NUFORC Sighting 04195

Occurred: 1985-08-15 20:00 Local - Approximate
Reported: 1998-07-03 00:00 Pacific
Duration: 20:00-20:30
No of observers: 2

Location: South Nags Head, NC, USA

Shape: Triangle
Characteristics: Lights on object

while walking on beach, two teenagers witnessed football-field-sized triangular craft over water from distance of approx. 50 feet.

In August of 1985 while my family vacationed for a week in South Nags Head, NC, a friend of mine and I watched a triangular-shaped craft above us at the beach one night. Although I do not recall precisely what week we were there, this incident took place on a Friday night. I and my friend, both females aged 14 at the time, customarily strolled along the shoreline in the evenings. I estimate that our "sighting" occurred around 8 p.m., but that time is not absolute. I recall that night as very dark, both starless and moonless. However, it is possible that the fear I felt after we encountered the craft skewed my impressions of the environment; to be certain of the moon phase, I'd have to check a calendar from back then. I do remember absolutely that the evening began clear and temperate, with just a few stringy clouds hanging here and there over the ocean. I was looking down, trying to avoid stepping with my bare feet on the sand crabs that come out at night. So it was my friend who first saw something odd in the sky. "Do you see those lights?" she asked me. I followed her gaze, then, and I saw five lights in a tight triangular formation...the center light was red, and it was the largest. It was flanked on either side by two smaller white lights. I do not remember any of the lights flashing; they all maintained a kind of focused dull sheen, if that makes sense. They did not emit beams or illuminate the sky around them. Together, they formed what we later interpreted as the "nose" of the craft, although we did not at first notice any other lights or even an outline of the craft's shape because the night was so very dark. I am guesstimating the craft's distance from us as about 50-100 feet -- very close -- and about the same distance up in the air from the ocean, but the darkness and the lack of earthbound objects (i.e. trees) by which to judge height/size made it difficult to pinpoint how large or how close this object was. As I looked up, I caught this "nose" emerging seemingly out of nowhere. In retrospect, I believe that I decided on-the-spot that the craft must have been behind cloud cover because that was the only way I could rationalize its sudden appearance. But as I said above, what few clouds there were that night were unsubstantial and spaced far apart from one another. As farfetched as it seems, I have to consider that the craft may actually have been "cloaked" in some fashion and then it revealed itself...? I feel ridiculous writing that, but I have no other explanation. It's possible that my friend and I just happened not to see it until it was dead even with where we stood. But the enormity of the craft and its apparent proximity to us makes that possibility seem unlikely to me. Regardless of how the lights got there, from the moment my friend and I first noticed them, some inexplicable quality they seemed to give off made us both vaguely uneasy. I think that strangeness was why my friend had to ask me whether or not I saw what she saw, and it was why I didn't question her needing my confirmation. I'm not sure how long it took us to realize that a big contribution to this strange "vibe" we were experiencing was the craft's utter silence. It wasn't merely an absence of engine or other familiar aircraft noise; it was an intense, all-pervasive silence that was eerily powerful precisely because it was so absolute. It was a consuming silence, the likes of which I cannot recall experiencing in any other situation. I have always remembered that silence and have tried to describe it on the few occasions that I have discussed my "sighting" over the years with friends. But it wasn't until I happened to catch a bit of a cable program the other night that I heard another so-called witness state that she had viewed a completely silent airborne object. That was the first time I had ever heard a UFO-sighting detail that matched my own experience, and it made me snap back to the events of August '85. I researched online and came across this site; now that I've read numerous other reports, I understand that very many people indeed have witnessed silent crafts. A few have also seen triangular crafts (another detail from my personal encounter that I had never heard elsewhere). Obviously, I have not made a point of keeping up with ufology! Hearing and reading some other people's testimony has encouraged me to share my experience now. Although I have never doubted the nature of what I saw that night, the content of other witnesses' reports lends credence in my mind to my personal memories, legitimizing them somehow. So I will continue with my report: I and my friend stopped walking to watch these lights for awhile. At some point, we became aware of a sixth light. It was the same color and size as the large dull-red light which marked the center of the "nose" of the ship, and it was straight back from that light. (Imagine an arrow, designated only by five points outlining the tip of the arrowhead and a single dot at the base of the arrow). Here is where my friend's and my accounts differ; one of us thought that the space between the original five lights and this single sixth light encompassed about one football field's length, but the other thought it was closer to two football fields long. After all this time, I don't recall which of us insisted on which length. Let me reiterate how hard it was to determine size and distance in that environment. Now that we saw the sixth light (it, too, just quietly asserted itself; it may have been there all along, or it may have appeared after the others), we determined that the entire area in between must be one giant craft. This final light marked the middle of the third leg that formed the base of the triangle. I know that my friend and I agreed that the ship was triangular and basically flat, but as far as I remember, we couldn't actually see an outline. It was like this ship swallowed the whole night sky above us. I remember just barely discerning the distant horizon break between the dark blue ocean & the deep black sky, and my vision was 20/20 at the time. So if the night really was as dark as I am remembering, the craft was either pitch black itself or it