Even Believers Sometimes Get to See Stuff

by Kevin Candela, March 7, 2017

This is an account of our experience on October 20, 2012. As this event is now over four years past, specific time references for that date are necessarily approximate.

Witnesses to this “close encounter of the first kind” were my wife Jackie and myself. Additionally, the occupant(s) of at least one other vehicle we saw in the vicinity at one point may have seen the same thing, in that they sat motionless at a stop sign long enough for us to pull up to the other side of it, wait our turn and then eventually go on because they still weren’t moving.

That evening we had attended a comedy “magic” show (it turned out to be a lot more comedy than magic in the end) at a venue owned by our friends. The event had ended around 10 or a little after, and we left shortly after that. I am more or less certain that the sighting occurred around 11 p.m., or at least between 10:30 and 11:30 Central Standard Time.

Being big fans of the supernatural, we were as usual “watching the skies” a la the ending of The Thing from Another World. Jackie was driving, leaving me free to look around. 

I spotted a red light in the sky down near the southern horizon (more or less over St. Louis, I guessed at the time) and that caught my eye: No aircraft observed at that great a distance should appear red (or, really, any color other than white). Note that all aircraft have small left and right side lights that are red and green, but these don’t shine like a very bright star over a number of miles and they certainly wouldn’t continuously override the “normal” (and much more potent) white beams that planes, jets and choppers all use.

Because I spent seventeen years in aerospace engineering, I realized what I was watching—and what Jackie saw as well, as we kept rolling along I-255 toward home and I pointed it out to her—could not have been anything conventional. Sitting somewhere between ten and thirty degrees up off the southern horizon, we saw it against the dark clouds down that way (the night was partly cloudy, especially to the south).

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing even at that distance. My logic circuits said it could only be fire—a distant jet airliner with its front end in flames up to, say, the wings—but it just hung there in the sky (or appeared to, since we were moving more or less perpendicular to it and it was still a number of miles away).

As we reached the exit ramp to Seminary Road a couple of minutes later, I realized that it was in fact coming our way. We made the left we would have made anyway, and as we went through the underpass beneath I-255 and emerged on the other side it was clear this was no commercial airliner: For one thing, it was flying no higher than small aircraft cruise at nearby St. Louis Regional Airport. I’d estimate the height at which this bright red-orange object was quite steadily cruising our way at no more than a mile off the ground.

What happened next was seen only by myself, not my wife, as she was still driving and had to divide her focus. 

As this bright orange “orb” (it looked round as much as anything) approached, I saw two white meteor streaks come down beside it, off by just a little to the fireball’s left. The outer one simply seemed to burn out, but the one closer to the cruising ball of whatever it was actually pulled into a tight “orbit”, arced beneath and around the anomaly and—when it was about even with it on the opposite side—made a sharp hooking motion in toward the fireball and vanished, tracing what in effect was a backwards “J” shape around the red hot-looking orb.

On top of the shock of seeing this, it was becoming apparent by then that it was going to pass right over us at this “small Cessna” altitude. It took a lot of me saying, “Pull over pull over pull over now pull over NOW…” to get Jackie to do it, but she finally did take us off onto the shoulder once we’d reached that stop sign mentioned earlier and made a right onto relatively quiet Union School Road.

I threw the car door open and jumped out right away to get a clear look at the object, and here’s what I saw.

The thing wasn’t really round. It was shaped more like a medicine pill with convex sides, but there were no edges to it—or, if there in fact were, the sheer toaster coil-hot orange glow of the thing was obscuring them. I can’t say for sure how big it was as it passed almost directly overhead IN COMPLETE SILENCE (we were out in the country with nobody else nearby and the engine turned off), but I can tell you that it was flying laterally, in no real hurry, and on a straight line trajectory that I later realized by studying maps was virtually true north. And from where we stood, I would estimate that it flew over us even lower than I’d guessed back on Seminary moments earlier: Hundreds of yards high at most, I’d say, though I know this will matter little to skeptics who will jump straight to night’s distance distortion effects.

I stood and watched the object as it cruised on, appearing to maintain an absolutely steady rate of speed and altitude, until its orange-red glow finally dimmed to faint white on the extreme northern horizon.

Here’s where the whole thing takes a strange, Jose Chung’s From Outer Space twist to it: When the event was at an end—it lasted no more than ten minutes, I’d say—Jackie and I continued on and talked about what we’d seen. 

Turns out she had not seen a slightly oblong, pill-shaped blob of orange “toaster/oven/stove coil” heat, but (in basically her own words, best I recall) had seen the anomaly as “a roiling ball of red, white and orange fire inside of an unseen sphere that contained the flames”.

This happened two months before the Aztec date of December 21, 2012, so I must admit my thought was, “Did we just see Pacal coming back?” or something along that line. But then the meteor-catching thing wouldn’t let go. Admittedly I’m the only one who saw this, but it happened so quickly that this really shouldn’t be surprising…or negate what I think I witnessed. Being from aerospace, I started thinking black ops and ended up with “rare metals meteor-catching fireball”, but why we’d have to make something look like a ball of cruising fire just to grab incoming Perseid meteors (it was the night of the annual shower, one more reason we were watching the skies) is beyond me still. Is it a flying smelter? Wow. 

No matter what, wow.

Well, that’s pretty much what happened and what we saw. A completely unexpected moment that left us uplifted, confused, transfixed, frightened—and in the end, I think, transformed and enlightened, even though we still hardly know the “reality” of it all. We both had tears streaming down our faces during the event, and THAT is something I consider tangible evidence.

Apparently, sometimes believers get to see stuff too, I guess. I wouldn’t have bet on that at all.

And in lieu of definitive answers either way…

“Nice ride, Pacal.”