Now that we have two very young grandsons, I want to record some of the stories from my life so they can enjoy them at some point in the future. Like you, I bet we would all love to see and hear our grandparents or great grandparents talking about how their life was ‘back in the day.’
So one of my retirement projects is going to be to make a series of YouTube videos to share with my new grandchildren – and who knows maybe their children and beyond too.
I want to start with the stories that had the most impact on me and I’ll share a written version of the first one here with y’all…
I want to tell this story, so it is in the record at least somewhere. The video version is here.
I believe it was the summer of 1960. I was living at 729 Irving Avenue in Elk River Minnesota. I’m not sure of the date, but it was during the summer and it was an almost clear day with very little breeze. I was in little league and had just played a game at what was then the Handke Junior High School down in the hole where we had an ice skating rink in the winters.
I was riding my red Schwinn bicycle back to home in the mid to late afternoon. I turned off Jackson avenue on 7th street and got on the alley to come the last block. I had on my red Texaco baseball cap (they were sponsoring my team) and I had my baseball glove in the front bent up metal bin.
As I approached the middle of the block, I jumped off my bike and began to walk it through the thick sand in the alley at the Madsen family house. As I got through the sand and came to our property, I looked up.
What I saw was a huge round object partially behind the north-most of our three large elm trees on 8th street. It was drifting, silently and slowly to the southeast.
I ditched my bike by the small Russian olive tree at the back of our yard and ran around the small hedge to get a better look.
The object was now beginning to go directly over our house. It was less than 100 yards away from me – maybe around 50 yards away. It was somewhat larger in diameter than our house was long, which would make it around 75 feet across. It was maybe 30 feet tall in the center. It was mostly a golden-brown color with some blacker areas. The panels around the edge were smooth. I didn’t see any windows. There were a couple thin silver or silver-black pole like objects coming out the top near the center. The object was barely rotating, if at all.
It was drifting just above the treetops, I watched it as I walked quickly toward Irving avenue. It went just above the row of tall poplar trees on the far side of Irving avenue. I stood at the top of our property on Irving avenue and watched it drift over the new addition and finally out of sight.
It seemed like a very long time, but it was probably less than 3 minutes that I saw it.
That evening at dinner I asked my parents about what I had seen. I was excited that it must be some new experimental aircraft that I hadn’t heard of. Neither of my parents could tell me what I had seen.
The next morning, very early, I went down to the post office before sunrise to get my bundle of Minneapolis Tribune morning papers to deliver. I usually spent a couple minutes reading a bit of the paper. On page 2 in the very leftmost column was a story about what people had seen and reported in the sky the previous day. The reports were mostly from northern suburbs of Minneapolis and included eye witness reports from police officers. Minneapolis northern suburbs were exactly in the direction I saw the object going. Their descriptions were like mine.
The newspaper called the object an ‘unidentified flying object’ – a UFO.
An experience like that is not easy to forget or dismiss. I really wanted a better answer to what I had seen. When I was a senior in high school I wrote my thesis on the UFO question.
A life time of thinking about this question has resulted in some shifting of my reality away from the consensus reality.
Are we the only intelligent life in the universe?
Once I understood how vast the universe was, it was clear to me that it was extremely unlikely that we would be the only intelligent life. And beyond that, it occurred to me that it was also extremely unlikely that we were the most intelligent life in the universe.
Has that intelligent extraterrestrial life made contact with earth?
That also seems extremely likely and it has probably been going on for many millenniums.
So, although most people are not inclined to give these questions much thought and simply subscribe to the consensus reality that we alone are the only intelligence in the universe, I live in a world where we human beings are of very limited, even primitive intelligence.
If we had just a smidgen more intelligence, we would see racism, war and suffering from poverty all go away. I have faith that much of humanity is moving, slowly, in that direction.
We think it quite stupid now to think the earth is the center of the universe, but that is what humanity assumed until just a few hundred years ago.
Soon after that, the notion that the solar system was the center of the universe collapsed.
And more recently it became clear that even the Milky Way Galaxy is not anywhere near the center of the universe either.
Someday, I hope very soon, we will realize that the seat of universal intelligence does not rest inside the human race on Earth. And with that realization we will see we have a long and exciting path of evolution ahead of us.