida and he was a very different person - basically primarily talking about aliens, having been abducted while hitchhiking at night in the desert Southwest, etc.
One thing that really was interesting to me in hindsight was that he described in great detail being currently (at that time) watched on multiple separate occasions by the classic 'Men in Black' at his parent's house in Florida, though he was totally unaware of the term at that time or that it was a 'known' phenomena (his voice was shaking when he described them, black car, black suits, sunglasses, sometimes parked on the far side of the street in front of his house). I had read a Budd Hopkins book in the last year or so and actually informed him at that time of the term 'Men in Black' (he had never heard of it) and also told him to look into reading the Hopkins book (I think it was Missing Time). After this time period, we sort of again lost contact and I haven't been in real contact with him since.
Part 3 About 4 or so years ago, his younger brother contacted me primarily for other reasons when he was traveling in my area. The continuation of the above story is that his brother is now completely "unemployable" as he will be apparently fine for short periods but will then go off into seemingly crazy conversations/discourses about aliens/UFO's, etc. (fine under some circumstances, but not well-received in most workplace environments). He has also had some health conditions, which may or may not have been correlated to the other experiences.
Part of what has kept me interested in this area is my friend's experience, as well as the continuing, cumulative 'preponderance of evidence' from all the other ongoing reports, sightings, etc. What has made me more recently interested in the early backpacking experience in connection with everything else was, in part, aspects of your 1000 Oaks, California report, in combination with my friends later unfortunate experiences through the years.
I just want to say thanks again to you and good luck with everything.
Thank you to the person for a very interesting report.
Brian Vike, Director HBCC UFO Research and host of the Vike Report UFO Eyewitness radio show. email: hbccufo@telus.net HBCC UFO Research Blog:
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