- Bellevue resident Lesley Stuart called recently with
a strange story and a question: Is somebody transporting missiles or UFO
parts across the Eastside in the dead of night?
-
- Stuart's house sits about 100 feet from a railroad crossing
for Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway on the route that carries The
Spirit of Washington Dinner Train. She and her daughter are accustomed
to the dinner-train crossings and regular freight shipments. But when they
heard what sounded like an extra-long train in the middle of the night
a few weeks ago, they woke up.
-
- What Stuart saw out her bedroom window alarmed her. "It
was like nothing we've seen before. It was spooky," she said. Inside
the northbound cars was cargo that got Stuart's imagination rolling: long,
skinny, shiny blue items that looked to Stuart like missiles; huge, white,
rectangular boxes slanted at one end; a shiny, white slug-shape thing,
as long as a semi-truck, with narrow bar-code stripes; giant gauges that
resembled clock faces.
-
- "These are not the Boeing airplane parts we're used
to seeing," said Stuart, who's lived on the corner for four years.
"It was like looking at something from another planet."
-
- The train took 15 minutes to cross, much longer than
usual, she noted. Stuart and her daughter witnessed the odd trains on two
nights before Stuart began leaving her video camera on the nightstand,
ready to record anymore odd activity. But another strange train never came.
-
- We called Burlington Northern to find out if weapons
or UFO parts had been carted through Bellevue.
-
- It turns out that, while unusual, the shipments were
not part of any covert mission. According to Gus Melonas, the railroad's
regional spokesman, the trains were transporting pieces of giant wind turbines
from the Port of Longview to Alberta, Canada. The shipments included generators,
props and blades from the wind turbines, which are used to generate power
and can be hundreds of feet tall. Two 57-car trains were rerouted through
Bellevue because the cargo was too big for downtown Seattle's rail tunnel,
Melonas said. "We don't expect this activity anytime again soon,"
he added.
-
- Stuart laughed when she heard the explanation.
-
- "I guess that's a reasonable explanation,"
she said. "So I can put my video camera away?"
-
- ______
-
- UFO Research http://home.fuse.net/ufo
|
