SIGHTINGS


Illinois Man Convinced
He Saw A UFO 75 Years Ago
By Len Wells
Evansville Courier
From Gerry Lovell <ed@farshore.force9.co.uk>


MOUNT ERIE, Ill. -- It's been 75 years since Norman Massie led a team of horses into a pasture near his Mount Erie home, looked up and saw what he is convinced to this day was a spaceship.
 
"You can call me anything you want, but I know in my heart and in my mind what I saw that evening, and it was some kind of spaceship," Massie said.
 
Massie, 85, was 10 years old when he encountered the object. The retired high school math teacher and coach says he kept quiet about the incident until 1990 because his father told him never to breathe a word about what he saw because "people would talk."
 
Massie's UFO sighting happened in June 1923 on the family farm in northern Wayne County.
 
"I opened the gate to let the horses into the pasture. I let them through, and as I was closing the gate I looked back down the field and there was an object with lights all around it," Massie said.
 
"I kept walking closer to the object until I got about 50 feet away. I stood there and watched the five men who were on board."
 
Massie described the men as being about 4* feet tall with blond hair. "I got close enough that I could hear them talk," Massie said. "One guy sat in a chair and the others called him the commander. Four others made trips back and forth in the ship. I didn't know what was going on until the end."
 
Massie claims he heard one of the crew members tell his commander that "the repairs had been made."
 
"The machine was metallic and stood on three legs. The top was a dome with holes in it. The best way I could describe the top was it looked like melted glass," Massie said.
 
The encounter lasted only about five minutes, Massie said. "In a minute, it came to a hovering position. The tripod legs telescoped up into the belly of the thing, and it went straight up about 200 feet and whizzed off to the west like a bullet," he said.
 
Startled by what he saw, Massie says he ran home and told his parents, Grover and Laura Massie, and his 8-year-old brother, Lyveere.
 
"Mom and Dad tried to convince me that I really hadn't seen anything, and was making up the whole thing," he said.
 
He says his dad announced he wanted no member of his family mentioning the incident to anyone because they might think Norman was "crazy in the head, or an idiot."
 
Massie broke his silence on the matter in 1990 when he told his son, Jerry, who was a colonel in the Air Force at the time.
 
"When I got done telling him the whole story he told me there was nothing wrong with me, that the Air Force files are full of pictures of UFOs. He accepted my story as the truth."
 
Massie says he's convinced the object had to come from somewhere other than Earth. "It doesn't bother me one bit that people might think I'm a crazy old man. In my own mind and my own heart, it existed and I saw it with my own two eyes."





SIGHTINGS HOMEPAGE