OWL / UFO PARANORMAL
AUTHOR: Present day 2023 listening to a UFO podcast over headphones while cleaning…show host: “there seems to be a persistent link between owls and UFO sightings at least in the US. Especially if you talk to people about what happened before and after their sighting and the feeling they had while witnessing the owl…”
(Cleaning continues, in my brain I’m a tiny bit jealous of the people with the awesome owl encounters) It would be amazing to have an otherworldly experience with an owl. I’ve seen loads of owls. I like owls but have always just had normal encounters…pause….very normal…except…(memory clicks into place like an old movie) except once…now that I think of it…Yeah…yeah that is inexplicable, how had I forgotten?
1983
My Dad had served in Vietnam a dozen years prior and earned a couple of medals with valor attached, a fact I wouldn’t know for over a year after his death. He was striking looking with corn flower blue eyes, a hawkish nose, square chin, black hair, and the fact he stood 6’8″ tall (203 cm). In Vietnam he didn’t eat much and had wasted down to frighteningly skinny. He was 18 years old when drafted.
He was guarded about his experience so I only knew he worked on Huey helicopters and everyone he had known there had died during an ambush. He wasn’t sure why he was alive. The only time I asked him why he received medals he said with the typical dramatic pause and snarl, “I didn’t die.” Dad delivered every spoken line like he was on a movie set.
Dad had a temper. He was ornery and could play tricks on people.
He had an oratory ability along with an excellent vocabulary, memory and his worst weapon: the ability to dissect a situation with razor like accuracy and then begin to deliver a speech for the ages. When he started talking everyone stopped and listened and his speeches were captivating. If he pointed a bony finger and began dressing down a moron for unacceptable incompetence, well, pull up a chair, get the popcorn – it was going to be epic.
At home telling a story and usually it was about someone making a spectacularly avoidable dumb mistake – he would start joking, then meandering a bit linking jokes and frees styling, so in short order the story would transform and I would be in stitches laughing so hard.
(My Grandpa, his Dad also told stories but instead of a ‘stupid person’ there was always an animal as the main protagonist and often him interacting with them in a supernatural way. They were amazing stories, but often he would get excited telling them and the whole back half of the story would be in Cherokee and I never found out what happened after he fought the boss rattlesnake.)
Dad’s stories about this and that were always gripping and usually really interesting. He would create a story around what he watched on TV as a documentary and it would come to life. There were always stories.
Mom would say, “he’s such a bore.”
I was shocked by that, Dad? Boring? What! Dad is a hurricane trapped inside a mortal form.
Dad wasn’t good with kids. This is important to this story, but he was great fun in a dangerous barely contained chaos way.
I have a problem regulating my glucose levels and they drop out the variability causes mood issues. When my son was born he had the same thing, but I imagine Dad had no idea why he would go from pleasant to aggressive or worse: rage. Now mind you, Dad wasn’t going to punch holes in the wall, break things or throw a fit like a childish self-centered punk — he handled it professionally. He would never have hit a woman or be what he considered undignified and rude. He seldom even cursed and he refused to drink. In my entire life I never saw him unshaven. His shirts were pressed. He always had an under shirt. He might be pissed off but at no point was the world out of his control. He sported no tattoos and no jewelry. He smart hair cut.
He swept the shop after he finished. He cleaned the gun he never fired.
I’ve seen him hold people upside down and lecture them. Literally.
I’ve seen him give people what for out of the blue.
He told me that his boss in a rage threw a shovel at him. He caught it mid-air by the handle then quietly turned towards the man – who then fled. (That could have been the perfect Christmas present for my Dad…)
Dad was a little larger than life. If he was actually upset and truly mad, instead of just indignant and flexing his oratory capabilities he would sink into a morass of silence that seemed to suck everything else into it. A quiet Dad was the worst news. I would feel every cell in my body tense.
His stance on being boisterous, loud, dramatic and making people wilt, break down, cry or even run away — well – they had that coming. (Okay, at this point people who know me, the author, are going to mention something along the lines like: you are like that! Maybe they’ll mention the neighbor guy trying to run his mouth and I stopped him with a hand mid-sentence with–“you don’t get to say s*** to me m******.” For those who say I’m just like him, well I would give about anything to be able to deliver an on the spot oration that dissected a situation with such surgical grace, insight and vocabulary and it’s a damn shame the world lost that now. (In the nursing home Dad could not keep a single roommate. Eventually after a dozen or so people proved no match to his countenance they let him have his own room but discharged him home quickly.)
