Bright lights in the night

Some people ask me how I got interested in knowledge that might be considered "alternative" in some circles. Here isa little story that certainly helped me along my way!

So here goes my story, and 100% true. There is a bit of prelude, so forgive me. In 1996 I was living in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia - a small coastal town. One day I was walking along the street, and I saw a sign which read: "Psychic readings, $10" Now I had never had a psychic reading, and was just in the process of discarding a typically hard, patriachal empiricist western facist worldview, so I went inside and met a woman named Leslie who gave me a "reading."

Now to cut a long story short, I ended up going to one of her talk/meditation evenings a few weeks later. At the end of the talk she told me that she had had lots of dreams about UFOs the previous night.

"Whenever I have these dreams there are lots of UFO sightings around," she said. "So if you go out tonight you may see something. I feel that 2am would be the right time."

Now being the gullible fool that I am, I decided to take up the offer. I went to bed at about 11pm, but set my alarm for 1.45 am. So I managed to drag myself out of bed at that hour. I stumbled around my unit for 15 minutes, and then headed outside at 2.00am sharp.

Well, my eyes almost popped out of my head when I swung the door open, and looked up at the sky. For flying right in front of me in the clear night sky was something I had never seen before. I can only describe it as a large (about a third the size of a full moon) ball of luminous white light. It was probably a few hundred metres in the air, adnd was flying/floating eastwards at about 60 degrees above the horizon, in front of me. There was absolutely no sound, and it seemed to be gliding on air. I can only describe it as eerliy unearthly. I ran out onto the road, and watched it disappear over the neighbours' houses. In total it was in view about 30 seconds.

Now, since it was heading east, and since I was in a rather excitable state, I headed down to the beach, which was only a few hundred metres in an easterly direction from where I lived. I walked up and down the beach for an hour, but saw nothing else. Finally I gave up, and decided to head back to bed. I walked back down the short street to my home, and up the driveway. As I was about to duck into the doorway (I'm rather tall) I looked up one last time. Once again my eyes nearly jumped out of my head. I'm not pulling your leg, when I tell you I saw something totally different, but equally amazing as the first ball of light. For, flying directly over my head (and I mean it was directly up) there was a group of about 20 red, circular lights flying in a double triangle formation. Again there was no sound, just eerie silence. As far as I could tell it was a group of circular red flying objects, flying in a double triangle formation, one triangle inside the other. The objects flew in a southerly direction, along the coast. They seemed to be a few hundred metres in the air, and disappeared over the horizon (there were some trees at the end of the road), again in about 30 seconds.

I have had quite a few "interesting" experiences since that day, but probably nothing quite so extraordinary. Of all the things that set me on a path of questioning dominant knowledge strutures of western society, this experience was probably the most significant.