The UFO Singularity (12 page)

It was just 5 or so miles outside of Locust Grove that Mike first noticed the bright light hovering in the distance. Glancing to his right, the object had caught his attention as it began moving over a mountain ridge to the east, drifting silently over the hills and valleys between.

Mike had wondered aloud to the others what a helicopter might be doing flying so late in the evening. The typical considerations all leapt to mind: Maybe someone had gotten lost while hiking, or maybe the helicopter was
looking for some suspicious vehicle reported in the area. Perhaps they were airlifting the victim of some accident to a nearby hospital; or maybe it was some kind of military helicopter passing through on a late-night routine.

As Mike and his company traveled along, it became apparent by the direction the light was moving that it would eventually cross with their path of travel. The object drew closer, and Mike was eventually able to see that the orientation of lights it displayed was not like any standard pattern he had ever witnessed on conventional aircraft. Within minutes, they were passing through Locust Grove, but as their exit onto the Bill Gardner Parkway approached on their left, Mike opted to continue north along Highway 23/42, just to get a better look at whatever this mysterious flying object might turn out to be.

The group continued traveling in the direction of the light, with Mike watching carefully for a location where he might pull over and observe the strange craft. Although there were a few trees lining the sides of the road, the light the craft had been giving off made its location obvious. Ahead on the left, Mike could see a power substation, surrounded on all sides by chain link fencing, and as he and the others drew near, it became clear that the object was hovering directly over this facility. Mike hurried along, and once they reached the clearing where the station was built, they suddenly found themselves in full view of this incredible aircraft.

It was enormous—a massive, disk-shaped object with colored lights along its perimeter, hovering in perfect
silence above the power station, and probably in full view of any commuters on the nearby Interstate.

Mike sped into the driveway in front of the gate at the station, rapidly flashing his headlights off and on before leaping out of the car into the cold November night. In the sky above him, he could see the craft in all its vivid detail, suspended virtually motionless directly above. It was, by all accounts, a flying saucer, with its colored lights rotating along its outer edges. Though he could not discern the color of the craft itself with certainty, Mike guessed that it was probably dull silver. Judging from the width of the fencing around the station, Mike estimated that the craft was at least 100 to 150 feet in diameter, and hovering between 200 to 250 feet above them.

Mike’s wife and sister couldn’t believe what was happening. Not only was there a huge, alien-looking saucer looming right over them, but they had watched helplessly as Mike pulled off to the side of the road, apparently signaling to the craft with his flashing headlights, then jumping out as he began waving his arms at this thing. What had he been thinking? Both women became very upset at seeing this, and their terrified shouting could be heard as they urged Mike to get back in the car and get them all out of there.

Mike, on the other hand, was intent on trying to get the attention of whoever may have been on board that saucer. “I continued waving my arms, as if to say to them,
Hey, I want to see who is flying this machine,
” Mike
recounted to me later. “The craft was just in a suspended state with these lights going around it. I remember thinking to myself,
I have to remember this,
so I likened the lights to the sort you would see on a Christmas tree, being red, green, and blue.”
¹

Though the colors could be discerned, something about those lights still managed to escape any kind of easy description. Mike strained his eyes to see what the actual source of each illumination may have been, comparing them to portholes along the side of a sailing vessel. He guessed each “porthole” was probably 18–24 inches in diameter, and spaced 8 to 12 feet apart. The lights would emit from these portholes in sequence with a first color, then a second as the first light slowly faded, illuminating the next nearest porthole in the new color, and then on to a third before repeating in this way all along the perimeter of the craft. “The lights seemed to me as if there was a white light inside that rotated, and would strike the portholes that were encased with the different colored transparent materials,” Mike’s e-mail said. “The best way I can describe these portholes is like the embers in a camp fire; a glowing type of light. That’s how my mind put it into perspective.”
²

The craft lingered there, completely silent and motionless, for another one or two minutes before it slowly began to drift toward the west, eventually passing right over I-75. Once the object was no longer in view, Mike returned to his car, finding his wife and sister still very terrified by
what was happening. Mike took several minutes trying to calm them down. Finally, after the excitement died down somewhat, the six of them resumed their journey home, driving the rest of the way in almost complete silence.

“We were all in some sort of shock,” Mike wrote of the incident. “When I got back to the house, I called Atlanta’s Action 5 New Channel,” which, according to his sister, had featured stories about similar sightings in the area around that time. “They hung up on me.”
³

Mike first contacted me in June 2011, nearly four decades after the incident. After a number of correspondences where we discussed the particulars of the UFO he had seen (as well as a few other peculiar experiences from throughout his life), I decided to make arrangements to meet him, primarily so we could further discuss a few of the details surrounding the 1973 Locust Grove encounter. In the years following the incident, Mike indicated that he had often found it difficult to describe this experience to people. “They can’t digest this type of information,” he told me, recalling how he had shared the entire series of events with a coworker shortly after the encounter.
⁴
Like Mike, this individual had held an interest in astronomy growing up, and the two of them often talked about things they had observed in the night sky through telescopes throughout the years. On this occasion however, as Mike told what he and his family had seen over the power substation in Locust Grove, he watched as the expression on his friend’s face drooped with disbelief. The
rest of the day, Mike became the recipient of frequent uneasy glances from this individual. It didn’t take many more exchanges like this for Mike to feel that he might do well to simply forget anything had ever happened at all—or at least act as though he had.