How many times have I wished that as a 5’6″ little female I could walk into a room and command respect.
Dad could calculate large numbers in his head immediately and accurately. Once he made me sit in one spot and try and learn multiplication, I’m not sure if he knew I didn’t know adding and subtracting yet. He kept growling at me, “this is easy, this is easy, don’t be stupid, what is THE ANSWER?!” He would demand stabbing at the paper with a huge finger indicative of years of heavy labor – my mind was panicking way too hard to think. I was four and three hours later he was still grilling me. By then I was sick to my stomach and pale and scared. My Mom would say in her little tiny voice, “now Larry don’t you think you should let her go…” He would growl and spit a nasty answer and she would slink off. Another hour would go by and she would say, “have you had enough math…?” To me – but I would meet my Dad’s cold blue glare, no, no I love this situation. I was in it for the long haul and I knew it. I did not learn math, and when I went to school found I would panic around math anytime it came up. I became so bad at math it was comical.
I got into trouble at age five for throwing a salute incorrectly while playing some sort of war game with the neighbor kids.
He did lovely things like throw my cats on the roof with zero understanding of my trauma. He was almost the height of the bloody roof. The kitties would cry to get down and I would go bawling my eyes out inside to get Mom to help me get the cat down – he would laugh. He played with spiders and thought it was funny I was scared. He would give me a blistering scolding when I couldn’t shove the massive iron shop door shut. It was a two story metal thing on rollers that had to weigh five-times as much as I did as a kid. I couldn’t even budge it a centimeter. He could close it with one hand. He was always laughing and telling me, “you should have been a boy.” If I was having difficulty with a bolt or a faucet or turning a screw driver the wrong way he would shout, “you’re in the Northern Hemisphere of the Unites States of America” ….pause….like that should click something in my brain, but I would look stupefied, “Well? Well! In America we’re not on the metric system so you turn it to the RIGHT!” I’m almost fifty now and I can’t explain that particular lecture, but I heard it a few times.
When I was a teenager, once I bought a discount button up shirt out of the men’s section on sale – I thought no one would notice. “Why on earth do you have that men’s shirt on.” It was a very generic shirt. “Oh, thought I wouldn’t notice?” He inquires, I’m at a loss, how in the hell does he know it was from the men’s section? He goes, “THE BUTTONS, they’re on the left.” And he lets out his breath like I’ve just done the most obvious and dumb thing in the world. So that was how I learned button up shirts are different apparently based on the gender, I sure as hell never forgot.
No one with any sense allowed my Dad to babysit. Nobody wants their child totally screwed up, and my Mom did her best to prevent it the worst.
The man didn’t have much if any fear.
My Dad was the guy who climbed up the water tower and put the star on top each December when it was snowy and icy. The star lit up and was quite large, around 6ft, aluminum with lights, and he had to carry it up the ladder in freezing temperatures with only one hand on the rungs. It was an exceptionally high water tower that took up the horizon and was a local landmark. In his 70’s he told me he had an extreme dislike of heights. I was flabbergasted. He climbed up a 200ft ladder in icy winter with one hand and hated heights? He was that kind of guy…
A lot of people had a harsh opinion of Dad as a person. Hated and feared him. My Mom’s father, my Grandpa Dell loved him (maybe about the only person besides myself). My Dad never disrespected Dell. Dell served four years in WWII and could stand up to my Dad but Grandpa was as easy going as my Dad was temperamental. (I spent a lot more time with Grandpa then Dad as a result.)
My Dad was the kind of person anyone would want in a tight spot. Maybe not as a coworker, definitely not as a boss, probably not as a boyfriend – definitely not as a husband. Never a babysitter, but if there was a situation – Dad was the G.O.A.T
1983
I found myself on a really rare, “outing with Dad!” I was thrilled. My Mom’s hobbies were anxiety, OCD cleaning, and chain smoking – it was boring. Her anxious comments would become like hiccups. She drove us up the wall. But with Dad, I knew there would be adventure and I wouldn’t have to be shouldering my Mom’s never ceasing anxiety as long as things went well and he didn’t explode.
