Ultimate Weirdness from the Timmerman Files

It's sort of difficult to try and explain this to anybody and have them not think you are making it up, or that you're from the looney bin.

     This was the opening statement by an interviewee for John Timmerman, who took the photo exhibit of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) around 92 malls in the United States between 1980 and 1992. In the process, he heard so many stories that, after the first two malls, he brought along a tape recorder and taped the witnesses. Mostly, what he heard were conventional UFO reports - if "conventional" can be used for such a subject. However, as you should be aware, you can't probe very deeply into this field without unearthing stories which are very weird indeed.

     (1) It was broad daylight in August 1976, and a witness was working in his mobile home in the forested hills near Medford, Oregon. Just then, he saw something like burning magnesium approaching across the cloudless sky. As he looked, it resolved itself into two objects, side by side, moving in complete silence, about to pass over his home. They were discs, flat on the bottom, and curved on top, and intensely bright. The amazing thing was that, between them, was a vintage World War II bomber. It was dark grey, and he could see its bubble-like gunner's hatch, and the two propellers, which were not moving. But the tips of the wings seemed to rest on the luminous discs on either side, as if they were ferrying it.
     Did some organization lose a World War II bomber exhibit in August 1976? If so, I suspect they never got it back.

    (2) This happened in 1949. The witness was a member of the 2nd Armored Division of the Tank Corps posted to Camp Hood, now Fort Hood Military Reservation in Texas.  For about a month he was on guard duty at night at a vacant, fenced-off areas on a nearby plateau. What they were supposed to be guarding was beyond him. Then, one night, about one a.m, some very bright, completely silent lights appeared in the sky, approached the plateau, and slowly descended. Much to his amazement, the end of the plateau suddenly opened up, and they could see light coming from inside. Then the other bright lights went down into the plateau, and it closed up again.
    "At the time I was ignorant about such things," he added. To which Michael Swords, who recorded this, commented that we are still not much better off.

    (3) Now we come to the man who had difficulty explaining it to Timmerman. It had nothing to do with UFOs, but when you've had a really weird experience, and a stranger is prepared to listen, you might as well get it off your chest.
     It was near Indianapolis, Indiana in 1977. The witness was standing in his living room, minding his own business, when he felt "a charge in the air", a tingling all over his skin, and the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He felt he had to turn and look behind him. There, emerging from a line in thin air was the upper arm, shoulder, and part of the torso of something non-human. There may have been a small coloured glow to the line, which appeared to form the boundary between, well, this world and somewhere else. Almost at once, the thing disappeared back behind the line.
    A year and a half later, the same thing happened.
    Interestingly, Timmerman didn't ask exactly what the creature looked like. Perhaps it was best not to know.

     Of course, when you hear something totally weird like the the last one, my rule is to neither accept it or reject it. Instead, you put it in your folder. If it was not true, it will die of loneliness there, but if it is genuine, eventually one of its friends will come along to keep it company. Something like this:
     (4) In 2004 a Californian called Sean contacted the Fortean Times magazine and described an incident from a few years before. He was with a group of about 20 or 30 actors and film staff crammed into a flat, drinking and partying, and taking the occasional marijuana. It was about 11.30 at night, and he was listening to some music while a friend played a video game. Suddenly, he noticed something move near the door of a small closet under the stairs, which people used as a "hotbox" ie a place to smoke marijuana, where the smoke can't escape.

I saw what I could only describe as a dark tentacle sweep out from underneath it. I felt a cold chill hit me as I watched it swish out from under the door, as if it was grabbing at something, and then swiftly retreat. It was a matt black colour - there was no reflection coming off it, as you would expect with a 'slimy' tentacle. It was not a cat's tail, an escaped snake or a remote-controlled prop (the only pets my friends had in their condo were copious amounts of roaches ... the scurrying kind that is.)

     Sean said that, although he was perfectly functional under the influence of marijuana, he would have written it off as an hallucination, except that he locked eyes with his friend, Ryan. He asked her if she had seen the same thing. She had. They got the heck out of there.
    According to the Childhood Beliefs Site, a large number of children believe there are monsters under the bed at night. Makes you think, doesn't it?

References: Michael D. Swords (2003), 'Timmermania: a step too far into the Timmerman files?' International UFO Reporter 27(4): 8-9, 26 (This was the now defunct journal of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.)
     The last story is from It Happened To Me volume 4, pp 149-150 (a Magbook put out by Fortean Times.)