Today at 10:17 am by 
UFOs Flying Dark
Posted by: Linda Zimmerman
“Lights in the sky” sightings easily comprise the majority of UFO sightings, and have just as easily been dismissed by skeptics as bright stars and planets, conventional aircraft, and—dare I say it?—swamp gas. Now, there is a new bane of a ufologist’s existence—drones. Every kid with an LED-covered quadcopter can spark a viral “UFO” video, even further muddying the already murky waters of “lights in the sky” cases.
Depiction of triangle UFO at night. (Credit: OpenMinds.tv)
So perhaps researchers need to take a step back and look into the darkness—into the far more rare cases of nighttime sightings of craft flying completely dark, without any lights. It’s impossible for skeptics to consign such cases to the “Venus Files” if they are solid, unlit objects. These cases also present a more enticing element, which may or may not be warranted—a somewhat sinister aspect as these craft obviously don’t want to be seen as they are cruising silently just over your head.
The subject of “Dark UFOs” came up recently when I interviewed Lorraine M. about her early 1980s sighting in Putnam County, NY, which was the scene of a major flap in the Hudson Valley which lasted several years.
“I was leaving a party with my friends,” Lorraine explained in a detailed email. “It was 1am and we had parked our cars in an elementary school parking lot. There were about six of us, laughing, having fun. I looked up into the sky to take in the beauty of this clear, starlit night when all of a sudden I noticed an area straight up without stars! ‘What the hell?!’ was my first response! I elbowed my boyfriend and pointed to the sky without saying a word. Immediately he elbowed and pointed upward to the next friend, and so on! We all stood there dumbstruck, looking up, amazed at the sight before us.”
This is a great description of the immediate reaction to such a sighting—no words, just each friend nudging one another and pointing successively on down the line. Lorraine explained that there were no streetlights, and the field of stars was very bright that night. The “colossal craft” had no lights or other form of illumination, so “The only way you could see its triangular shape was how it blotted out the stars!”
“We all stood there, staring upward, mouths agape, bewildered… scared yet amazed…It passed over us at a height that it could nick its bottom on the point of the Empire State Building. And its speed was as slow as a balloon in the Macy’s Day Parade. It passed slowly. Creeping along. Then all of a sudden it shot out from view, then reappeared what seemed like ten miles down further and continued its sloth-like pace.
“We ran to our cars! The next day we learned through the local newspaper that others had witnessed this craft as well! I would say that experience far exceeded any party that night!”
Just to further emphasize her story, Lorraine later emailed me this:
“All of this is the darn truth! I’ll never forget it!!”
Book cover to Linda Zimmerman’s Hudson Valley UFOs.
This craft exhibited many of the characteristics described by witnesses during the 1980s flap—triangular, the size of a football field, and the ability to go both incredibly slow and impossibly fast. However, whereas most of the other craft witnessed were often described as being lit up like Christmas trees, this one was flying dark.
Around the same time frame of the late 70s and early 80s, a “black disk” was spotted one night in Brentwood, NY, which is on Long Island. A witness reported to MUFON that she went outside to call her cat in for the night when she looked up and saw “a black disk the size of a stop sign at arm’s length” and about the height of a radio tower. It moved very slowly, diagonally over her house and she had time to observe it from both the back and front yards.
Again, there were no lights, and the shape was only able to be determined by the “sky glow” from the neighborhood lights, as the object was silhouetted against the dark sky. There was one other unusual feature the witness described with this craft—“The bottom didn’t appear smooth, it looked like it had sections that were raised, with sharp edges.” Unlike the previous case, however, where the UFO shot off in the blink of an eye, this black craft just quietly floated out of sight.
Yet another different shape of dark object appeared even earlier in the area, a rectangular craft as described in a 1978 NUFORC report from Avon, Connecticut. This case was also different, as what first drew the attention of the witness was a bright light, which apparently shut off as the witness approached.
“I was driving back to where I was staying that night after dropping off a friend. I was driving up a road in Avon, CT, when I saw a bright light up ahead; I thought this was unusual for this time of night [1 am]. I proceeded up the road and when I got to where the light basically was coming from, there was no light present. I looked around in curiosity and discovered an object the size of a house hovering about fifty feet in the air. There was a half moon and visibility was good, this object was very dark and large, there were no lights on and it made no noise whatsoever.
“I parked my car in the middle of the road and left it running with the lights on, hoping someone would come down the road to witness this as well. I stood still in one spot staring at this object for about 5 minutes, fearing what it would be capable of doing. I looked around and saw a house that had its lights on, so I ran over to it and knocked on the door. I waited for a couple of minutes, but nobody answered.
“I ran back to where my car was and the object was still there. I became so scared I jumped in my car and drove off quickly. As I went to the stop sign at the end of the road, I looked up and the object had followed me all the way down the road. I turned to the left and saw the object was still following me, so I floored the gas and never looked back again.”
As if this case isn’t bizarre enough, there was a final twist.
“It took me over a month to tell anyone else, but eventually I told my parents. We ended up moving to an area right where this event occurred, and a neighbor saw the same thing almost one year to the date later. She described the exact same event I witnessed.”
Watch Linda’s presentation on Hudson Valley UFOs here.
Thanks to: http://www.openminds.tv
