One night my mom and I were on our way to my grandparent’s house. On the way, mom saw something in the sky and asked me what it was. I looked up and there was a weird shape in the air, like a cone. So my mom stopped the car and rolled down her window. When she rolled down the window, I saw a cat beside the car, staring at us. It had these big orange and yellow eyes. I told mom there was something weird about the cat and she said she wasn’t worried about some stupid cat. She kept on looking at the object in the sky for about five minutes. Then it flew away, so we continued on to my grandparent’s house.

When we got to my grandparent’s house, there was the same cat sitting beside the car. I told mom that it was the same cat and she said I was crazy. How could the cat get ahead of us? Then we heard noises while we where getting clothes out of the car. It sounded like an airplane. We looked up and there was the same UFO, but closer than it was before, it then circled around my grandparent’s house.

The next day, I went out to the car and there was that same cat sitting on my grandparent’s porch. I tried to scare it away, but it just sat there. So I picked it up and started to carry it off the porch. When I was about halfway down the steps, the cat disappeared from my arms. I didn’t feel it jump out of my hands. I turned around and there it was, back in the spot where I picked it up, just staring at me. So I ran inside. I haven’t seen the cat since.

Until my retirement I was a Sergeant on patrol on the WV Turnpike now I77 and I64 between Charleston and Beckley.

Many stories circulated about strange sights and happenings along this highway. In the many years I patrolled this area I never saw anything strange except for one twenty second interval one night while on patrol.

This night something drew my attention skyward. Whether it was lights or I just happened to look skyward, I just don’t know.

I was near Nuckles, or near what was then The Morton Truck Stop now known as the Howard Johnson restaurant about mile 60 on the WV Turnpike. The spot was deep between two hills as it is today.

The object I saw was 1000 feet to 1500 feet high and looked to be 15 to 20 feet across. It was very lit up and sparkled like old time Christmas sparkles at the rear of the UFO.

Within 15 seconds it was gone, dazzling lights and all leaving me dumbfounded. I was so anxious to see someone to ask if they had seen what I saw or what I thought I had seen.

Even though I was convinced that I was wide awake and alert. I decided not to mention the incident to anyone. Then when news stories began to appear in the local daily newspaper about UFO sightings down the river (Dunbar) below Charleston. I volunteered to tell that I had also sighted the same objects. Later, a fellow Turnpike patrolman told of seeing the same sight or object.

All witnesses gave almost identical descriptions, like to this day I remember what this object looked like. I don’t know what it was but I know that I have never seen anything before or since that resembled this object.

A state police trooper in Raleigh County thought he was responding to a prank call early Thursday when he received a report of strange lights in the sky near the WV Turnpike. But Trooper John Ferda of the Beckley detachment discovered when he reached the scene in the Sand Branch area that the report was no hoax. Hovering in the sky over the turnpike was a cluster of bright lights.

“It looked like maybe two or three high-beam flashlights close together in a cluster. It was high enough to be above the tree line in the horizon. It was not making any noise,” Ferda said.

As Ferda and other police officers at the scene watched, the lights appeared to move from left to right, then dropped out of sight. Ferda said he observed the lights for nearly an hour before they disappeared. He and the other policemen went to an area near the WV Turnpike where the lights appeared to be coming from, but they could not find any source for the aerial show.

The lights had no distinct shape and did not appear to be attached to anything. “They were just there,” Ferda said. Raleigh County airport officials said no aircraft was reported over the area at the time of the incident, which occurred around 2 a.m.

However, Ferda said he cannot accept the idea that the strange phenomenon may have been caused by extraterrestrial beings. “There’s an explanation based in reality,” he said.

Recently my boyfriend and I were headed home from Kenna to Fairplain on Rt. 21, south of Ripley. We noticed a line of cars sitting almost still when we arrived to the turn off to our road. Wondering what the commotion was, I looked to the sky and immediately saw a triangle of lights, not moving, just hovering in the sky.

I told my boyfriend to step on the gas, I wanted to rush home to get my binoculars, so that I might get a better view. As we made the turn onto the road, I turned and put my head out the window to watch this object, hoping we wouldn’t loose sight of it. To my surprise, it began following us! It chased us teasingly to the final curve in our road, and then suddenly shot off in the other direction.

I was 13 or 14 years old it was I my friends Mike Wayne and my brother Jamie, and Mike’s little brother Anthony. We were all going to “brave the elements” and camp out, in Mike’s front yard. Wayne and Jamie went to the store to get the normal supplies pop, chips, and candy. Mike’s little brother was only seven or eight and naive.

We scared the daylights out of this kid on a daily basis with all the normal scary ghost, monster and demon stories. It was dusk and the stars were almost all visible when I looked at Mike with a wink and said to Anthony as I looked up at the sky in the direction of what I thought was a high jet “Look at that UFO.” Anthony gave one look and said yeah right.

