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Large silver sphere visits UFO Hunter (conclusion)
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The piece de resistance!
Gary did not feel so alone now. Linda Moulten Howe was a powerful ally that would make sure that whatever he could photographically document from the obversation post of his balcony would get some high-profile media exposure. The sympathetic audience of Coast-to-Coast AM radio and avid followers of her Earth Files website would be listening and watching very attentively from now on his front line confrontation with the phenonenon. And MUFON was now also starting to show some strong support. One of its top Star Team Impact members had just informed him that MUFON was going to file a FOIA request for release of information on possible radar documentation of the "unknown" Gary had seen pacing the Delta airliner. With this kind of back-up he was renewed in his resolve to finish what he had started, to furnish irrefutable evidence of the reality and even modus operandi of the alien presence among us.
Then what Gary was hoping for (or thought he was hoping for) actually happened---but he was not psychologically prepared for it. About a week or so after his interview with Linda, Gary called me around 10am in the morning, sounding very distraught. He proceeded to tell me that he was turning in his resignation to MUFON and wanted thenceforth to have absolutely nothing more to do with investigating UFOs. I asked him what in the world had happened! He said he was going to tell me because I was the Tennessee State MUFON Director, and then added that I could also tell Max Mitchell our State Chief Investigator-----but no one else! Not even Linda Howe. Listening on the edge of my seat, I heard the following account :
That morning just after his fiancee left for work at 6am, he had gone out on his balcony to have a smoke. When he sat down, he immediately noticed directly across from him---not more than 60 feet away...hovering silently just above tree-top level, a silver metalic-looking sphere, twenty to thirty feet in diameter. Gary said this thing was so perfectly polished that it reflected the surrounding scenery like comouflage. I asked him what thoughts were going through his head at that point. He said he was so awe-struck and fixated on the sight before him that the only thought he heard himself utter in a hushed whisper to himself was, "there you are." He couldn't remember much else transpiring in his mind while he continued to sit there in what amounted to a state of frozen paralysis. In his own words, "I remember thinking that if I move, this thing will probably take off. I could feel my heart pounding, but it was almost a mesmerizing and fearful feeling to just look at this thing." In his recent report to MUFON, he says, he "felt like a deer in the headlights." [Where have we heard this before?]
I kept asking him what happened next like I was there with him witnessing this whole thing. The anxiety that I could detect in his voice over the phone made it all the more real to me that this Close Encounter had just happened and that I was the first one to be hearing about it. He said after an extended stare-off with this thing, it finally departed by moving straight up, neither shooting off at a blinding speed nor just blinking out like UFOs are known to do, but with a slow or fairly fast ascent [his memory was somewhat blurred here] until Gary lost sight of it due to the overhanging eaves on his balcony. Once again in his own words, "I'm not even sure how long I sat there afterward thinking about it. Then I got up, went inside, looked at the stove clock, and it said 8:45 am." If Gary had gone out on his balcony deck right after 6 am and it was 8:45 am when he came back into his apartment, this means he was outside with his silver visitor from the blue for two-hours and forty-five minutes!!! Gary can't remember anything transpiring other than a silent face-off. It sounds a lot like he experienced some time disorientation here.
Since he was so emphatic that he didn't ever want to talk about this again and wanted UFOs completely out of his life from then on, I respected his wishes and left him completely alone [though I wasn't so sure his alien visitors would do the same]. It seemed pretty obvious he had experienced some major trauma and needed private time to cope with it on his own. As State Director it put me in a very difficult and personally disturbing posture : I wasn't allowed to write about this or even to tell other people anything at all about what was possibly the most amazing case so far in the history of Tennessee MUFON. So I had to simply bide my time and wait until Gary was ready to deal with this in a public way to further our understanding of the UFO phenomenon. After nearly a month of keeping his Close Encounter hidden from scrutiny by MUFON or other trained UFO investigators, he has now filed an official MUFON report on this. Gary is to be greatly admired for "screwing his courage to the sticking place" and returning to his original commitment to UFO research.
I think what has happened with Gary should make MUFON think about laying down some specific guidelines for Field Investigators for how to handle the situation when the UFO phenomenon begins to get interactive with them. Or should any attempts to make contact with the phenomenon be forbidden territory for Field Investigators? Their capability of remaining objective and scientific in their evaluation of the data could possibly be compromised or even seriously impaired when they step over the line and become experiencers themselves. And finally, considering that we could have permanently lost a fine MUFON Field Investigator like Gary Mansfield because it suddenly got to hot in the kitchen might suggest that Robert Bigelow should provide some special funding to make it possible for MUFON to offer professional counseling to Field Investigators who suffer from shell-shock in the line of action.
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