Eye Witness - UFO, Topeka Kansas 1964.

Well, I suppose it's time to start talking about something related to my definition of this blog, instead of merely stating my philosophy of family and lore. Imagine being only ten years old in the mid 1960's. Yes, the free love, peace, hippy times and being a child with extremely sharp hearing and the ability to always notice things out of place.

Such was an evening in May of 1964 in the capital city of Kansas, namely Topeka. My family lived on the southwest side of town, the middle class neighborhood of the "Kirklawn" area. It was about dusk. The sun was already down past the western horizon, but there was still a visible reg glow in the western sky illuminating the horizon. But in the east it was pitch black.

At around this time I noticed an eerie high pitched whine in my ears, similar to the sound the old tube TV's of that era made when you first turned them on, but this sound seemed to go on and on, until almost 5 minutes had passed. Curious about what was bothering my ears, I began looking around the house for a TV set left on (we only had one black and white one in our basement den). There were no electronics on in the house that could explain the noise and then I began to suspect the noise to be coming from outside our home.

When I walked outside I was drawn to look towards the black horizon in the east. For some reason I felt compelled to look in that direction, then with a flash an object similar to the one pictured above appeared from a blur in the eastern distance to a glowing (blue glow) metallic orb directly over my head as I stood in the center of the street between my house and the neighbor's houses. I had a clear view to both the eastern and western horizons (an unimpeded view of approximately 25 miles to the west). The object was about one story higher than my two story house and yet it looked to be easily twice the size of our two story home. I had friends at that time in my life who were children of the military personnel at Forbes AFB in the southeast corner of Topeka. So I was quite use to seeing all types of military aircraft coming and going from the air force base when I visited them, but this vehicle showed no sign of normal combustion propulsion, it merely levitated in mid air with only a faint blue (oscillating glow) and a hum. I had never wished so hard for a camera in my entire young life and yet I was afraid that if I went inside my home to get one, the craft would be gone by the time I got back. So I simply stood there dumbfounded.

No sooner had I given thought to a camera when the craft suddenly and without warning shoot off from a dead stop directly over my head to disappearing "over" the western horizon in less than 2 seconds (and there was no sonic boom). I could not believe that a solid object of that size could travel the distance of approximately 25 miles (the distance to the horizon on a flat level ground surface before the curvature of the earth hides the view) with no visible means of propulsion, my heart was beating in my hand. I immediately went inside and called the local radio station. A disk jockey got on the phone and listened for a minute or two and then sarcastically asked if there were any little green men looking down from the ship. I hung up in disgust and seldom spoke of it again until many years later when I would have additional (terrifying) experiences in the arena of Ufo-ology.