My name is Barbara, and I need to tell you what happened to me on December 29th, 1980. I'm fifty-one years old, I own a restaurant and a grocery store in the Houston area, and I've never been the type to believe in flying saucers or any of that. But what happened that night, it destroyed my health. It put me in the hospital. And the government won't even admit it happened. It was the week between Christmas and New Year's. My friend Linda and her seven-year-old grandson Tommy were with me. Linda worked for me at the restaurant, and we'd gone out that evening looking for a bingo game. We tried Cleveland first, then New Caney, but everything was closed for the holidays. So we stopped at a roadside restaurant for dinner instead, and around eight thirty we started driving home. I was driving my 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass. We were on FM 1485, this isolated two-lane road through the Piney Woods. If you know that area, it's dense forest, oak and pine trees, swamps and lakes scattered around. Not many people use that road unless they live out there. It was dark, cold, had been raining earlier that evening. The road was still wet.
Around nine o'clock, we saw a light above the trees ahead of us. At first I thought it was an airplane coming into Houston Intercontinental, maybe thirty-five miles away. Didn't think much of it. But as we kept driving on those winding roads, the light got closer and brighter. Way too bright for an airplane. Then we came around a bend and there it was, right in front of us. Hovering above the road, maybe a hundred and thirty feet away, just above the treetops. I hit the brakes hard. The thing was massive. Diamond-shaped, like if you took a giant diamond and cut the top and bottom flat. As big as the water tower in Dayton, I'd say. Maybe bigger. The whole thing was glowing, this intensely bright metallic silver color. And here's the thing, there were these small blue lights ringing the center. But what really got my attention was the bottom. Every few seconds, flames would blast out from the bottom, shooting down in this huge cone shape. When the flames stopped, the object would float down a few feet toward the road. Then the fire would blast out again and it would rise back up. Over and over.
The heat coming off that thing, I can't even describe it. Even from inside the car with the windows up, it felt like my face was burning. Linda said we needed to stop, that we'd get burned if we drove any closer. And she was right, the heat was incredible. We both got out of the car to look at it. Tommy was in the back seat, and he started screaming for his grandmother to get back in. He was terrified. Linda got back in pretty quick to comfort him, but I stood there. I couldn't look away. It was the most bizarre thing I'd ever seen in my life. I don't know how long I stood there. Maybe a few minutes. The heat kept getting worse. When I finally touched the car door to get back in, I had to use my coat to protect my hand because the metal was so hot it would have burned me. The door handle was painful to touch even through fabric. And when Linda put her hand on the dashboard to steady herself, her hand pressed right into the vinyl. Left a perfect handprint. The dashboard had gotten so hot it had softened.
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