Today, people’s perception of subjects like UFOs has changed a great deal, especially compared with the early 1970s. In those days, what we have come to know as the modern UFO era was barely two decades old, and reports of encounters with physical occupants of such craft were still only in their infancy. In fact, one of the more striking early incidents that involved physical beings from an alleged UFO had taken place just weeks before Mike’s encounter, six hours south of Locust Grove in the Gulf Coast town of Pascagoula, Mississippi. It was there on October 11th that two coworkers named Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker had been night fishing for speckled trout and redfish by an area known as the old Shaupeter Shipyard. The men observed a blue light in the sky, which came down very near to them, hovering over the bayou, revealing a large football-shaped object. Then an opening appeared in the craft, from which three alien-looking beings emerged, floating above the ground over to where Parker and Hickson were fishing. The men were terrified of what was happening, but were not able to resist capture and were taken onto the craft. While on board, the two were examined by a device resembling a large human eye, and were eventually returned to the dock where they had been fishing. Both men had been so frightened by
what happened that Hickson initially warned Parker that they should never tell anyone what happened. After a few hours, the two eventually relented and took their story to Pascagoula Sheriff Fred Diamond.
⁵
Interestingly, during the period between Mike Reese’s first mention of his 1973 encounter to me in an e-mail and our eventual meeting over dinner in late September 2011, Charles Hickson passed away, at the age of 80. Throughout his life, he had always maintained that the curious and terrifying events from that evening in October 1973 were true and accurate.

Much like Hickson and Parker’s reaction to their unusual encounter, for some time Mike Reese had felt it was useless to tell others what he and his family had experienced. In some ways, he also seemed to feel like what he had experienced was clandestine for legitimate reasons. In an e-mail exchange with me on June 9, 2011, Mike shared the following:

If the government did retrieve things from Roswell and it was alien, I can kind of understand why they would not release this information. Just in the last few days as I think about how to describe this to you, I get into [an] “out of sorts” feeling because my mind is trying to rationalize the incident. I’m not saying that this should not happen; I am saying that a lot of people would be walking around in a daze for a long, long time [if they tried the same thing]. I myself have a strong will and strong mind…but if I pondered over this incident long, I would probably lose everything.
⁶

This sentiment Mike expressed, involving the trouble associated with pondering the more curious elements of the UFO enigma, is very prevalent in the study of unexplained phenomenon, particularly with UFOs. Those who are “gifted” with an otherworldly experience seldom see it as such, and can easily become inundated with fear of the unknown, much like Hickson and Parker had been. In fact, only hours after their abduction experience, the two were left in a room where they were secretly recorded, following their discussion with Sheriff Fred Diamond. Rather than making any mention of a hoax or prank, Parker—obviously still very shaken—repeatedly told Hickson he wanted to see a doctor. Even after Hickson had left the room, Parker could be heard saying aloud to himself that, “It’s hard to believe.… Oh God, it’s awful.… I know there’s a God up there.”
⁷

In closing, Mike assured me that “this stuff is very real,” and that it “did happen as I described it.”
⁸
Additionally, he accepted my offer to meet in person, and to bring his sister along, who had also agreed to speak with me. “I’m sure she would not mind giving you her description of the incident.”
⁹

After a few weeks of planning between our schedules, I finally arranged to meet Mike and his sister, Pam, along with a few other family members and associates for dinner on September 24, 2011. It was a beautiful, colorful drive through early autumn at around sunset that evening, and the Nantahala National Forest’s high ridges and deep gorges carried me along to the town of Murphy,
North Carolina, where Mike now lives. Two associates of mine, Chris Heyes and Matthew Oakley, came along, too, because they are co-hosts on my weekly Web radio program,
The Gralien Report.
I felt they might be helpful in gathering information while we shared dinner and a few glasses of wine with Mike and his company. Though we arrived late, Mike and the others greeted us warmly, having reserved a table for us in a private room in the back of the restaurant. Once orders for drinks and entrées had been made, our conversation ensued. (My travel companions ordered martinis, and I ordered a glass of one of the café’s fine pinot noirs.)

As I had anticipated, there were a number of what I took to be interesting secondary details about the incident that came to light while discussing the encounter in person. Mike’s description of the events remained remarkably consistent, and his sister Pam, who sat beside me the entire evening, agreed with Mike on nearly every point. Pam was quieter than Mike, however, and though she was willing to share details about her own experiences, there was still an underlying tension or hesitation I sensed from her, especially while discussing the Locust Grove incident. Mike also mentioned that he had experienced intermittent headaches and nausea in the days following the encounter. “After the incident in Locust Grove, I had an extreme headache sometime after. I even had to stop on the side of the road while I was going to work at GA-DOT and throw up.”
¹⁰
Mike was puzzled by the sudden illness, and told
me he “had to go to the infirmary to get checked out,” where he was told he was experiencing an optical headache. “I can’t remember how long after the incident this headache occurred.”
¹¹
He told me that his recollection of this aspect of the encounter came after reading an article I had written online, where I described headaches following other people’s UFO sightings. Indeed, this subject was familiar to me. Mike’s own circumstances, especially the headaches and nausea, sounded similar to some of the various symptoms of radiation sickness, which can follow exposure to small doses of ionizing radiation.

Another interesting aspect of Mike’s circumstance involved his recollection of reading a story only a few years before the Locust Grove incident that was remarkably similar to his own encounter: “I remember reading in one of the
Fate Magazine
issues years ago of a sighting that also involved the craft hovering over a power sub-station.”
¹²
In my personal library, I have a number of volumes of
Fate Magazine
dating as far back as 1959; however, scanning through issues from the 1960s, I was unable to locate the article Mike described. Nonetheless, this aspect of the story is of interest, due in part to the fact that Mike even wondered how this knowledge of similar circumstances—obtained
prior
to seeing the object over Locust Grove—might have influenced what he and the others had seen. This hints at a very strange and complicated area with the UFO enigma, that involves the apparently
interactive
nature of many UFO reports; some witnesses even express
feeling that their roles as observers alone could play some part in the appearance of various physical qualities UFOs display.