After hanging around for a few days and reading other threads, I'm motivated to share my own experience, and I will admit in advance that part of the reason I'm posting it is to see what kind of response it gets. It is, however, a true experience that happened to me and my cousins.

In the mid 1960's, we spent several Christmas/New Year periods with my stepdad's sister and her family in the Los Angeles area. They actually lived in Lakewood, which is now a bustling suburb not too far from Disneyland, but back then the other side of the street from Aunt Jean's house was a cow pasture - with cows.

On one of these occasions, the adults went out to party for New Year's Eve and left me and my cousins Rick, Gary, and Shawn to be watched by the eldest cousin, Sheila, who was about 15 or so at the time and an experienced babysitter. Rick and Gary are just a little older than I am, Shawn is younger by several years. I was somewhere in the vicinity of 8 or 9.

After the grownups left, Sheila made popcorn and we settled in to watch TV until something well past our usual bedtime, which was allowed on New Year's Eve. Somewhere along in the movie, I began to notice that the color was going off on the TV, turning green. But it wasn't my house or my TV, so I waited for one of the cousins to get up and correct the color.

Then Shawn suddenly exclaimed "Everything's green!" I looked around and sure enough, it wasn't just the TV - everything had a greenish cast, as if I were wearing green colored glasses. Sheila, being the one in charge and therefore responsible, freaked out just a little and made us all get up and go outside like a fire drill.

When we got outside, we discovered that the next door neighbors, who had been setting off fireworks, were all standing on their lawn staring at OUR house, or actually at something above our house, with their mouths open. We turned to look and saw a classic saucer-shaped UFO hovering about 15 feet off the roof, spinning slowly like a top but not wobbling, and shining a beam of green light down onto the house.

We quickly deduced that this green light was going THROUGH the roof and into the living room, and that this was what had caused everything to look green to us inside. Sheila geeked bigtime. She ordered us to stay outside, nominally under the supervision of the neighbors, and ran in the house to call the police.

In retrospect I am surprised that the police responded at all, much less as quickly as they did, but they did. Also in retrospect, the young blonde patrolman who had the misfortune to be selected to investigate Sheila's call was very young, probably no more than 20, and most likely a raw rookie.

At the time, all I saw was a cop in a cop car, who came tearing around the corner in a very satisfactory manner with lights flashing and siren going and pulled up in front of the house. I don't know what he expected, but when he jumped out of his car and saw the object, still spinning quietly and serenely above the house and shining its green light, it was quite obviously nothing he had expected. He reacted by drawing his sidearm and firing at the object. It was a pretty big target, and he hit it. We all heard the bullet ricochet off metal.

At the instant the bullet hit it, the green light winked out and red and white lights came on around the middle of the object. Imagine two silvery metallic saucers or very shallow bowls placed one on top of the other, rim to rim, but there is a band of darker, non-reflective material about a foot tall between the two rims. In this band the red and white lights appeared, rotating with the object's spin and blinking on and off like aircraft safety lights. Within a second or two of the lights changing, the object took off, straight up. It moved so fast that you really couldn't see it go, it just disappeared and you were left with the impression that it had gone up.

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And that was it. There were several minutes of hullabaloo after it left, including the policeman searching the inside of the house at Sheila's insistence, but nothing was found. Eventually he left and we all went back inside. When the adults returned we were all still wide awake and very excited, but I'm not sure they really believed us.

The next day they talked to the neighbors, and also my uncle climbed up on the roof (it was a Southwestern sort of adobe or stucco style house with a more or less flat roof) and discovered that the dirt on top of the roof was swirled into a circular pattern, as if there had been a tornado.

The really ODD thing from my perspective is that as the years went by, the adults seemed to completely forget about the incident, as if it had never happened. I began to be unsure about it myself until I had the chance, as an adult, to talk to Sheila and found that she remembered the whole thing just as I did and was equally puzzled by her parents' inability to remember it. She also told me that, although Gary and Rick remembered it, Shawn had forgotten it. (Of course, Shawn's loss of memory might be normal - he was only 4 or 5 at the time.)

