Following my post yesterday…Which was the second time I felt instinctual terror in my life, I felt it necessary to detail the first. This was an occurrence of a different nature. Extraterrestrial?
So…The short story of how Gwyd went for a walk in the middle of the night and came home at a screaming run.
I was a country teen. I rode a bus an hour and a half a day to go to school. Not because it was that far away…Just 12 miles, but because there was so much distance between students it took forever to pick up enough of them to fill a bus. It was about 4 miles to the nearest paved road.
I never really had a curfew, not during the summer at least. I had to have the car at home by a certain time, but never really a set time I had to be back at the house and in bed. After all, there was not much trouble I could really get into. I spent a lot of time at night out in the woods or just walking (A habit I keep to this day).
So…I had a friend crash at my place while my parents were out of town. We were jamming on guitars, eating pizza and discussing things that we were absolutely sure no one had ever discussed in quite this fashion before. Typical teenage “Oh my gosh…we are sooo deep” sort of stuff.
Things were winding down a bit around 3 am but neither of us was particularly tired. As it was a pleasant summer night, we decided to walk the mile and a half to the girl next door’s house and see if she was up.
We knew there was absolutely no chance of this. None at all. To a couple of 16 year old boys however, it was indeed possible. Well worth a stroll to find out.
So we left on what we indeed knew was a futile mission.
We had walked almost exactly one and a quarter miles under clear skies. The moon was out and near full, all around we could hear crickets and peeper frogs. There was a little wisp of fog from one of the watering hole ponds that the cows drank from. We could even see some cows huddled up a few hundred yards away.
Then we saw something else. At first I thought “Ooh…Fireflies!” but then it struck me that fireflies are not red or blue. They also don’t slowly gain brightness over a 10 second period and then fade out like they were on a dimmer switch.
I looked closer and saw that they were appearing in front of a black background. I know…Night sky…That is a black background right? No. This was a black area covering the night sky with a defined edge. It was roundish. Slightly elliptical and moving slowly. As it moved, the fading in and out red and blue lights moved with it, as though affixed to its surface. As it moved you could see stars slip behind it and it would block them out until they reappeared on the other side.
My perception was that it was a large, flat object about 15 feet across with independently fading lights randomly attached.
We both stopped and watched while it slid behind a lone tree in the cow field.
We stood still for another moment, then without a word, turned and started walking back towards home. We didn’t speak, we didn’t rush, and we never once turned our heads back towards what we had seen. We walked in absolute silence as the crickets and peepers had decided that we had the right idea and now was not the time for conversation.
This went on until we had almost reached my driveway. Many of you, not accustomed to country driveways would now say “Ah…safe then! Just pop into the house!”
Not so much. The driveway alone was the length of two football fields. This is when my friend said “You saw that…right?”
“M-hmmm…” I replied, not turning my head.
“You noticed that it is all quiet around here…right?”
“Yep…” I replied.
“You think that maybe that is because it followed us home?”
It is at this point that rational thought went on holiday.
We did not, in fact, turn to see if the christmas light flying disk from beyond had indeed followed us home. Did not bother to turn our necks a single degree to check if it was hovering inches from our shoulder blades just waiting to extrude a pseudopod to extract our memories…None of this was a concern.
It seemed to my non rational brain that the priorities were now running and screaming with some flailing for good measure. I envision myself as a terrified kermit the frog- Arms raised, hands flapping loosely at the wrists, mouth open with gibbery noises coming out running knees to chest from the thing I was absolutely sure was moments away from turning me into a pod person.
We got through the door of the house, slamming it behind us. I sprinted up the stairs to my room and strung my bow.
Yes…My bow. You work with what you know. I gestured my friend towards the antique Daisy bb gun.
Cause…You know…Aliens hate flying pointy sticks and little balls of metal that can’t pierce cardboard.
And there we waited until morning.
Towards morning we both wrote down exactly what we saw without discussion. What we wrote matched up pretty well.
And we never talked about it again.
Is this a little easier to explain than my previous entry? A blue and red weather balloon accidently filled with fireflies, lit by the moon’s reflection off of Venus crashes behind a tree due to a low pressure zone caused by swamp gas?
I can go with that 🙂
Bonus tale- The Legend of the Roo Roo. The tale that proves all things are possible.
The first cryptid I ever attempted to validate was the Roo Roo. Don’t bother looking it up. There is nothing about it anywhere. The Roo Roo was never seen alive…only heard.
This happened when I was about 13 years of age. We were living in a trailer while we built what was to become our house. It sat in a field at the edge of the woods, a fairly large woods at that. Some of it was privately owned, some of it was state land but it ran on for miles along the banks of the Black River on the East side of Michigan. These woods were my favorite place in the world and I would spend every second I had to spare there.
The evening the Roo Roo came, I was not home. I was spending the night at a friends house several miles away. When I returned, I was met by my father asking if I had done it.
I had no idea what he was talking about! He went on to describe what had happened. He had been out walking Bonnie Longears, our basset hound in the middle of the night. He heard a crashing noise from the woods along with some grunting. It sounded like something big. Not the sort of crashing you would hear from deer but more of a trees being toppled and logs torn apart sort of crashing. Bonnie the dog listened carefully, staring at the spot the crashing was coming from. Then the creature made a different sort of noise. A low growling Roo sound that repeated…
“Roourou!”
The dog tensed.
Louder “Roourou!!”
The dog bolted towards the house and my father followed.
Over the next hour my family sat, listening to this large beast crashing through the trees mere meters from the trailer. All the while it uttered its strange cry…
“Roorou!!”
And their only explanation the next day was that it had been me. I hadn’t even gone through my puberty voice change yet! There was no way I could have made that sound!
Thing is, we knew all of the local types of critters. Nothing any of us knew of would make that noise. Perhaps a bear…but the sound was too consistent. Bears kind of talk when they growl. Not the same sort of call over and over again. We had an unknown creature on our hands.
It happened one time after that, also when I was away. And it was then dubbed the Roo Roo.
It became a family joke. “Take a stick…There’s Roo Roo’s out there!” “Go get the eggs before the Roo Roo collects them…”
“Lock up the Ducks so the Roo Roo can’t get ’em!”
We finished the house and moved in. Many years later my parents got their first computer. They had the Encarta Encyclopedia with video and sound and every thing. This was the first time I ever got to use a computer that didn’t load from a cassette player and I was excited! Audio and video files? I could play them on the computer?
I browsed the cd’s (There were about 8 of them I think) looking for files to play. I found one I thought might be interesting and I clicked…
This is the sound I found:
http://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/card/Kids_Corner/sounds/badger.wav
My dad ran into the room.
That was the sound. The sound of an annoyed badger. The sound of the Roo Roo.
I have not met many people who have seen a badger in Michigan. I was outside all the time at all times of day and had never seen or heard one. I didn’t think they even lived in the area.
It was something outside of what I knew and as such had taken on mythical properties. It was something that was not supposed to be there so as a human, I filled in the blanks.
Now I know it was a badger.
But when I see one at the zoo, I still call it a Roo Roo.
gwydtheunusual 