The following is an excerpt from my new ebook Black Swan Ghosts: a sociologist encounter witnesses of unidentified aerial craft, strange beings, and other elements of the multiverse (Mount Baldy Press, inc., August 2017, ISBN 0-9715863-7-3) Enjoy!
Chapter Six — Joy French, car stalls while driving up Mt. St. Helens, experiences missing time and unexplained lights over the car
Joy French is a woman now in her nineties who spent most of her life working for Alaska Airlines in ground support and mechanics: she told me she was two years too late to be a flight attendant for the airline. I met Joy in the Coeur D’Alene, Idaho area after you put an ad in the local paper for a meeting of UFO witnesses.
Why did Joy want to assemble such a group?
Joy said that in the 1980’s she was living in the Mt. St. Helens area and had an experience there she could never explain to this day.
She had contacted via Citizen Band radio a gay friend of hers, Don, and asked him to share some wine with her in the evening. He also asked her if she wanted to get together to watch a movie together at his place. She agreed to drive down to his residence lower down on the mountain by lake Merwin. The last thing she clearly remembers that day is hanging up the mic of the CB, leaving her house and getting in her vehicle.
The next thing she remembers is that it’s dark and both of them are in her car driving up the mountain to her place at around 2 A.M. Except Don was driving the car and she never, ever let anyone drive her cars! She told me was really firm about that.
The next thing she remembers is that all of a sudden the radio goes out and the car stalls. Her friend being a car mechanic got out of the driver-side door and goes to the front of the vehicle. Joy remembers that it should have been pitch black at that time of night at that location, except her friend was covered in bright light coming from the sky, so bright it was like “daylight at noon” as she put it.
She remembers asking him “where is all that light coming from?” He lifted the hood and looked around inside the engine compartment for a few minutes. He then said “there’s nothing wrong with the engine, start it.” It started perfectly and Don closed the hood and got back in the car.
Joy’s next memory is waking up in her bed many hours later at about 8 o’clock in the morning. She has no recall how she got there or where her friend is. She tried calling Don on the CB. He was back at home. She suggested they should meet down at the community kitchen to discuss what happened to them.
She asks him: “What happened last night? Everyone will think we’re crazy.” He has exactly the same memories as she does and the same missing time gaps. He says to her that no one will believe them if they talk about it and, yes, everyone will think they’re crazy. They decided to never talk about it again. Joy kept her word for about a decade.
To this day, Joy can’t explain what happened to her and her friend. She had some hypnosis but no memories surfaced that she didn’t already have.
Her remedy was to hold “UFO witness meetings” in the Pacific Northwest area of which I was able to attend three. And these meetings were filled with people who had related experiences from all over Idaho and Washington.