Category: black swan ghosts

Witness’s car stalls mysteriously, a bright light appears overhead, and then she loses seven hours of time (excerpt)

Joy French--witness in 1980's to her car stalling, bright lights overhead, and missing time
Joy French–witness in 1980’s to her car stalling mysteriously, bright lights overhead, and missing time

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.

Read about fourteen more stories like this

Huckleberries and plant-flattening “flying tortoise shells” with lights (book excerpt)

Louise Voves
Louise Voves–witness to military coverup of unidentified aerial craft and physical trace evidence in the 1970’s

The following is a rough draft excerpt from my forthcoming book Black Swan Ghosts: a sociologist’s encounters with witnesses of unidentified aerial craft, strange beings, and the unexplained (Mount Baldy Press, inc., August 2017, ISBN 0-9715863-7-3) Enjoy!

Chapter 6—Huckleberries and flying tortoise shells with lights

Louise Voves is a woman I met in North Idaho, a friend of another witness in this book, Joy French, who had an interest in UFO’s after an encounter on Mt. St. Helens that left her and a friend with several hours of missing time. I met Louise at Joy’s apartment once and she told me her story.  I had a subsequent chance to interview her at her bakery in Athol, ID in October, 2015. Louise passed away due to complications of heart surgery several months after the interview. She was in her mid-80s.

Louise and her brother picked huckleberries once a year. It was in the early 1970’s. The brother made Huckleberry pies and jams for a living. So once a year they trekked out to a national forest near the town of Usk, Washington and the Kalispel Indian Reservation, just over the Idaho border. She told me this particular spot had good huckleberries. The huckleberry species Vaccinium is endemic to the Idaho and Montana area.

They were out there in late Summer at a known “good spot.” There was a mother and her son nearby also picking huckleberries. All of sudden they heard the mother say:  “What’s that?” and point up to the sky above them. A few hundred feet above the area they all saw what Louise described as a “two tortoise shells put together with colored lights pulsing around it.” It was sort of wobbling back and forth, basically just hovering in the same spot, about thirty to forty feet across in diameter. The mother and son panicked and started to leave saying they were going to get the police.

Louise and her brother watched the object for a few minutes. It made a motion like a leaf swaying back and forth as it’s falling, though this object stationary. She said it then the object then suddenly dove towards the ground at about a 45 degree angle and made a whooshing sound. It then moved away horizontally and quickly just over the ground and went out of area. As it did it pushed down all the meadow and grasses in its path completely flattening them in a path about 40 feet across for a hundred yards.

They weren’t sure what they had just seen. Louise told me that at the time they didn’t even have the word “UFO” in their vocabulary. After the object left, they went back to picking Huckleberries.

The mother and son had made their way down to the town of Usk and visited the police station who had called the sheriff who in turned called the military. (Spokane is home to Fairchild Air Force Base since the 1940’s and was a Strategic Air Command base in the 1970’s at the time of Louise’ sighting.)

After what seemed like a few hours later, a convoy of military trucks showed up at the site where Louise and her brother were. They dismounted from their vehicles and proceeded to ask Louise and her brother a ton of questions about what they had just seen. They wanted to see exactly where the vehicle went low to the ground. Louise then took them to the track of grasses that the object had flattened and the military were extremely interested, some of the soldiers following the path into the distance. They said to her and her brother “Were you drinking?” At one point they asked Louise “Did you see anyone?” implying possible  occupants of the flying disc.

Then they said:”You have to leave the area.” She told my friend Joy that she was asked to sign something saying she wouldn’t talk about what she had seen. Louise and her brother were really upset about this. As they left, they saw the military guys getting out their equipment, radiation and soil testing gear.

As they drove away, they saw more military vehicles arriving at the scene including troop carriers.

They went back the next day but now there was a military jeep stationed a few miles from their huckleberry spot and “kelly humps”, tank traps, freshly dug into the road. As they approached, the soldier in the jeep came out and said: “No one is allowed in the area, you’ll have to go back.”

This mean’t that Louise and her brother wouldn’t have many huckleberries that season and they were upset about that since her brother already had orders to fulfill. A friend of their’s attempted to visit the same area a week later and was still not allowed in. Louise said she never saw anything about it in the local newspapers or heard about this incident ever again.