NUFORC Sighting 16828

Occurred: 1997-03-12 20:09 Local
Reported: 2001-03-14 00:00 Pacific
Duration: 3-4 minutes
No of observers: 1

Location: Norfolk, VA, USA

Shape: Chevron


800 foot wide Boomerang shaped UFO floats over head at treetop level, with humming sound-next to Norfolk NAB, Virginia

I have been told to inform you that Art Bell's two "Radio Blackouts" on March 13, were in commemoration of the the "Phoenix Lights" on 3/13/97 and in honor of the night that Nikola Tesla's Lab in NEW YORK was Blown up on March 13, 1895 at 2AM!- the exact time that his radio went out. On the evening of March 12, 1997, I went to visit a friend and former neighbor of mine from ODU college. He lived in a one story ranch at the end of Rogers Avenue, in the Glenwood Park section of Norfolk, VA. Glenwood Park is a small rectangular shaped residential neighborhood, approximately 5 blocks by 5 blocks situated inside a residential section of the Norfolk Naval Base. A street level maps shows quite clearly that this neighborhood is surrounded on all sides by what is collectively referred to as the "Norfolk Naval Base" or just NAB by locals. IN clockwise direction, to the South of Glenwood Park is all Navy Housing, to the west is the Norfolk International Terminals, to the North is Norfolk Naval Air Station, one of whose major runs parrallel and just to the north east of Glenwood park about a 2,000 yds away. Also just north east of Glenwood is the home of the US Atlantic Fleet, complete with ballastic and attack submarines, Arleigh Burke class destroyers, and usually a few Aircraft carriers and their support craft. To say that the area I was in was a "military area" is an understatement, for the Hampton Roads Area has over 250,000 active duty personel, which makes this area, in effect, collectively, the largest military base in the country. (USA) At any rate, at approximatley 9pm EST, while flipping through the basletball games of the "March Madeness" basketball season, in which ODU was playing a major game, my friend (Tommy) not his real name, told me his father who lived next door, was having some plumbing problems. I was a plumber at the time for national plumbing company, and told him that I could help his dad out. I didn't have any buiness cards in my wallet so I walked outside to my service truck which was parked nearby, to get some cards. I dug through my messy paperwork and finally found a few cards and began walking back to my friends house along a 30 foot long path towards a small 3 step concrete porch before entering his door. As I walked along the path, towards my right hand- upper right about 45 degrees from the horizon level, I could see the constellation of Orion with its three stars, AL nitak, Al mintak, and Al- whatever it called, shining very brightly. I could not see the moon, (it was close to a New Moon) the temperature was probably about 40 degrees F and the sky was crystal clear with no clouds visible. Humidity was normal to below normal, and the air was crisp. As I walked The Path, I noticed that "something" was catching my eye and I felt distracted by something. I kept walking, and as I walked I glanced up again at Orion's Belt. My attention was drawn to the area in between the first star on the left of Orion's Belt and the star Sirius which is directly to the east of it. I'm not sure why I looked up there...but my my peripheral vision was catching something moving and I strained to see something, but I didn't know what... So I kept walking up the path and by the time I got to the first step of the porch I looked up again briefly at Orion's Belt and noticed something odd. As I began to walk up the three steps of the Porch, I kept my eyes fixed on Orion's Belt. Something had passed in front of the left star of Orion's Belt blocking out the starlight. "That's Odd" I said to myslef, because as a Former Civil Air Patrol "spotter", I have been on many flights in small cessna 152's and Piper's and knew from experience that any aircraft in this area of NAB would have to have their FAA approved Anti-Collision Lights on at night. Moreover, I also knew from experience that any craft traveling at night, over a military Terminal Control Area (TCA) wihtout lights on, near the final approach vector of its major East-West...would certainly lose his license to fly...in a heartbeat.. Intrigued, I paused at the top step of the porch to wait and see if this idiot pilot would turn on his running lights. I waited for the white random flash in the middle if the craft with red on left (port side) and green on right side (starboard) indicating its presence in the nights sky. Just as soon as that thought passed in my head, I saw the middle star of Orion's belt blink out, as if the craft had passed in front of it...passing as it were from the left of Orion's belt straight across and in front of the middle star of Orion's Belt and the then on to pass in front of the third star on the right...blinked out...all in succession....like One-Thousand, Two- Thousand, Three- Thousand. "This guy's screwed" I say to myslef thinking of how much trouble he's in, (or she, not to offend any woman pilots) when my eyes adjust enough so that I can now see that the dark object is some kind of huge flying wing or boomerang shaped object. "A B-2 Bomber!" I say to myself? Then I say, there aren't any B-2's stationed here? Just as my eyes were able to focus on the craft (with no lights on it whatsoever) It initiated some type of maneuver and I lost it for a few seconds. I took this moment to look at my watch...and as far as I can remember it was 9:08:00 pm EST. From that point on my recollection of how time passes is very bad. I lost the craft for anywhere from 3 seconds to maybe as much as 20 seconds....I'm not real sure. When I first saw the craft, as it passed in front of Orions belt stars, it was approxiamtely 3-4 inches, wingtip to wintip as measured from my face to my outstretched index finger. The shape of the craft was a "boomerang configuration". Some might call this a "chevron" configuration...but I think that describes something more like a carpenters square than what I saw...the bend in the middle, the Dihedral, was only about 5 or ten degrees maximum, meaning that the boomerang shape was only slightly bent in the middle, not 