was utterly transparent. We never questioned that the sixth light belonged to the same craft. All of the lights moved in tandem. They slid so smoothly and slowly across the sky that their motion was almost imperceptible. They moved in the same direction in which my friend and I had been walking, and then shortly after we stopped to watch them, they stopped, too. After I'm not sure how long, we tried moving forward again, and the craft moved with us. We stopped again; it stopped again. I think anxiety started seeping in to me about then if it hadn't already. Perhaps the coincided movements were an optical illusion, as when you view a painted portrait from many angles and it seems to always be looking directly at you. But my friend and I got the very definite impression that the craft was watching us. We reacted by speaking in low murmurs as if it could hear us, and for some reason I got it into my head that we ought not stand looking at it for too long at a stretch or it would overpower us. I kept having to shake off a certain numbness -- not so much a physical numbness as a mental one. It was very easy to fall into a sort of spellbound state as we watched these lights. Eventually, we decided to head back in the direction we'd come from. I think we were both beginning to feel frightened, but the onset of fear was slow. We turned and walked back down the beach, and lo & behold -- the craft switched direction, too. It did not turn; it just moved "backwards," so that the sixth light -- the second red light -- now became the "front." I remember feeling a bit scared, but more giddy. It was like a game we were engaging in with this strange craft. Now we stopped and waited for awhile to see what might happen. My friend felt less anxious than I did, and I took courage from her equanimity at first. I don't know how long we stood there. It was probably under 10 minutes, maybe even under 5 minutes, but it could have been hours. I had absolutely no grasp of time. I know that I got that numbness again because I realized at some point that my friend had sunk down to the sand and I hadn't even noticed. She and I had stopped talking. The object mesmerized us, or we allowed ourselves to believe that it did. It continued to merely hover, stationary. After we had watched it for some time, rain began to fall, lightly at its start. Maybe it was the rain that jolted me back to my senses or maybe I just "came to" again of my own accord, but whatever the reason, I forced my attention away from the lights. I bent down to look at my friend's face. I had to get close up to her because of the darkness, so when I looked in her eyes, we were only a few inches apart. I remember that what I saw in her eyes sent a chill through me. She was smiling a strange little smile and her eyes were all glazed over. It wasn't like she was totally unresponsive or anything, but there was an unnatural excitement and faraway attitude that she conveyed. (I should clarify here that we were both very much drug-free). When she spoke -- something like, "you're in my way, I want to see them" -- her voice quality had changed, too. It was then that I understood that what I'd taken for her equanimity was actually closer to her willingly "zoning out." That really scared me. The rain started to fall harder. Then, quite suddenly, the whole craft just took off at a speed that made my breath catch in my throat. Again, absolutely no sound unless it was quieter than the rain. The craft went up the beach about a half-mile at approximately a 30-degree incine, and there it stopped near a short cliff. At first we thought it wasn't doing anything, but then we noticed that the positions of the lights relative to one another seemed to change. That was because, as we soon figured out, the craft was turning around. It did not bank at all -- the nose did not dip down. The whole craft just turned on a flat plane. Oddly, as it turned, we could see all of the lights all of the time. It was as if the inside of the craft were invisible -- we could see the "nose" lights through the "tail" light like no craft was in between. Yet we had no doubt that there really was a craft in the shape of a triangle, not just disconnected lights. So I think that the ship must have been very, very flat. Another few minutes went by, during which we couldn't tell what the craft was doing. But then we understood that, in a slow, steady, direct line, it was returning -- it was approaching our area again. It was moving so deliberately and so directly towards us that at first we hadn't been able to perceive its motion. Somehow, seeing those lights begin to get larger with the perspective as the craft neared again, my friend and I finally got filled to bursting with a sort of elated terror, and we ran all the way back down the beach where we'd come from and then up a gravel road to our cabin. The rain was furious now and blinding. I am not a sportive person, but I ran fast and hard that night with no regard for my bare feet on the rough gravel. They got fairly cut up from our run. I remember seeing other people on the beach as we ran back. Being 14, we yelled loudly all the way home, garbled giddy warnings about "the lights! the lights! don't let them take you!" and so on. People flitted past in a blur as we ran, but I do remember some puzzled looks on people's faces. It occurred to me later to wonder whether they even saw these lights at all. But when I and my friend finally got back to our empty cabin (my parents were out for the evening), we slammed & locked the door and turned on all the lights and pulled down all the blinds -- and as we yanked down the blinds, we kept peering through the windows. We couldn't see the lights where they should have been. The whole run back had taken maybe 5 minutes and we hadn't checked behind us to see the location of the lights since maybe 2 minutes earlier when the other houses had obscured our view. Now, gazing through a back window, we finally located the lights again. Maybe the reason we had gotten puzzled/startled looks from people as we ran was because the craft had zoomed off, far past the area where it had made that no-bank turn earlier, and higher up. It must have moved very quickly. The fact that it had flown away again rather than continue to move toward where we had been standing excited us because that "confirmed" that the craft had actually been focusing on me and my friend. We decided that it had wanted to abduct us and that it nearly had. I'd still like to think that. But who knows.

Posted 1999-01-28