The UFO Story

By Anthony Rowe

When I was seven years old, I came face to face with a UFO.

It was 1967, and I was living in Sausalito, California with my mother and my older sister, Leslie. We lived in a houseboat area known as Gate Five. Our house wasn’t technically a houseboat – it was built on pillars on the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay. Gate Five was a hippie community, and I witnessed many strange and unusual things as a kid roaming those docks, but nothing compared to what I saw early one morning when I looked out of our window on to the bay.

I awoke abruptly, sat straight up, and rubbed my eyes. I looked around and realized that I was on the floor of our living room in my sleeping bag. My mom and my sister were sleeping soundly on the couches behind me. Turning my head to the far right corner of the room, I saw our Christmas tree with multi-colored lights resting on the branches and my presents nestled beneath. Just to the left of the tree was a large picture window that looked out on to the bay. I peered out the window and saw, to my right and left, rows of colorful houseboats of varying shapes, sizes, and conditions secured to their docks. In between these two long docks was a wide opening that allowed me to see across the bay to the hills of Tiburon.

I was a seven-year-old boy, awake in a sleeping world, gazing out the window into the gray, clear light of pre-dawn when suddenly something appeared in the right corner of the picture window. It was moving slowly from right to left about 100 yards out on the bay, beyond the docks, and about ten feet above the water. I leaned forward and narrowed my eyes, not sure that I was seeing what I was seeing – a solid copper sphere surrounded by a ring of spinning lights gliding silently above the water.

My eyes were locked upon it when, as if it noticed me, it stopped and hovered in the left edge of the picture window. Chills ran through my body, but I continued to stare at the miniature Saturn looking back at me, the copper sphere within remaining still while the ring of lights surrounding it continued to spin. Then, it began moving, slowly, towards our house.

As it approached our house, it headed for the space between our house and the house next door. I craned my neck to get a better look as it moved out of the picture window to my left. My last, and closest, inspection of it was as it was about to pass between our house and our neighbor’s. The copper sphere was solid, it had no windows, and there was nothing that attached the spinning ring of lights to the sphere.

I was transfixed, but this spell was abruptly broken by a terrifying thought that flashed into my mind – what if they saw me seeing them, and they decided to take me away? I instantly spun around and slid into my sleeping bag, pulling it up as far as I could so that only my eyes, my clenched fingers, and the top of my head were poking out. I fixed my eyes on the opposite wall, not daring to look in the direction of the UFO. I watched as spots of white light danced frenetically upon that wall for the seconds it took the UFO to soundlessly pass the window behind me.

I didn’t move for a very long time. Finally, I gathered up the courage to leave my sleeping bag and investigate. My mom and sister were still sleeping as I tiptoed across the room. I pressed my face up against the window the UFO had passed. First, I looked across at our neighbor’s house. Then I looked down at the mud of low tide. Finally I peered to the left, following the path it must have taken. I saw no traces of anything.

Walking softly back to the living room, I climbed back into my sleeping bag. I lay there staring at the ceiling for about an hour, running the events of what had just happened through my mind as I waited for my mom and my sister to wake up.

When they did finally wake up, I jumped out of my sleeping bag and breathlessly told them what I had seen. They listened with sleepy disinterest as I excitedly explained the amazing thing that had happened to me while they slept. This was not the first time that I had told the two of them an implausible tale, and like those villagers who listened to the boy cry “Wolf!” time and time again, they had learned to dismiss my stories. When I was done, my mother strolled away from me, yawning as she said, “Next time they come, why don’t you invite them in for tea?” My sister rolled her eyes and went off to get ready for school.

I followed them around and kept telling and re-telling them what I had seen, begging them to believe me. After a while, though, their looks and the tone of their voices made it clear that I had better give up and get ready for school. I remember standing alone in our house feeling like I was going to explode -something extraordinary had happened to me and I was being told to prepare for an ordinary day Each morning, my friend, Jacob would come to pick me up for school. Jacob lived in a converted school bus that his parents had painted blue (it was the 60’s after all). Though they were nomads (I can still hear the sound of the dishes rattling as they would ramble down the road), they parked their home about a half-mile away from us along the gently curving shore. If I pressed my face up against our picture window and looked to the left, I could see their big, blue bus.

I don’t remember what I was doing when Jacob ran up and knocked on our door, but I remember running between my mother and my sister toward him. I stopped short when I got to him and shouted, “Jacob, Jacob, guess what I saw!”

Breathlessly, he replied, “I know exactly what you saw! You saw a UFO. It was shaped like Saturn and it had a ring of lights spinning around it. It stopped in front of your house and then passed between your house and the house next door. Then it flew over the highway and up to the top of the hill on the other side. It hovered there for a few seconds, and then it disappeared into the clouds.”

My mom and my sister slowly turned toward me, jaws dropping. I looked back at them with a satisfied smile and said, “See! I told you!”

Epilogue

My mother called to report the sighting. The Air Force told her that what I had seen was one of their experimental vehicles, but that they would send us a report to fill out anyway. My mom had to explain to me what “experimental” meant.

For the next week or so, military helicopters regularly flew over our house. One of the helicopters turned up as I was playing in front of our house. I squinted up at it as it hovered noisily above me, and a question formed in my seven-year-old brain…

“Experimental, huh?”