However, not 2 seconds after he looked away the “JET” which had been traveling in a straight path abruptly turned another direction, sped up, went right across the sky, then stopped got very bright then burnt out. Mike and I were dumbfounded. Of course, Anthony had not seen it. We told the others as soon as they got back and they thought we were lying.

We told this story nearly everyday that summer and almost no one believed us. At the end of the summer, we told the story to a friend who had just gotten back from New Mexico. She thought she knew everything. She immediately concluded, “It was just a satellite being launched into space” because she had seen them all summer. That is when I tried to explain that things like that happen in New Mexico that is close to Area 51 and in the desserts are where the government has those air research places or whatever but that our nearest place would, be like in Florida at Kennedy where they launch the space shuttles. I think it was Extraterrestrial and possibly it heard us but I will probably never know.

On night my boyfriend and I was driving to my house on Beechview Rd. that connects from Maple Fork to Sand Branch. As I got close to my house I could see two very bright lights hovering over a vacant lot that had been cleared out. At first I thought they may have been a street lamp. When I got closer my boyfriend and I realized what we were seeing.

I stopped to get a closer look. When I would stop, it would hover right over my car. When I moved my car it followed us. My boyfriend told me to step on it and not look back. We were so scared we didn’t. We ran into my house and didn’t come back out!!!

When I was 12 years old I used to watch television at my grandmother’s house every night. This was back when satellite dishes weren’t as popular as today, so not many people owned them.

One night in early August I was returning home with my dog when all of a sudden he started barking. He was the type of dog to bark at anything and everything, so I didn’t take notice until he started jumping up and down barking his head off. I glanced up at the sky and my mouth immediately fell open.

Hovering over the mountain opposite my house was a medium sized, triangular UFO with an orange glow all around it. I started running towards my house yelling for my mom and sister to come out and look, but as I ran, the UFO slowly without a sound began to glide over my house. My mom came out on the porch just as it went over the mountain.

Every time you see a picture of a UFO on TV it’s just lights or the outline of a disk, but what I saw was very visible and the whole thing was lit up.

I swear to god and with all my life that this really happened and that the UFO was something out of this world. The very next day a local newspaper had an article about people reportedly seeing it. After that night I talked about it every day for at least 2 months and I’d give anything I own to see it again.

Every summer you’ll hear reports of eerie lights on top of North Mountain near Lost City. I’ve seen them on several occasions. The first time we were across the valley up on Shenandoah Mountain we watched little balls of light shoot straight up off the mountain.

Some balls would shoot up and bolt off the the right or left. Who here has heard of these and what do you think? One guy I know says its because of a volcanic vent that runs through the hills from here to Hot Springs.

Since making a doll in Girl Scouts, I have loved to sew and do needle work. I’m not a seamstress, I just dabble, but when I was maybe in the seventh or eighth grade I decided I wanted to learn to sew. I wanted to make my own clothes.

Mom was working as a secretary at Southern West Virginia Community College at the time and through this position, she met a wonderful young lady by the name of Virgie Evans. Not only was Virgie an excellent seamstress, but a very kind, gentle, giving person. She did not hesitate to agree to teach me to sew.

We worked on this yellow plaid slacks and vest outfit. Can you imagine, an inexperienced seamstress using plaid for her first project. Any other person would have discouraged me from using the plaid, but not Virgie. She and her sister, Ann, worked side-by-side with me until the outfit was completed. It looked pretty good, not homemade at all.

One night Virgie, mom and I had been working on the outfit at our house in Williamson, West Virginia. It was getting late and Virgie had to leave. Mom volunteered to take her home, because of the darkness outside. It is so clear to me. We walked out of the house to get in the car. As we turned at the top of the driveway to walk to the car I said, “Look at the full moon!” Mom and Virgie commented as did I, “I don’t remember seeing the moon ever so close to the ground. I don’t remember it ever being so big. I don’t remember ever seeing the moon sitting between the Beinhorns and the Harvits (our neighbors across the street).”

It was then we realized the huge glowing orb in the sky was not the moon at all, for as we scanned the heavens, we discovered the moon to our left, not full and not near as large as what we were viewing in front of us. It was beautiful. We stood there frozen with our eyes transfixed on the white sphere until something began to happen. Slowly the sphere began to move close. The white of the orb began to disappear being replaced with what appeared to be the night sky.

It was like a giant eye closing. It was when the globe was almost completely dark; we noticed what looked like diamonds lining the bottom. When the eye had closed, it left only the thin row of twinkling diamonds. Then in an instant, poof, the twinkling diamonds were gone leaving only the heavenly bodies of the night sky. For years mother and I never spoke of the beautiful heavenly sphere, but today with all the sightings of strange objects in the sky, we no longer hesitate to discuss it. However, my mother remembers this event in a different way, but this is my story and I’m sticking to it.