[Unusual UFO stories reach CNI News in many different ways. In this instance, we telephoned a new subscriber, George Moseman of Long Beach, California, who had forgotten to tell us his email address. It was a routine business call to someone we'd never talked to before. But Moseman, a successful stock broker, very much wanted to tell the story of his own unusual UFO encounter, an experience he shared with his two sons and their friend during a camping trip in late 1995. CNI News editor Michael Lindemann interviewed Moseman by phone, and the following is excerpted from the transcript of that conversation.]

Michael Lindemann: To begin with, I understand that your UFO encounter occurred in the Anza-Borrego Desert on December 28, 1995. Is that right? [Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is a very large wilderness park running from about 40 miles south of Palm Springs, California, south almost to the Mexican border.]

George Moseman: Exactly.

ML: Who was with you?

GM: I had two of my kids, and I had a neighbor kid. All boys, ages ten, eleven and twelve.

ML: Were you camping?

GM: Yes.

ML: Explain how the event began.

GM: This occurred just after sunset, perhaps around 7:00 p.m. It was completely dark.

ML: What exactly did you see?

GM: I'd taken the kids into Borrego Springs [a town in the middle of the park]. We were right off San Diego County Route F22, which runs between Salton City and Borrego Springs. About half way [between those towns] is a "primitive campground" called Arroyo Salado. It's right off the road, and it's all rocky. There is no foliage there at all.

The kids had gotten in a fight at the restaurant, and my two kids were mad at the neighbor kid. So when we went back [to the camp], my two kids took off with flashlights. We were familiar with the area; we'd been out there a lot. There is a little mountain -- they call it "Chuck Mountain"-- probably 200 feet off of the valley floor, and my kids took flashlights and walked this little trail up the ridge. They were up there for awhile. So I grabbed the neighbor kid, who was with me making camp down below, and I wanted to have a pow-wow, because it was a pretty gutsy confrontation. I took the neighbor kid up to the top, and we sat down up there.

We had a full view of what they call the Badlands, which stretch about 15 miles out to the Salton Sea. We were facing north, sitting down cross-legged, with the flashlights. There was about a half-moon behind me, to my left, and a full field of stars. Winter on the desert is absolutely magnificent.

ML: OK, then what happened?

GM: Coming from the Salton Sea area, I noticed some really bright-orange lights, from the east, really bright orangish-yellow lights coming across the desert.

ML: How many lights?

GM: Lots. Lots. At first, it looked like a squadron of helicopters on night maneuvers, coming across the desert. What fixed me on them was that the lights were a kind of light that I hadn't... at any rate, it caught my attention right away. So we all kept looking, and they were really bright... on what appeared to be the outer rim of a disk.

So as this thing gets closer, the first and overwhelming impression was NOT that you were seeing a UFO, but that the lights were all one thing. The shock came from all of a sudden staring at an object that you think is a number of objects, and as it gets close enough to make out what it is, you see it is one object.

ML: So, after seeing lights for awhile, as it approached, you could begin to see enough shape that this thing started to have some structure to it?

GM: It was just one thing. You could just tell. I mean, you couldn't tell exactly what it was, but my first words were, "Oh my god, it's the mother ship." And we were not afraid. But we were awestruck, in shock.

[As as aside, George explained that "we wrote our dialogue down -- who said what, when. After the sighting, I separated the kids to let them do pictures, and then we re-created our dialogue."]

GM: It went right down this sort of shallow valley in front of us. I have a lot of maps of the area, so I tried to triangulate the thing off of the peaks that it went by. We had one peak across from us at 3,500 feet, and one that's 5,000 feet. It was slightly above that, low enough in the sky, perhaps a 45-degree angle, to be maybe 6,500 to 9,500 feet in altitude. But massive, massive. Football-stadium sized.

ML: You mentioned the term "disk" earlier. What shape was this thing?

GM: A HUGE disk, a huge disk, with some kind of structure on the bottom and top.

ML: What kind of structure?

GM: The top appeared to be a little taller, and the bottom a little bit flatter, but bowed -- you know, convex.

ML: You said you saw all of these lights -- the lights sort of illuminated the rim of this thing. Is that correct?

GM: Yes. You could see the shape quite clearly. And also the starfield that it blocked out when it went by. It was literally blocking out, I would say, hundreds of stars. You could just see this THING go by.

My oldest son said, "Dad, what is it?" And you go into instinctual parenting and protection, you know? I said, "I don't know. There's a lot of military bases out here... aircraft, you know." I was literally grasping for an alternative explanation, knowing that whatever I said wasn't going to be bought for five seconds. And he says, "Dad, how can something that big fly that slow?"

ML: How far away do you think it really was?

GM: I'd say maybe two miles out.

ML: Two miles out -- and yet it was still big enough to block hundreds of stars?

GM: It was huge.

ML: How slowly do you think it was flying?

GM: Under 50 miles an hour.

ML: Could you hear any sound at all?

GM: Yeah. One of the reasons I originally mistook it for choppers is that it had a... [imitates a helicopter-like thumping sound]. But when I saw what it was, the sound was not choppers, the sound was like a huge generator, like an oscillating electrical sound.

ML: What frequency? What pitch?

GM: Really low. Boom-box. Rattled your chest. Powerful. Not that loud, but pretty convincing. Sub-woofer, East L.A. Saturday night.

ML: Did you notice any physical effects when it was near you? Anything that would, for example, betray static electricity? Or other kinds of...

GM: No, none whatsoever.

ML: What else about it can you tell me? About its behavior, or its shape?

GM: Well, I tried to analyze why we weren't afraid, other than the fact that it didn't put out a fear vibe -- if we can get that subjective for a moment...

ML: Okay.