Looking back however, my mind can’t fill in – why was I with Dad that day. My Mom always tried to circumvent any kind of ‘Dad babysitting’ circumstances.
We were driving in the middle of absolute nowhere. We already lived remote – and we were far, far away from home surrounded by Oklahoma prairie and tall grass. In my memory the grass is a cold golden color, so it was probably winter. The sun was shining and it was dry.
Dad made a sudden stop on the single track dirt road we were traveling, he looked for a place to pull over and park the truck. We were in an area I had never seen before. There was just the narrow red dirt and gravel road stretching into infinity splitting the prairie momentarily. We got out and there is nothing around – I mean NOTHING we head across the ditch and head up the short embankment where a barbed wire fence ran along the road. Oklahoma has miles upon miles of barbed wire fences. They are along almost every road in Oklahoma except for ‘free range’ which is so rare many Oklahoman’s won’t know what that means. Anyway, we were busy with our trespass. Up the embankment we go, he picks me up and drops me over the barbed wire fence and he climbs the first couple of wires and hops over. (Crossing over, under and through 5 line barbed wire fences was almost an everyday thing for me as a kid.)
Reader might be wondering, so was this family property or…??
Heck no, no idea where we were. But it seems that we were supposed to be going home and we were running late.
Well fence lines were more like suggestions you know. If there was something to go see we weren’t going to be morally limited by a fence. Besides if they didn’t want us there they would have dogs or a ‘Keep Out’ sign. No sign or dogs is basically an invitation for investigation! We would never mess with someone’s cattle or stock. Messing with a cow was tantamount to stealing their children and burning down their house, maybe worse.
(It might be worth noting my trespassing history probably is in the hundreds of instances…)
We’re in the middle of the prairie Oklahoma in no-man’s land. We’re wading through a pasture. The buffalo grass was so high that Dad picked me up and threw me onto his shoulders so I could get through. This made me about 8ft tall and I loved it.
There was an old barn ahead, and it was a classic. It was really large and majestic and well built. It was grey with age and looked like the old time paintings so popular in the 1980’s complete with windmill.
Back then old barns and windmills dotted the country and I always saw those, those were normal – but I bet few are still standing today which is a shame. Dad thought they needed preserved even back then. History slipping away.
We managed to get inside the barn through a sort of window hole in the back, that was the easiest entrance. I would suppose it was for horses or something that seventy-years before made sense.
Inside there was this vast vaulted ceiling. It seemed to go up for ages, it was amazing. The back of the barn boasted a hay loft.
There was a mysterious and dense atmosphere inside the barn. Maybe a bit like visiting a grand museum or cathedral. It had a feel that made a person want to whisper. It was shaded inside with light streaming through holes and cracks. Something bothered me about the barn, like there was a piece missing. Other barns I went into later never had that feel, and I since been in a fair number of larger impressive barns. There was something just off about the barn, like 15 degrees too far left, but I was with Dad on a mission. We could handle it. As Grandpa would say from his military days: CAN-DO.
Dad would point out this or that and explain it. I would nod like I fully understood the explanation but it didn’t stick and didn’t compute. I hoped he wasn’t going to quiz me on it later because sometimes he did that.**
The floor in the barn was dusty. I mostly stared up because it felt so tall. All of a sudden we hear a racket and a screech sound — just terrible noises – then silence. This huge owl was startled by us interlopers – and he comes gliding perfectly silent* directly towards us. I can still see him in my mind. He was all white and huge he dipped down just above Dad’s head. The wings felt as if they went from wall to wall almost – but I was a shrimp of a kid. Adult me supposes his wing span was anywhere between 3-6ft. He was so quiet and then at the last minute pulls up and went out a hole in the barn on the far side with barely a whisper. Wow.
Owl probably buzzed our head to get enough lift to exit the hole at the roof line, but it was so close to us and so incredible.
I had stopped breathing. I probably did a little kid scream. Dad says, “that’s a barn owl.” I said something kid-smart like, “but it’s daylight!” But instead of getting snarky and irritated, Dad just nodded looking worried, “they do that sometimes” he said absently not paying attention. “We need to leave. right. now.”
