What Tennesseans are see'in in the skies UFO-wise
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In the late August of 1989, near Crump, Tennessee, two men were driving north down highway 22 about two miles north from Shiloh Military Park right after sunset when they had the following UFO sighting. The witness I talked to said that he was first alerted to the presence of these strange objects by a very high-pithced whirring sound that caused him to look off to the right across a level stretch of farm land. Less than a hundred yards away he spotted three disc-shaped objects hovering at tree-top level over some woods. He pulled off the road and stopped the car so he and his companion could get a better look. Since there was still some lingering daylight left, the two of them could still make out some features of the craft that otherwise could not have been seen. In his own words the man told me they saw three saucers "bumper to bumper, not more than two feet apart" horizontal to their line of vision.
There were blinking lights all around the outer rim of these objects, alternatively red, white, and green and rotating counterclockwise. These discs were the same size, about 25 feet in diameter [this is the average width I believe of most flying saucers that have been reported by numerous witnesses over the years]. These saucers also had the typical dome on top. There were no other protuberances or structual features that could be made out, just a smooth surface. The one thing that was not typical here is the fact that these objects were black/green in color and not silver or gun-metal gray like saucers usually are. And another feature not heard in most sighting reports is that according to our witness these discs had what appeared to be thick, black rubber bumpers that circled their outer edge. Except for the whirring sound that first drew his attention to them, they were completely silent for the duration of their sighting.
These two men sat in their car in utter amazement just watching these otherworldly-looking craft. Jimmie told me that he and his friend were real surprised that no one passed on the highway while they sat there. There were no other humans anywhere in sight. Just the two of them and the three mystery objects. They had been sitting there stunned to their toes by this private, privileged show for a whole 4 or 5 minutes before the things started moving slowly away from them, passing down behind the trees out of sight. Jimmie said he thought at the time that they must have landed somewhere in a field beyond the wooded area where they had been hovering because they didn't rise up again. He even speculated that they might have gone down into the Tennessee River that was not far from the tree-line where they had been.
For twenty years Jimmie has told no one but myself about this sighting except his mother and sister. "People down here would have thought I was nuts," he told me. Just a few comments here : No one else being in sight for about 5 minutes on a fairly frequently travelled highway in the early evening while this sighting lasted is a little suspicious and also quite typical of a lot of sighting cases. One has to wonder if more happened here than just a happenstance sighting. And it was a Close Encounter of the First KInd. Any UFO seen by a witness less than 500 feet away is designated in this category by Allen Hynek in his classification system given in his book The UFO Experience. And our witnesses were within 300 feet of these discs. And finally, one has to wonder what business these UFOs had that night in the Tennessee River bottomland.
[If anyone else knows of UFOs being seen in this area around Savannah, Tennessee, please contact me at eddiemiddleton@yahoo.com. There have been many sighting reports over the years from this area.]
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