Well, there you go. I don't know what to think, as I've never read another UFO report that was even similar. There are quite a few military bases in Southern California, so I'm not ready to say it was an alien spacecraft by any means. All I can say is, I never heard or read anything that could explain what it was.

Before y'all ask, this was my only significant UFO sighting (the other was just a red light in the sky seen from a distance), and I've never had any other experiences such as missing time or bad dreams about aliens. In other words, I'm pretty sure I've never been abducted or contacted at any time. Us kids had no aftereffects from exposure to the green light, no sunburns or skin rashes nor even a headache.

WOW!
It's too bad the neighbors didn't think to get a camera.
I'm totally awestruck.
Perhaps your parents thought it better NOT to talk about it..
We all know the labels people place on others.
If some of the abduction horror stories are true, then you are ALL very lucky.

Way Cool! Hi Anonymous and thanks for coming out of the woodwork to share!

I'm excited, this is the first time I've heard or read of another encounter that included the green light. Your encounter is also *roughly* within the same time frame - at least within 5 - 10 years, which makes a sort of sense to me.

I wonder if this was something they tried that didn't work for them, or something which was quickly replaced by something that works better for them?

Dunno, but I think it's interesting. Thanks again for sharing!

Oh, and I'm not so sure there's any such thing as a "good" UFO encounter. I'm glad neither of us was abducted or injured.

They're out there. My mother, her twin sister and bro-in law were harrassed/teased for nearly 4 hours as they traveled back from Stillwater to Sand Springs, OK in 1959. The craft which they say was about 4 car lanes wide (they knew this because it often darted in the road right in front of them and hovered there, while my uncle would continually get out and sit on the hood in an effort to reassure/protect the two women inside the car). Then, it would dart off into the farthest horizon in the blink of an eye, uncle would get back in the car and drive like a bat out of hell and the whole scenario would begin all over again. When they finally got to Sand Springs, which should have been an hour drive, they drove to the police station, nearly crashing in its doors. This was at 4:00 a.m., the cops came out and saw it as it was darting off into the horizon. I've been hearing this story for 40-something years from three perfectly sane people. They're out there.

Yes, too many people have seen something..

The thing that annoys me to no end is that the people who should be helping us find out what's going on - and protecting us - continue to deny that anything is happening. That's just wrong, and it's scary.

Originally posted by Heike
Yes, too many people have seen something..

The thing that annoys me to no end is that the people who should be helping us find out what's going on - and protecting us - continue to deny that anything is happening. That's just wrong, and it's scary.

Well eveyone has their own theory. My dad had top govt. clearance for 40 years, and you could not get a word edgewise out of him. Which actually I admired him for very much, but he worked in the space program and I think he knew things. Some of us would just take the govt. revealing the truth with a grain of salt, but many many people, such as third-world countries etc., might stir into mass panic. Like when Orson Wells broadcast War of the Worlds.

If they were just flying around startling people and getting their picture taken, that'd be one thing.

But if they are abducting and experimenting on people, killing livestock, interfering with traffic control at airports, etc. etc. shouldn't that be a rather different issue?

Let's even avoid the whole ET/alien thing and look at it another way.

If someone followed you and harassed you on the highway and the police refused to look into it, would you be upset?
If someone violated your privacy and personal property by deliberately shining lights into your house, wouldn't you expect some action to be taken?
If someone trespassed onto your property at night and killed some of your cattle, isn't that a crime?

If HUMANS were doing the things that we have reports of aliens doing, law enforcement would have to be doing something about it! But as soon as the case starts to look like the perpetrator isn't a human criminal, they just drop the whole thing. Does that make sense? Really?

Wow, that is a very compelling story Heike.

It's probably impossible at this sort of time remove, but I wonder if there's any way to try and find out if there was a police report filed at all. You say the young cop fired his weapon – I don't know about regulations back then but certainly now that would call for a whole bunch of paperwork. Does either you or your cousin remember anything about the neighbors – like a name, ideally?

Do you remember what you were watching on TV?

Sorry, I'm better at asking questions than providing answers. But I am fascinated by the account.