Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by my newest supporters Stephanie, Dave,
Penelope and Jason. Thank you for making the show possible. Tonight,
I'll be revisiting my personal experience with the unknown. It's
an encounter that has baffled me for over three decades,
and since I first discussed it on the podcast back
in twenty seventeen, I've remembered some additional details that I'd
like to share with you, So let's get into it.
Thank you for joining me and welcome. I'm your host,
Nick Ryan. Have you ever experienced something that affected you
so deeply that you have trouble processing yet? I'm not
talking about just confusion, but more like a deep frustration
with trying to analyze and understand something that is unfolding
before your very eyes, but even stranger, at least in
my case. After the experience has ended and in the
hours or days that follow, you almost entirely forget that
the events even took place until something jogs your memory.
It's at this time when the experience comes flooding back
to you like some sort of long forgotten memory. Well,
this is exactly what I experienced almost thirty one years
ago now if you're not familiar with my story, I'm
referring to something that I witnessed while living in a
rural town in my home state of Michigan. I discussed
my encounter in episode six, which aired in twenty seventeen,
but more recently I realized that there were some details
that I failed to include in that episode. Nothing earth shattering,
just minor things that I think are important to put
down on paper. At the very least, this will help
me to document the exact series of events that unfolded
that night for my own records, but perhaps it will
also help someone listening who may have seen the same
anomaly that I did, and hopefully compel them to come forward.
So tonight, I'd like to once again share my experience
and include all the missing details that I previously overlooked.
I appreciate you joining me, and please remember that if
my experience shares similarities with something that you encountered, please
don't hesitate to reach out to me, because I would
love to hear about your experience. My story begins in
southeast Michigan, where I was born. I was raised in
a fairly small town outside of Detroit, where Friday night
football was the high point of everyone's week, and our
version of social media was to meet down at the
local dairy queen and hang out with friends. Life was good, quiet,
even predictable, and besides the occasional night terrors that I
had as a younger child, the realm of actual paranormal
phenomena never factored into my daily life. That is until
elementary school. I was in the library one day and
I came across a series of books by Time Life
called Mysteries of the Unknown, if memory serves. One of
the books in this series focused on time anomalies like
portals and alternate dimensions. I remember one story in particular
that involved a pilot who was flying near the Bermuda
Triangle and somehow made what was normally a several hour
flight in just under an hour after flying through what
they described as a circle in the clouds. I can
still recall the bizarre illustration on the page portraying a
small Sesma sized airplane navigating through an ominous cloud formation.
That image has always stayed with me. From that point on,
my interest in the unexplained slowly began to grow, but
it was never anything that I sought out to explore.
It was merely a curiosity that stayed in the back
of my mind. It never caused me to question the
world around me. After all, I had more important things
to think about, like birthday parties, sleepovers, and teenage mutant
ninja turtles. Of course, I did have small, and what
I would consider at the time to be insignificant experiences
that I assumed all kids had. For instance, my grandparents'
basement was always dark and musty, and I distinctly remember
always running up those stairs feeling like someone was always
right behind me. And then, of course, there were a
couple of times that my friends and I messed around
with Ouiji board and we all swore that someone else
was moving the plan chat This would inevitably lead to
a night of telling ghost stories or reading the infamous
book by Alvin Schwartz Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
And let's not forget the terror inducing game called Bloody Mary,
where there was always that one friend that swore that
they could see something looking back at them in the mirror. Again,
all these experiences create positive core memories that I and
my friends still enjoy reminiscing about to this day. They
were creepy, sure, but they never felt truly real, and
ultimately they gave us a way to connect and have fun. However,
just a handful of years later, something did happen that
made me take the paranormal much more seriously, and to
this day I cannot explain what I witnessed to the
best of my recollection. This took place during the summer
of nineteen ninety five, and I believe it was just
before midnight Eastern Time. I wish I could be more
specific with the time and the date that this occurred,
but try as I might, that particular part of the
memory eludes me. In any case, I was about fifteen
years old and I had recently finished my freshman year
of high school. At that time, my mother and I
lived in a duplex in a rural area just outside
the small town of Hamburg, Michigan. Our daily routine played
out as it usually did, and since it was summer break,
my mother dropped me off at my grandparents farm, which
was only about ten minutes from where we lived, and
she then went on to work her typical nine to
five shift. I enjoyed a normal day with my grandparents
as usual, and before long it was late afternoon. That
evening my mother picked me up from my grandparents. We
drove home, and shortly thereafter she made dinner. As the
sun went down, we watched TV and talked about our day,
and nothing unusual happened the entire evening that I can recall. Then,
at around ten pm, she told me that I should
get some rest and to go to bed, so I
got up from the couch and went to the bathroom
to brush my teeth. She decided that she was going
to go to bed as well, so we said good night,
turned off the lights, and we went to our rooms.
I closed my bedroom door, sat down on the edge
of my bed, and took my glasses off, which I
then placed on my nightstand. By this time it was
around ten thirty, but I wasn't very tired, so I
laid there for at least another hour, just thinking of
my day and staring out my bedroom window. My room
had only the one window, and my bed was in
the opposite corner from it, which made it very easy
for me to look out and see the clear night sky.
