The Light At The Lake

When I was twelve years old, living in Londonderry, New Hampshire, I woke in the middle of the night to see strange shadows moving on the walls of my room. I believe now that they were nothing more than the shadows of trees, shifting in the wind outside my window. In that bedroom, I saw many demons that later turned out to be nothing more than explainable objects, but when I woke up that night I was very afraid. I crept out of my room and woke my father who, after seeing that my tears were genuine, got up carefully to avoid waking my mother and led me into the living room so we could talk about what had scared me. That led to a long, midnight discussion about the paranormal.

At some point in the conversation, I asked my father if he believed in ghosts, UFO's and such. Now, my father is a staunch Baptist and my family spent 14 years traveling the worlds as missionaries, so the answer he gave me was a bit strange to say the least.

He basically said he didn't know what he believed, but that he had seen things that were unexplainable in his life. He then told me this story:

My father served in Vietnam when he was very young and left the Marines when he was 23 years old. He and some friends got together shortly after and went night fishing on a lake up in New Hampshire called Big Island Pond. Big Island Pond is exactly what it sounds like; a huge pond with a large island in the middle of it which is currently a bird sanctuary owned (if I remember correctly) by the Alan Shepard family. He and his friends were out in the middle of the lake and it was around 3:00am. They hadn't caught anything, but had a good time all the same. They were thinking of heading back to shore when two of the men noticed a point of light in the sky, larger than a star, but obviously not a light from an airplane. They pointed the light out to the other man in the boat and then they all watch in shocked silence as the light began to move.

It traveled very quickly across the sky until it was hovering directly above the boat. All of a sudden, the object began to get bigger very quickly and they realised that it was falling. The three men cowered in the bottom of the boat as the object stopped about twenty feet above their heads. It was about thirty feet long and oval shaped with no apparent seams or edges. My father said he imagined it was a sort of egg shape on it's side because it seemed to be three dimensional and shone like a light through an eggshell, not a pulsing light, but a constant whitish gold light. There was absolutely no sound. All of a sudden, the object took off straight up again and when it was a few hundred feet above them, it took a ninety degree turn and shot off across the sky, parallel to the surface of the lake and disappeared. My father said the ascent and disappearance took maybe one second.

The entire even lasted less than a minute from the time they noticed the light moving to the time it disappeared. It hovered above their heads for most of that minute.

He and his friends picked themselves up off the bottom of the boat, compared notes and headed back to shore. They were terrified, but elated at the same time at having seen something so extraordinary.

My father doesn't tell that story to anyone and he didn't speculate as to what it had been. He didn't call it a UFO or an alien space ship or a disembodied spirit. He just said it happened and I believe him. He hasn't told that story to anyone else other than my mother and even my brother doesn't know about it. Now you know too!