- 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.
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- "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.
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- 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."
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- Massie's UFO sighting happened in June
1923 on the family farm in northern Wayne County.
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- "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.
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- "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."
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- 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."
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- Massie claims he heard one of the crew
members tell his commander that "the repairs had been made."
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "Mom and Dad tried to convince me
that I really hadn't seen anything, and was making up the whole thing,"
he said.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- "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."
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- 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."
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