High Strangeness: Watch the Skies!

[UFO image from crowdedskies.com.]

More Blood Fall goodness on the way, I assure you. But let's contemplate what else exists in Chatham's skies. I'm delighted to let reader Martha share her story with you, as it was emailed to me:

My sister and I were driving back from Chapel Hill late at night after seeing a movie I think. I want to say it was Good Morning Vietnam. It wasn't horribly late, but late enough, and in those days far fewer people lived out Jones Ferry Rd. in Chatham County so there was very little traffic. Just after we crossed over University Lake and were heading out of town, we noticed a very bright white light in the distance hovering at tree level. We talked about what it could be and speculated about it being the new WUNC TV tower that had gone up across from Story Book Farm. At the time, the large white tower was rather new and it was an eyesore because it blinked so brightly. However, the bright light on this evening was not blinking. As we drove, the light stayed stationary in the distance. We passed Story Book Farm and the blinking tower and the bright light was still ahead of us. Of course, now we were really wondering what was up. A helicopter with a search light on it. maybe? That was the best we could come up with, but given that is didn't move at all it seemed somewhat unlikely. When we came to Frosty's we pulled into the empty parking. The store was closed for the night. We stopped the car and turned the car off. The object with the bright white light shining down was right above the intersection of Crawford Dairy Rd. and Jones Fairy Rd. We rolled down the windows and it was completely silent. So silent you could hear the crickets and cicadas making their summer racket. Definitely not a helicopter. As we both sat there and looked at this thing (I recall it as being rather triangular-shaped like something from Star Wars, but my sister recalls it being saucer shaped), I'm not even sure we said anything to each other. We just stared. And then quickly, the light went off, the engines of the ship powered up (but weren't horribly loud when they did), and it took off really fast into the sky. It all lasted probably less than a minute or so.

So that's it. Never seen a UFO since. And have never figured out why one would be hanging out where this one was. Talk about boring. Maybe it was looking for the Big Hole over off of 54 and was checking the map.

She added this, in response to my queries:

The engines I guess sounded like jet engines gearing up, but not nearly as loud or deafening as that. And it took off very fast. The "ship" itself was not that large. Larger than a trash can though. Maybe the size of a reasonably sized room in a house. 50 X 50 ft? 30 X 30? Not small, but not huge by any means.

What are we to make of this? I don't know. The trash can reference is to a story I related to Martha, in which some friends of mine were chased by a trash-can shaped object as they drove their van to the beach. The object rose up from under an overpass and pursued them at speed for some miles before disengaging.