He kept motioning for me to hurry. I think we had gone through a window in the back because I recall having to go up and over something to get out of the barn. “Come on, come on, come on…” He had gone through the ‘window’ he motioned to me and with one arm hoisted me free of the barn. No more carefree shoulder ride though, he dragged / pushed and urged me on absently while looking around nervously. At some point he realized that he had me by my little hand pulling me through the buffalo grass that was folding over and making a bit of a slide if you will, so I slid along rapidly over bent thing stalks. “Hmmph” He stopped dragging me, we were at the fence. Popped me back over in one smooth action, it was a little steep so I slid down the embankment, and our exit was much faster then how we had entered. We tore off in the truck and he didn’t speak one word. The dreaded Dad silence. But this time he didn’t seem angry but he was bothered.
He didn’t relax until we were on our familiar rural route almost home. But it was late, the sun had been overhead at the barn and now we were late for supper which was always at 6pm, we called it supper, some people call that dinner or tea I believe. It felt like we had been in the truck only a half hour, I shrugged it off because mashed potatoes were ahead.
I didn’t know what had happened but I knew something had happened. Dad didn’t say one word after we got home. He never mentioned the trip or the owl again. Not ever.
I went over to my Grandparents, “Grandma, Grandpa, guess what?! I SAW AN OWL! A real owl! It was a barn owl!” I had committed the name to memory. I wondered if white owls were rare, I decided it was a rare barn owl.
Then today I looked back and I thought – you know what – that’s really strange. Why were we out there? Why did Dad suddenly stop there? There are hundreds of old barns dotting the prairie and it seems like we had been in a hurry to get home before the sudden detour on a single track dirt road and then stopping at a barn – how did we even find that place?
Why was Dad adamant that UFO’s were real? Why did I never ask him?
As a young person we watched an early ‘Roswell Special’ and I asked Dad, “Dad, is that real? Did aliens land at Roswell?” And looks very serious and solemnly says, “Oh, yes, yes they are real.” If I didn’t know better, I would say they scared him – but that was impossible right? He once played with a black widow spider. For fun — and couldn’t stop laughing, the joke was probably my face because I thought he was going to die. Maybe he didn’t know it actually was a black widow and poisonous in retrospect, but as the kid that gets absolutely harangued if I don’t know the names of things: it was the real deal. He lucked out.
Age Seven I was depressed all the time. I had a sleep walking issue, but when I would sleep walk I would also hallucinate. I think I wrote about that before here if you are interested. One night I thought there was this light coming through my window, and I recall vividly my window, my curtains and peaking up out the bottom of the double pained glass. It was like car lights coming in my window but impossible and there were shadow figures and then nothing. ET was popular around that time but I didn’t connect that in my head at all, it made me feel sick inside and weird, it wasn’t good.
In fifth grade my best friend brought his brothers book to school about aliens and UFO’s – I begged to borrow it so he let me take it home for the week. It was a thick mass publication paperback full of photos, sketches, pictures along with stories. I didn’t read it, I took it back the next day, I couldn’t look at the images. I had a profound unease and felt sick. It made my brain feel itchy and like I couldn’t focus on it and I hated seeing them and like I was falling down a hole and couldn’t stop myself. Stay away from alien stuff — Roger that. The Greys absolutely freaked me out, when Communion came out it made me shudder and made me feel sick all over again. The same all encompassing dread and sickness rolling into my throat – every time.
In the 80’s the big news about aliens in my little world was the tv, which mostly piped in British shows but we did get a fuzz infused channel 8 out of Tulsa, Channel 4 and 6 depending on the weather and Shirley MacClaine was making a splash with the tell-all 1986 publication of, “Out on a Limb” where she meets the Pleidians. I listened to tells about the aliens and thought, she’s full of shit. She’s never met a single god damn alien.” I was so pissed off about it for some reason, I knew she had it all wrong, but I didn’t know how I knew.
What I saw when I would sleep walk made no sense, but one thing in particular repeats in my head over and over again, so before I close I’ll share it because I feel like it’s linked but I don’t know what it means.