90, or 45 degrees, but much less. Ok, so when I first saw this thing, I had absolutely nothing to gage its height by. I automatically assumed that it was a B-2, not just because its shape resembled a "Flying Wiing" but because I couldn't hear any engines. So I assumed that it had to be a B-2..... As I was pondering all this in the brief period when I "lost" it against the night sky, I got the overall sensation that it was performing some sort of "maneuver", another thought popped into my head... I thought to myslef, "Maybe it's the Navy Seals!". Yeah that's it, it's the Navy seals on a hang glider on a stealth mission...like that scene from "Escape from New York" and I thought to myself "they are training for a mock take-down of NAB! this is cool, I 'm gonna watch this! Just as I had convinced myself that this thing was not a B-2 and had to be a hang glider, because there was no sound, I noticed something coming over the treetops to my left hand side. (southwest). My dad was in the Army and I remember him always telling that if you want the best visual acuity at night, you don't look directly at an object, you constantly move your focus "around" whatever object your trying to look at, this keeps your rods and cones replenished. The reason for this added detail is because, I got the impression that the craft made some type of maneuver to fall from its original position which had to be 6-10 angels high. It moved so fast that I totally lost it from my vision, even though I was looking right at it...I didn't pick it up again until it was about 20 feet above treetop level and about 100-150 yards away! What I'm trying to say is that I don't know whether this craft "fell" from its first position or "dematerialized" and then rematerialized over the treetops...because as I was trying to explain before...I changed my viewing from looking directly at it to focusing around it and it just sort of "materialized"...I don't know if it was because of the way I changed my focus on it (night Vision) or if it really did "Demateraialize" and then "Rematerialize", but my gut feeling at the time was that it did some type of rapid circling maneuver, like when you took the seed pods of maple trees and threw them in the air, we called them, "helocopters" and played with them, they would fall and spin on a central axis while spinning rapidly...I am aware of the brains ability to "fill-in" areas where it does note have enough data to form an opinion, I call it projection, I'm sure some psychologist out there has a name for it. It may have done both or just did a super tight, super fast, "helicopter" maneveur, I'm just not sure. Having flown right seat in cessnas and pipers and having flown hang gliders at Kitty Hawk quite a few times, this intrigued me, because if it was a hang glider, it would explain why it was so silent, but there is no way a hang glider can drop 6000 feet in just a few seconds, without having a catostrophic failure! Hang gliders can drop very fast and silently, but their center of gravity is such that it always seeks the horizon, I just can't imagine a hang glider going straight down like that, unless it had a catastrophic failure, but these thoughts were all muted in a few seconds as It grew closer... So after it made this falling maneuver, it was now situated approximately 200-300 yards away to my left, at about 200 ft ASL or just above treetop level. The craft is moving quite slow now and I am just starting to get a glimpse of its shape, which has changed, not because it actually changed shape, but just because I was now looking at would have been it's right "wing tip" from a position that was in front of and to the right and below the craft. Now the craft, instead of "appearing" like a boomerang, now looks like.... A saucer? I say to myself? No how the hell it went from Boomerang to Saucer shape was beyond me.... AS it grew closer to my position I could see that it had some type of dome shape on the bottom of the side I was looking at. (At the exact time of this angle of view from my perspective I thought it looked like some sort of Dome or oblong shaped Craft...) Ok now I'm standing at the End of Rogers Ave which runs nearly exactly East West and I am at its most Eastern part. The Craft is travelling From due south to North, without any deviation, except for whatever maneveur it made to fall in height. It was just as if I was on a parade stand and this craft falls from the sky and silently floats in front of me going from my left view to my right and out of sight.... But at this time the UFO is now directly in front of me. Rogers Ave is about 5 blocks or approx 2000ft long and lined with yellowish High Pressure Sodium Streetlights. Rogers ave, from my position is exactly perpendicular to me, meaning that it is forming a right angle 90 degrees from my viewpoint. To be more descriptive draw an upside down T and I am at the position of where the Bottom and top of the T intersect, looking down the vertical part of the T. Also important to remember is that this was March and the trees that year hadn't quite bloomed yet, and there were many trees in the nieghborhood and along Rogers ave, so at times during the sighting, the craft was behind the branches. In my original report to MUFON VA I said I thought it had some type of antenna on top of it, but after going back to the sight a year later at the same date, I quite clearly mistook the branches for an antenna. As it got to a point where it seemed to hover over the streetlights I was looking at the craft directly through it's right side. From this perspective it actually appeared to be classic Saucer shape with a rectangular body, with smooth corners and dome on the bottom! But just as my brain was trying to tell me it was a Sacucer, I noticed that the craft seemed to slow down and seemed to almost stop, directly above the streetlights. As it did slow down the right tip seemed to dip down a little as the left tip seemed to yaw to the right, like a conventional plane would do in a turn, but the difference is this thing was nearly at a hover, less than a stone's thro away trtavleing at most 1-5 mph....I knew it wasn't a hang glider or B-2 or anythign like that at all... Right around this moment I noticed that I could "feel" a very low frequency