The Linear Canvas

Being on the road most of the day, five days a week for thirty plus years allows one to see many interesting people, places, and things. Sometime around 1995, I was working for a wireless broadcasting company in Lima, Ohio. Heading to a trouble call in western Ohio, I was driving west on US Route 33, between St. Mary’s and Celina, Ohio just before the rest stop on the north side of the highway. It was approximately 2 PM, and the sun was shining very brightly. As I approached a farm field at a cross road on my left, I noticed something in the field, or I should say above the field. The grey colored object was not very big, but it was big enough that it shouldn’t be suspended in midair, about fifteen feet above the ground, for any reason. But it was.

My brain could just not understand what I was looking at. It was obviously something I had never seen before. I wanted to fill in this blank in my mind with something known, but I was unable to. There is just nothing I could explain about what I was looking at. I had no frame of reference and nothing was as it should have been.

There was a thing, hovering silently and steady in the middle of the air with no means of support whatsoever.

The object itself had a mostly flat bottom that was saucer shaped. It was about eight to ten feet across. In the classic UFO way, it had a top that was like an upside down cake pan in the center that was about four or five feet wide and about a two or three feet tall. The whole object was about three to four feet tall and tapered to about an inch or two at the edges, so it was obviously not big enough for a human. It was about one hundred feet from a tree, so it couldn’t have been hanging from one. There were no power lines anywhere close by, so it couldn’t have been dangling from that either.

As I passed on the opposite side of the road I watched the object through my van’s driver side window, and then in my outside rear view mirror. I debated in my mind whether to turn around or to continue on. I felt a little panic and I decided I would just keep going to where I was heading and maybe drive back by later. When I did return about an hour later, the object had disappeared.

What I saw that day is unclear to me. I wish I had been braver and gone back and investigated. Something just told me to leave and not look back. This was well before digital photography became so commonplace. I wasn’t carrying any kind of camera, even film.

Many similar sightings are explained away as a plasma cloud. Maybe it was. But if it was a spaceship from another world, the creatures there are awful tiny. Of course it could have been a remote controlled scout ship sent to investigate the surface of our planet. It also could’ve been a Robotic Bovine Experimental Surgery Unit sent to carve up some cows.

Whatever it was, it spooked me enough that when I got home I made a drawing of it on the back of a bank envelope, kind of like what Richard Dreyfuss did with the mashed potatoes in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", but without the mess to cleanup. I have looked for years for that drawing but as yet have not been able to find it.

Not only was it very small compared to other reported UFOs, the incident also happened in midday. I think classic UFO sightings have been of a large craft appearing in the late-night. Both are unlike my experience. The late-night experiences also tended to be by lone individuals. In this case there was traffic passing in both directions. I’m sure I’m not the only person that saw it that day, as well as all those worried looking cows in that pasture. It also did not speed away. If there was any intelligence controlling this object, then obviously it didn’t care what I thought.

Or is this just all they are allowing me to remember?