I wake up, look around. I’m sitting down in a small school sized chair (I’m around 7 or 8). I can’t move. It’s dark, very dark, but I know I’m in a large space, in my mind I think it’s the school gym, which to me is huge and vast. I’m dressed and my shoes are on. There is light on above me, it’s bright and it’s so bright that everything else is inky blackness and I can’t see the walls or ceiling. I expect to see the metal cross beams of the gym, but it just goes on into empty black. The light is like staring into a dentists light. This space is much larger than the school gym. I sit there with a grim resolution, and that’s it, I think the floor is a wooden gym floor. There is a feeling in this hallucination or dream that is unlike anything I have ever experienced.
Dad passed away a stubborn ornery argumentative fellow who was altogether consistent. I moved to the West coast, “so you’re a freedom hating liberal now?” Is what Dad said, he wouldn’t stop calling me that for at least a year. We didn’t talk for ten years previously, and true to form, I did not allow him to babysit. We started emailing back and forth and it turns out we both loved to write. When the fires started in California he told me, “that’s directed energy weapons, they’ve been working on those since the 80’s.” Uh hu. “I’m serious. They’re using DEW’s on those cars, you should see some of them.” I was thinking, nobody should have showed Grandpa there the Internet.
He was insistent something bigger and terrible was going on. I said sure, Trump is running for president! It’s the end of the world! You’re not going to vote for that awful man are you Dad? He said, “lock her up! The Clintons have had so many people killed you barely believe it.” I would sigh and go on…but then…one day….one day things didn’t add up and I was like, “Dad, I think you were right all along. Something bad is happening.”
Three really nice nurses kept visiting my Dad. They were funded to go out and give vaccines in Florida where he had retired. Dad didn’t want a vaccine. He didn’t trust it. They worked on him and well, Dad is a sucker for pretty women. They gave him the shot, “no I didn’t take the vaccine” he told me, “I took something for shingles only, just the shingles shot.” But in a few weeks they came back and told him he had to have a booster, I knew that nomatter what the strangers had told him he was getting the covid-19 vaccine, because that was what they were funded to give and his regular health nurse wasn’t involved. The last I heard he said, “I feel so bad kid, I just feel awful, my arm where they gave me that shot, it hurts terrible.” From the man that had gangrene twice. Who once shattered his big toe with a 500lb weight, who had gone through so much in life with never a complaint (well he did have a complaint: people were too stupid!) haha, It was the first and last time he mentioned how he felt health wise to me. He wrote me a Happy New Years email , “the rednecks have the fireworks going!” and then he was gone. I had a feeling. I believe it was almost five days exactly after the second shot he passed away.
Maybe in a weird way the paranormal connected us, because nobody in my circle of friends and relatives even want to hear an adjacent topic. Anything unusual is off the table of conversation. They look like I’ve dragged the dead corpse of a porcupine into the room. The distaste is palpable. I miss the old man. In a world where so many people live such inauthentic lives, his was full of color. Terrible mistakes sometimes too – especially with women *groan* but he owned everything he did. He also sometimes did crazy heroic acts of kindness out of his own pocket, like fixing frozen water pipes in winter under an elderly persons house. He knew the guy got buy on a shoe string and wouldn’t have money for a plumber or supplies — fixed it all quietly so the old fellow wouldn’t feel bad like he owed him.
I guess this is my origin story because the paranormal didn’t stop there and it hasn’t stopped now.
**Notes: Owls have special feathers so they are completely quiet when they hunt. Gives them a silent attack against mice etc. Also, barn owls are often white on the underside which is what I would have seen. Pretty sure a barn owl in an old barn is kinda…well to be expected?
Dad and his quizzes, “so I want you to tell me the names of the trees as we pass them” — but it’s winter and they have no leaves so he goes, “well just look at the bark, it’s obvious!” Yeah, I did not name those trees correctly. (Ironically if they had sported a leaf or two, I could have named them all, but I felt like a moron that I had neglected memorizing the bark. I guess most parents my have been happy with the guesses, hickory, black jack, walnut, pecan, oak! But nope – it was set in stone, I was a big dummy.)
Worth noting that Dad’s older sister holds a Ph.D
I still memorize animal and plant facts – you never know when it’s going to be needed. 😀
