Rick's UFO Pick - Featured on the xx-xx-07 UFO-Files Report Show

Occurred : 10/12/1985 23:45
Reported: 10/15/2000 21:24
Posted: 3/21/2003
Location: Swansboro, NC
Shape: Disk
Duration:23:45 - 23:50

My sister and I observed a disk for about 5 minutes hovering approximately 120 feet away.

My sister and I were watching the Johnny Carson show. When a commercial came on, my sister got up to go to the kitchen. To get to the kitchen from the den, she had to walk right next to a set of sliding glass doors that run parallel to the White Oak river.

She yelled for me to come into the kitchen to look at something. She had to call several times because she does the same thing at the site of a cockroach. She is clearly an over exaggerator. This time however, she had spotted something much bigger than a roach. As I turned and looked through the glass and over the river, I caught my first sight of a black disk that must have been 30 feet in diameter, about 10 feet thick in the middle and tapering to about 3 feet thick equilaterally at the circumference.

The craft was hovering about 50 feet above the water and approximately 120 feet from my sister and I. That put our vantage at just slightly above the craft when I noticed the moon reflecting off of its semi-gloss black finish. We were stunned but not afraid. We slid the large glass door open and walked out onto the first floor deck. The first strange thing I noticed was the complete absence of noise. The craft was literally hovering noiselessly in front of me.

That is when the gravity of the situation hit me. Living between Cherry Point Air Force Base and Camp Lejune Marine Corps base, it was not unusual for aircraft to fly directly over the house. In fact it seemed that the Marine Corps had mapped a low altitude helicopter route directly over the house. Helicopters do however make an unmistakable noise which would have been nearly unbearable at the range we were from the noiseless black disk.

My sister and I walked across the deck and down the stairs onto the concrete driveway which was littered with shattered hickory nuts that had been run over by my mother's Buick. The reason that I mention the hickory nuts is because I was bare footed at the time and the only thing that distracted me from the noiseless black disk was the incessant pricking on the bottoms of my feet. It was for this reason that my sister and I walked off of the driveway onto the grass.

Myself having moved about 90 degrees horizontally, about 20 degrees vertically, and about 30 feet closer, it was fairly clear that the object was taking up 3 dimensional space. From the time that my sister called me to come see the object to the time that we were standing in the grass was a matter of about 2 minutes. We stood in the grass for about 1 minute which also happens to be the amount of time we watched the craft before it left. During that 1 minute, things went from being strange to being inexplicable.

The craft began to move slightly more into the bay and away from us, but it wavered a bit horizontally. After about 30 seconds of that, it moved farther out into the channel. At this position, it was equidistant from the shore and from the White Oak river bridge (of the two bridges, the bridge on the Swansboro side). It wavered a bit in this direction as well. Finally, as it slowly moved toward the bridge, it gained speed so quickly that its path was traced with a streak of light.

As it left, it moved forward much faster than upward, but it did move upward and to the left. When I say it gained speed quickly, I mean that it was gone in a matter of a tenth of a second. When the last minute of the observation of the craft was over, the first minute of discovering its effect had begun. Immediately I heard the noise of masses of minnows jumping in the water. My sister and I walked down onto the dock to investigate the seemingly amplified noise. What we discovered was a large area of foam. In fact the water seemed to be boiling.

All around us the minnows were jumping. Normally minnows swim in schools of about 30-60 which might measure 5 square feet in surface area. While in a school, each minnow acts as one so that when one is scared, the entire school is scared. I have been in situations where maybe 5 schools of minnows will jump at the same time because I jumped on the dock, but never before and never since have I seen so many minnows jumping.

In retrospect I wish I would have put my toes in the water to see if it was hot, but I didn't. I've often wondered if the thick foam on top of the water was caused by all of the minnows jumping or if all the minnows were jumping because the water was foamy. At that point, approximately 7 minutes had passed and my mother had come outside. My sister and I told her what had happened and I guess she was too tired to care. A few months after the experience I drew what I had seen with crayons for a science teacher, and I bet he still has it somewhere. At the time, my sister was 13 years old and I was 8 years old. My sister and I haven't talked about it since just after it happened. During my education at a state supported University, I realized how contradictory what I have seen is to contemporary physics. The truth is going to be nice.

A big thanks goes out to NUFORC for this sighting report.