NUFORC Sighting 177971

Occurred: 1984-11-20 21:00 Local - Approximate
Reported: 2023-09-02 01:29 Pacific
Duration: Uncertain, 10-30 min
No of observers: 20

Location: Columbus, OH, USA
Location details: Truck parking lot / former department store parking lot. Map coordinates: 40.013128, -82.959853

Shape: Rectangle
Characteristics: Lights on object, Emitted beams

Rectangular object hovering over parking lot, apparent occupants, instantaneous acceleration and extreme speed.

This report relates to an experience I and a former friend had around mid to late November of 1984 when this event took place. I lived in a neighborhood in Columbus Ohio about half a mile East of I-71 and not far from downtown. My friend and I left my home on my motorcycle because it had just started snowing heavily and we wanted to get where we were going before the roads got too bad.

After turning onto the main road (E. Hudson) towards I-71 I noticed small crowd of teenagers and young adults standing in the middle of the street ahead of us. I had to stop the bike in order to avoid hitting them. All of them were staring up in the air toward the south of the road above the large parking lot which had once been an old Rinks department store and had been turned into a tractor trailer parking lot. Google map coordinates for this location are: 40.013128, -82.959853.

My friend and I looked up to the left and saw three painfully brilliant white lights arranged in a triangular formation fairly close together. As my eyes adjusted I made out the shape of a very large parallogram-shaped object suspended above the parking lot. The two of us debated what it was for a moment and we both realized the object had no visible means of support and was not making any sound at all. I could see that the falling snow was leaving an outline of the object below it on the surface of the parking lot.

At this point my friend began to get pretty hysterical and demanded that we leave. But I said that I wanted to get a closer look. So I parked the bike and walked across the parking lot until I reached a distance of perhaps fifty or sixty feet horizontally away from the object.

As I got closer I realized that it was not quite as large or as high up as I had initially thought. There were a few semi tractor trailers parked in the lot and using them as a size reference I would estimate the length of the object to be roughly 120 to 150 feet and it was hovering absolutely motionless about 50 feet off the ground. It was a dull silvery-grey metallic color overall and was covered in what appeared to be panels or plates,some of which protruded perhaps a few feet here and there in geometric shapes, mostly squares and rectangles. When I walked toward the opposite end of the object I saw five light blue rectangles which covered most of that end. They appeared to be illuminated from the inside and I saw what appeared to be several fuzzy, indistinct outlines of human or humanoid shaped figures.

From the time I reached perhaps 100 feet or so from the object I felt a very odd sensation which I honestly can only describe as having my sense of the passage of time distorted such that I could not tell if I stood there for five minutes or for an hour. The sensation grew stronger the closer I got. It was a very unnerving and overwhelming sensation.

After some time, I'm not sure how long, I saw an intense blue column of light emitted from the bottom center of the object to the ground. I think this lasted for a few seconds but am honestly uncertain. Again, there was still no sound at all and I remember being aware of actually hearing snowflakes hitting the ground.

The next thing I recall was the object moving pretty much instantaneously vertically upward and still soundlessly at an extremely high velocity so that it was out of sight almost instantly.

I then walked back to the motorcycle and my friend and noticed that the other people who had been on the street were all gone. My friend was very angry at me and still hysterical as we finished our motorcycle ride.

My friend and I have not seen each other or had any contact since 1986 or so.

I would just like to follow up by saying that at the time this occurred I was a sergeant in the USAFR serving as an Aeromedical Evacuation Tech. I am also a private pilot and aircraft builder and have been a pilot since 1979. I didn't report anything at the time of the event since I didn't want it to affect my service record and having been stationed at Wright Patterson AFB I knew how such things were generally handled. Later I didn't report it because my brother was a USAF cryptographer with a top secret clearance at the Foreign Technologies division at Wright Patterson AFB and I did not want to cause him more stress than he already had. Sadly my brother died a number of years ago and I finally decided I really should report what we saw in the hopes of adding more helpful information to research of such phenomena.

The first attached image is a scan of a pencil drawing I made after the event of the object and surroundings. Of course there were no cell phones in 1984 and sadly I had no camera to photograph anything with. The higher quality drawing I attached was made by my friend from the incident who happened to be a skilled artist. I do not own that image but I included it for your reference.

*Please note that I did file a report of this incident with MUFON in 2016 (Report #61345.) My friend also filed a report on the same siting with MUFON prior to mine. I am just trying to make what information I have available to anyone who might be able to put it to constructive use. Also please note the date, time, and exact number of witnesses are my best estimates based on my memory. I never spoke with any of the other witnesses aside from the friend who was with me.

Posted 2023-09-10