Notable Personal Occurrences

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

These are occurrences from the course of my life that I thought other people might possibly find interesting, for one reason or another. These are things that were ‘outside’ me, not things I produced. They are ranked according to how significant they are to me, from least to most.

1. I saw a UFO. This was when I was in College at Georgia Southern, right outside Statesboro, GA (yes, that Statesboro, the one referenced by Blind Willie McTell in “Statesboro Blues” — a song the Allman Brothers killed every time they played it, but especially when they played it there). I was walking across the campus one night and saw a small red dot of light moving across the sky. It made two precise right-angle turns without losing one iota of momentum before I lost sight of it due to the trees. The size and speed of the object depended on the distance, but it obviously was some distance away; I would say it had to be moving faster than a plane. (Though ‘Electric Koolaid’ would become popular among certain people I was friends with there, I promise that was not involved.) [1972]
2. I found an arrowhead. Actually, I found many, many arrowheads. In my college days I worked as a surveyor during the summers. My first summer doing that was spent doing topographical surveying for what would become West Point Lake, on the Georgia-Alabama border. Part of the work involved the construction of a railroad line into the site. In doing that they scraped the surface of the land to smooth it. It turned out, that area had apparently been extremely popular with the people who were living in this part of the world before the Europeans arrived. We literally could not take a step without stepping on an arrowhead. [1971]
3. I found a four-leaf clover. Like many, if not most people, whenever I see a patch of clover I look more or less casually for one with four leaves instead of three. One day I was walking towards the front door of a couple that are friends of mine. There was a patch of clover in the yard. I looked down, and sitting there, as obvious as it could be, was a four-leaf clover. [c. 2012]
4. I found a shark’s tooth on the beach. This was at the shoreline in Grayton State Park on Florida’s panhandle — the ‘Redneck Riviera’. I was walking along, looking as always for a shark’s tooth. It had occurred to me that, a shark’s tooth being a heavier small object to wash up from the ocean, I should focus my attention on places where there was a concentration of heavier small objects. I eventually saw a sharks’ tooth sitting at the edge of one such aggregation. It was large — about 1 1/4" across the base and that long from base to tip. It had a kind of sheath over an inner structural piece, with serrated edges. The color was unexpected: it was a kind of greenish-khaki. [c. 1999]
5. I ’saw’ a ghost. Actually, I ‘experienced’ two ghosts — both adults, one male and one female that I took to be a couple. I was working on a house in upstate New York at the time (that’s what I do for money), staying there while I was doing the work. (The husband in the couple who were the owners, by the way, was not one of the original Blue Men, but was in the very first bunch to be added to the original group.) It was a small house on the top of a small mountain/large hill in the foothills of the Catskills. It had a Great Room/Kitchen on one end and a similarly sized Master BR on the other end, with a hallway connecting the two (along which which there was a bathroom and closet on one side and a small bedroom on the other). One night I was in the MBR, which they were kind enough to insist I use, watching a movie when this ‘couple’ came into the room from the hallway, continued through the room, and exited through the opposite wall. I wasn’t frightened, just stunned. If they were aware of my existence, I couldn’t tell it. I can’t say I saw them in any physical sense, but I was aware of their presence without any doubt. That was the only such occurrence. [c. 2008]