UFO Sighting

Did I really just write that?

Photo by TNL Design & Illumination GmbH on Unsplash

I’m going out on a limb by writing this short piece about a bizarre experience I had earlier this summer. First off, I want to make it clear — I am a skeptic when it comes to UFOs, UFO sightings, the belief in UFOs, etc., etc. What I should say is, it’s not so much that I’m a skeptic, it’s just something I don’t think about. At all. Ever. It’s never captivated my imagination. I’ve always — and still am — much more intrigued by the activities of human beings.

That said, human beings, for centuries, really since the dawn of time, have been interested in the notion of extraterrestrial beings/life. So, given that humans and their theories about life intrigue me, perhaps this subject should, too. Plus, I had an inexplicable experience a few months ago myself. Furthermore, it was corroborated by video from an internet stranger who also lives here in Baltimore.

Here’s what happened: it was mid-morning, around 11:30 a.m., on Friday, July 12th. I was taking a break from job hunting, sitting outside on my back patio with my dogs, and facing the sky north. It was a coolish, sunny day. There were just a few clouds in the sky, so visibility was excellent. As I looked up towards the tree line in our backyard, I suddenly noticed three distinct metallic orbs bobbing up and down. The sun glinted off them. They didn’t appear to be moving all that fast, as they weaved back and forth between one another. I had never seen anything like them before — their presence stunned me. (I mention that, as I shared this story on the Baltimore subreddit and several people asked me why I didn’t take pictures or video of these orbs, and I explained that I was so taken aback and surprised by what I saw that I didn’t think even to try to capture them).

As I said, they were in the northern part of the sky, right above downtown Baltimore, not far from the Inner Harbor. They kept moving southward. I watched them with intense curiosity as they made their way across the sky towards the Inner Harbor, eventually disappearing from view.

As I write this explanation, I’m still at a loss to understand what I saw on that day. However, I have seen Congressional testimony published by The Independent that shows exactly what I witnessed. Except in this video, there is just one that Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, describes as being a “spherical orb” in the Middle East. Apparently, these orbs have been sighted quite often in the Middle East as well as across the entire Atlantic seaboard in the U.S.

Furthermore, a subredditor reached out to me after I posted a question, as I mentioned briefly above, on the Baltimore subreddit about whether or not anyone else had seen the three orbs that I saw on July 12th — most people gave me a hard time (it is, alas, the internet, where jokesters, trolls, and gagsters abound), but many did not. In fact, many people took it seriously. Anyway, that subredditor told me that his roommate/buddy saw the spherical orbs later that same night and had filmed them! He sent me the film, and I was astonished to see the same orbs hovering over the Inner Harbor. So I wasn’t alone in seeing them on that day!

Interestingly and coincidentally, I recently purchased a book published by the University of Chicago Press titled How to Think Impossibly: About UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else by Jeffrey J. Kripal. This philosophical study prompts us to, well, think about the impossible, including that of UFOs. I’ll likely write more on it later, as I’ve just cracked it open to read. Still, the main thrust of his approach is that there are enough people who’ve experienced impossible things, so we must take them seriously and devise a theory of the imagination to understand what they have encountered, whether that be UFOs, time travel, spirits, or more.

I hope that Kripal’s work will provide me with more of a framework, a theoretical one, to consider what I experienced.

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