My Personal Disc

If there was any lingering chance of me ever getting elected to any public office, my truthful account of the experience that follows will seal its tomb permanently.

The year was 1980. Amy and I were en route to her parent's home in the East Brainerd suburb of Chattanooga. It was late. Dark out. We were seated in my little truck travelling on Shallowford Road. There is a point where Shallowford Road intersects with another road that was cordoned by a four way stop. As I approached that intersection, I immediately noticed two things: first, I noticed the illuminated "tower" behind the house up ahead to our left; and then I noticed the tractor-trailer truck sitting idle at the four way stop, facing us. The tower, as I'll explain, was probably twenty to thirty feet above the house to our left. I remarked, "what kind of tower is that behind Debbie Lackey's house?" I knew that the house was inhabited by Miss Lackey and her family because my buddy, Neil, had told me so, because he used to date her.

When I employed the word, "tower", it sprang from my brain's apparent attempt to reconcile how two horizontal white lights, approximately ten to fifteen feet apart, could be aloft without being supported by a structure of some kind. So, my cognition immediately defaulted to the practical. I assumed that someone in that family had constructed a citizens' band or radio tower of some kind in the back yard of the house and had fitted it with two lights which projected from the house directly across the highway at approximately thirty to sixty feet above the ground. The lights were perfectly stationary, and there was no noise. Not even the hum of a bulb.

In hindsight, I now realize over thirty years later, that my "tower" was being witnessed by at least three people: me, Amy, and the truckdriver who idled at the stop. I remember stopping in the road, windows down, summertime, and gawking at the lights, until I finally realized that there was no tower supporting them. Through the darkness, I could make out the absence of any structural device beneath the lights, which looked like two automobile headlights, shining straight and horizontal, yet separated a distance from each other that would defy the width of our standard highway lane.

As we looked on, a dozen or more new multicolored lights began illuminating in succession around the periphery of the object. "Oh shit!" was the only sound I heard from within the dead silence as my girl, mouth agape, realized what we were experiencing.

After the multi-colored lights had completed their successive illumination around the object, it revealed to us a perfectly circular "disc shaped" object. I estimated at that time and now over thirty years hence that the object was from thirty to fifty feet in diameter. The disc then began to move. It moved very slowly and in absolute silence in the direction that the two beams of light had been directed. Toward that trajectory, it crossed above the highway, some ten feet ahead of us and some fifty to sixty feet above us. We stretched to watch it crossed above, and then noted that the disc stopped as soon as it completed crossing above Shallowford Road. Those times that I've related this to others I've always maintained that I could have hit the disc with a baseball or a rock. I cannot attest to this, though. But, the point is made. It was that close.

As we tried to examine the underbelly of the disc, it again stared to move; this time, travelling in the direction that we had come. So, I turned the truck around in the middle of the two lane, divided road, and noticed that the tractor trailer that had been stationary, was idling up and moving as well.

Once we were headed in the opposite direction, we followed the disc, which was maintaining a constant speed and hovering some ten feet or so above the tree line that ran adjacent to Shallowford Road. We followed the disc for about fifteen seconds, when, with speed that rivaled the speed of light, it jettisoned into the universe. Silence was perfectly preserved.

I have now ended my silence about a fact that occurred remarkably close to the sensory perceptions of at least three human beings in the summer of 1980 on Shallowford Road -- a suburb of Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was late. And dark out.