hum, a frequency that sounds much like an eighteen wheel truck in the distance on a deserted hwy, the way you hear it is like a long drawn out huuuuummmmm.....huuuuuuummmmmt. The biggest difference is that I seemed to "feel" this not necessarily "hear" it. Realizing that this was an extraordinary event, I tried to shout out my friends name who was only 20 feet from me through that door...but only a whisper seemed to come out....thinking I had lost my nerve I took a quick breath and shouted again....but nothing came out.....in a panic, I took a really deep breath and exhaled a shout that my mother could have heard 600 miles away....I felt my lungs contract, my throat muscles contract, my tongue moving and breath exhaling....but not a whisper came out! Truly terrified now, I just stood there transfixed on the craft as it seemed to hover over the streetlights and as it did so its right front and right bottom wingtip had the amber colored lights off the HPS streetlights illuminating it. It was at this point that its shape and form were very clear and defined. From my perspective the craft appeared to be approximately 30 or 40 feet from front to back. About 20-30 feet high and ...well at that time I hadn't seen it from any perspective that I could gage its length-wing-tip to wing-tip yet. It most definately had a dome about 15-20 feet wide which protruded down from under its right wing-tip about 5 feet at most. I could also see the outline of another dome on the left under belly of the left wingtip. The right front or leading edge of the wingtip was essentially a vertical surface as was the rear leading edge, but I don't want to confuse the reader into thinking that this craft actually had any laminar flow. The top and bottom edges of the craft were rounded like the Quarter round mold on your floor. In general it was an immense rectangular cross section, boomerang shaped craft with rounded smooth radius edges with no other protrusions or lights or windows or whatever, just perfectly smooth as if it had been injection molded out of a high temperature ceramic composite. The color of the craft resembled what I would best describe as a Black-Bluish. It blended so well with the night sky it was almost impossible to see unless you were looking right at it. You probably could have been sitting right under it, looking stright up at it and the glare of thelights would totall block your view...you wouldn't even know it was there! I have a some Engineering experience and I would say that it most likely resembled a Metallic flame spread coating, whereby metal powder is heated and melted in situ as it is applied to a substrate. This gave the skin of the craft a texture which made it appear from a distance to almost be pourous, like a lava rock or something of that sort but much smoother. It fit in with the sky so well that I think you could have been driving right under this thing and if you werent looking directly at it, you would go right by.... Of course by this time it was apperent that it was not any type of "Air" craft. The "wings" were 20 feet thick, there was no chance for the wings to produce any laminar flow whatsoever and without laminar flow and the Bernoulli principle, you can't produce lift, there were no jet engines, no jet exhaust hitting the trees and moving branches, nothing at all just that all invasive humming. After it did its little slow down and tilt, it then seemed to regain its bearing and slowly began to move a little faster and straighten out its flight path continuuing on its northward path and gently, quietly passing over the homes in that area before I lost it over the horizon. But this was probably the most awe inspiring thing of the whole event for me, because now I had a third perspective from which to gage its true wing tip to wing tip size or length....and I was completely dumbfounded by what I saw.... Before my eyes was a craft that had to be no less 800 feet from wingtip to wingtip. To give the reader some perspective of it's shear size, a 747 looking at it head on is about 187 to 200 feet in length, so if you took 3- 747's and laid them tip to tip they still wouldn't be long enough to match the size of this thing. It was so long that I couldn't focus my eyes on one part of the craft and still be able to see the rest of it....from 2000 yards away! I actually had to move my whole head to scan its size from left tip to the middle and then all the way back over to the right where a tree got in the way! One side of the craft was on the right side of tree and the left part on the left side of tree with 20 feet of branches in between! One more thing, on the back of the craft there was some sort of "line" which ran parallel to the body of the craft. In other words it looked like a rectangle within a rectangle. In retrospect it must have been a protrusion of a few feet out because it was passing over a huge playing field and the lights which illuminated it were now coming from an angle which would could only have made the shadow line I saw if something was protoding as opposed to recess within the crafts structure. Also when viewing craft from the rear, I could see that there were three domes on the bottom of the craft, one on each tip and one in the middle. The next day I searched every paper and news item...but I heard nothing. I thought that I was the only person in the world who saw this thing. Then on July 4, 1997 the SCI FI channel did a special on the 50th anniversary of the Roswell crash...and at the end Jonathan Frakes says, "and in Phoenix Az, on March 13, 1997 Strange lights were seen.…" You have no idea how nuts I went, my roomate thought I was losing it...Now here I was, with proof that others saw exactly what I saw, but only they were 1000 miles away and it was the next night! This began a 4 year quest to find out the truth, the disinfomation, and meaning behind my event. I reported my sighting to MUFON....but they weren't much help at all...I am hoping that posting on this agency will encourage others who know the TRUTH about 3/13 to come forward about this and other sightings in the Hampton Roads Area....I have more information about this sighting for those interested contact Peter Davenport.

Posted 2001-08-20

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