GM: One of the reasons... was the fact that it was flying such a precision path. I watched it for between five and ten minutes, easily. And the path, meaning the velocity and the direction, was so absolutely precision, that was one of the things that made it even more extraterrestrial. Because when you see something like this, you realize that your mind actually catches an airplane bouncing through the air, subconsciously -- but this was a path which probably could be measured in proton diameters.

ML: What direction was it traveling again?

GM: East-to-west, all the way from near the Salton Sea, which is probably over 10 miles to the east, to the opposite horizon, probably 15 miles to the west.

ML: How long did that take?

GM: There's the tricky part, because you're so absolutely dumbfounded -- you know, you'd probably be off if you timed it -- but at least five minutes. I used to say 10 minutes, but that would be eternity. We watched the thing disappear into the western horizon and, as it did, we could see the lights.

Then we walked down, and we didn't say anything. I mean, we were stunned. And the kids were like, "What?" It was like, there's everything else that happened in your life, and then there's this. We knew we'd be looking for a place to file this for a long time. But we just single-filed down the mountain.

And my youngest son saw either the same craft, or a similar craft, off in the eastern horizon, to the southeast, about 20 minutes later while we were getting ready to go to sleep. About 20 minutes later, he goes, "There it is again!" We all knew it was, because we had watched it disappear into the western sky, and that's what it looked like as it was just fading from our field of view. And there it was again, miles away this time, but very obviously the same lighting pattern.

ML: So after he pointed it out, you all saw it again?

GM: Yeah, he pointed it out, but we didn't see it traverse back to the east, we just looked to the east, and we saw the same thing. As a matter of fact, the lighting pattern on it -- if you hadn't seen it go by 15 minutes prior, you might think it was a group of planes or helicopters flying off.

The kids were kind of afraid. My oldest son sat in the cab of the truck, and looked over at me, and he goes, "You know, I don't know if I really needed to see that at this point in my life." I said, "I know what you mean, but we'll talk about it later."

So three days later, which was Sunday night, New Year's Eve of 1995, I got the kids together. I'd let a few days go by, and they were a little chatty about it, and not too defensive. So we talked about it, and we reconstructed the conversation.

Then I said, "I've got to see if anybody else saw this. Even in the desert, someone should have seen this." So I called the Anza-Borrego Park ranger's station. A woman answered the phone, and I said, "I was out in the Arroyo Salada on Thursday night. Did anybody see anything go by?" She asks, "Like what?" I said, "Well, I don't know. I didn't understand what it was. Did anybody else report anything weird?" And she said, "What, like a UFO?" And I said, "Well..." And she said, "I'll tell you what. Not Thursday night, but my son-in-law was driving through the Mojave last year and he saw one of those great big mother-ships. He's a real straight-arrow and everything, and he saw one of those mother-ships unloading a whole bunch of flying saucers. Then he watched them come back in, and then they flew away." This was the ranger-woman at Anza-Borrego! And I'm going, "That's pretty far out. Very interesting." So I said, "Well, here's my number. If anybody reports anything, have them give me a call."

So, about 6:30 that night, there's a woman on my answering machine. She says, "Hi, my name is Marie, and I just wanted to talk to you about something you think you might have seen in the desert." So I called this woman. She's an older woman from the area down there, and she said, "I'm not going to ask what you saw. I'm going to describe the experience that I had." She said that she was driving alone out F22, the same highway that I was on, and she looked out her driver's window, and out over the Badlands was this gigantic, gargantuan craft. And I said, "Jeeze, describe it." She described it -- it was the same thing I saw.

It followed her [westward] almost to the periphery of Borrego Springs from the Salton Sea, about 20 miles. She stopped and rolled down the window of her car, and it stopped, parallel with her, out on the desert. And then she proceeded into town. She walked into the house, and, she said, "My eyes must have been as big as pie plates, because my husband immediately walked up to me and said, 'What's wrong, honey?'"

So I said, "Did you report it?" She said, "No. This is the first one that I've had." And I said, "Was that Thursday night?" [i.e. the night of Moseman's sighting]. She said, "That was 1978."

I asked, "How did you get my number?" She said, "I was in the Ranger's Station, picking up some books, because I do writing on wildlife for the Park Service. And I overheard this ranger talking to you in the next room about UFOs."

I talked to her a number of times. And I asked her, "If you had to isolate one aspect of it, what would be the most overwhelming or dramatic part of the experience?" She said the same thing I said: the size. It appeared to be technology that's outside of mankind's theoretical framework, way outside the framework of what I consider to be our current technological parameters. It made a big impression on both of us.

[George Moseman later volunteered the name of this woman, Marie Wright, and Michael Lindemann interviewed her as well. Marie corroborates Moseman's story. At the time of her own sighting, she was the wife of a Christian minister. She was very active in the community and was then running for a local elected office. She also did volunteer work at the state park. Wishing to protect the reputations of her husband and herself, she did not report her sighting in 1978. Subsequently, her husband died in a traffic accident. Today she is a vocational nurse, still living in the Borrego Springs area, and she speaks freely about her sighting, which is the only UFO encounter she has had.

Her description of the UFO differs somewhat from Moseman's. He says he saw a huge disk. What she saw appeared longer front to back than side to side, and seemed to have lighted windows on the sides. Other elements of the descriptions are identical: enormous size, slow and steady movement, bright lights, and general location. Like Moseman, Marie Wright is convinced that what she saw could not have been a human-built aircraft -- particularly in the year 1978.

The television program "Sightings" did a feature in 1994 about UFO activity around the town of Anza, California, labeling the area one of America's premier UFO hotspots. Over the years, scores of local citizens have sighted unusual aerial objects and strange lights over this tiny desert community.]

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