Although I had taken my glasses off, I could still
make out the moon and stars for reference the direction
that I would have been facing when looking out my
window would have been south by southwest and toward the
direction of Dexter, Michigan. Out my window, I also had
a clear view of our next door neighbor's old dilapidated farmhouse,
as well as a couple of large dead trees that
stood on the northeast side of their property. These trees
were very tall and the branches jutted out in front
of the moonlit sky, which made it very easy to
notice when a plane or satellite was moving off in
the distance behind them. I do remember the air being
very still that night, so the stationary tree limbs made
any moving objects in the distance extremely obvious. As I
lay motionless in bed, I began to notice what looked
like a star behind the branches of the trees. This
object looked as if it was pulsating or breathing very slowly,
as some stars appeared to do. As I observed it
over the next few minutes, it remained stationary, but it
continued to fluctuate from dark to light. At this point
I was absolutely sure that what I was seeing was
in fact a star, satellite, or possibly even an airplane
that was very very far away. But as I continued
watching it, appeared to start moving horizontally again. I used
the large tree branches in our neighbor's yard as a
point of reference, and after a moment or two of
keeping my body absolutely motionless and trying to debunk what
I was seeing, I was ultimately convinced that this object
was indeed moving. Although I was hesitant to look away,
I wanted to put my glasses on, thinking that my
poor eyesight was to blame for this anomaly. But reluctantly
I reached for my glasses and put them on, nervously
looking back out the window and worried that it would
be gone. But there it was, in the exact same
spot and still moving very slowly. Although it was strange,
I was still convinced that it must be something completely normal.
But as I watched, it stopped moving and it then
began moving horizontally in the other direction. This is when
I realized that whatever this thing was, it wasn't normal.
It didn't move like a plane or a helicopter, and
it would stop and change direction instantly. I watched it
do this back and forth movement for several minutes, and
it was at this point when I began to feel
slightly uncomfortable. I wasn't scared, but I knew something wasn't right.
I laid there in my bed, staying perfectly still and
mesmerized by what I was seeing. Then, without warning, the light,
which was still in the same location in the sky
and still appeared to be the size of a star,
began to get a little brighter, and at this moment,
a piercing white light seemed to emanate from the object.
I don't know how, but I could actually see the
light travel from this object toward my bedroom window and
then light up the entire wall next to my bed.
It was like a strobe light, but with only a
single flash, and it happened in a millisecond. In fact,
it happened so fast and with such intensity that I
flinched and blinked after the light had already gone. Absolutely
stunned by what I had seen, I looked out my window,
trying my best to locate the object once again, but
I could find no trace of it. It was in
this very moment when I had the overwhelming feeling of
being watched, and this was accompanied by the sensation of
having my privacy invaded. It was a bizarre, visceral feeling
that I wasn't accustomed to, and it felt inescapable. After
several minutes, I reluctantly got out of bed, went to
my mom's room, and I tried to wake her, hoping
to tell her about what I had just witnessed. I
wasn't upset, but I was fairly unsettled, and I didn't
know exactly what to say, but I just felt like
any someone to be aware of what had just happened.
My mother, however, is a very deep sleeper, so I
couldn't fully wake her, and after a few minutes of
me trying to tell her what I saw, she eventually
just rolled back over and went back to sleep. At
this point, I went out to the living room, which
was only a few feet away, and since I was
already feeling a bit exposed, I didn't turn on any lights.
I quietly walked across the carpet toward the two large
windows that were located in the corner of our living room.
From these windows, you could easily see our driveway, a
small dirt road leading to the main road, and you
could easily see our neighbor's farmhouse and the two trees
that I mentioned earlier. Everything was silent, and although I
once again looked for the odd light, it did not
make another appearance. As I stood there in the dark,
staring out the windows, a last wave of unease crept
over me, but as soon as it came, it left
and was instantly replaced by a feeling of unnatural calm.
Everything seemed peaceful and I became very relaxed. It was
like something had flipped a switch and I was now
completely uninterested in contemplating what I had just experienced. I
then returned to my bedroom, got into bed, and I
went to sleep. The next morning, I woke up and
started my day as usual, but it wasn't until a
day or two later that I remembered what I experienced
that night. It's like I blocked it out, and to
this day, I still have long stretches of time where
I'll forget that it even happened until something reminds me
of it. The older I get, the more I think
about my experience, and of course I wonder what it
was that I saw, But over the years, the question
that really seems to haunt me the most is what
the object was doing. Was it actively searching for something
or did it just notice me noticing it. In that
moment after getting out of bed, I remember feeling as
though I had been targeted. It was almost as if
I had interrupted it, as it was in the midst of
doing something nefarious, and it then turned its attention towards me.
Is this really what was happening? Though? I don't know,
but it's how I felt at the time it occurred.
What bothers me the most about this experience is the
feeling of my privacy being invaded. You see, I thought
this object was hundreds, if not thousands of miles away,
only to have it shine a light directly into my
bedroom window. What I also find disturbing is how I
felt fear and anxiety one moment and absolute peace the next.
Was it a higher intelligence putting me into a state
of relaxation in an effort to make me forget the encounter,
or was it simply a natural reaction to a stressful event.
I don't know. I know it may sound like I
believe this was some type of encounter with a UFO,
but the truth is that I really don't know what
it was. As many of you know, I pride myself
on being skeptical, not in the sense that I don't
believe in certain phenomena, but instead I try to look
at everything from a practical perspective first before turning to
the paranormal for answers. But no matter how many times
I revisit these events, I simply cannot find a mundane
explanation for what I saw that summer night back in
nineteen ninety five. So there you have it, my personal
encounter with the unknown. Maybe someone listening has witnessed something similar,
or perhaps even the exact same thing, and if so,
I would like to hear about your experience, which you
can email to me at Paranormal Mysteries Podcast at gmail
dot com. Please remember that all experiences, no matter how
insignificant or outlandish you believe they might seem, are always welcome.
Until next time. Thank you so much for listening, and
please remember, don't wait for the unknown to come to you,
get out there and find it