Tercio de Melo Sousa

↵My UFO experience

When I was about 10 years old I had a history teacher fittingly called Hammurabi. If I'm not mistaken, pardon my uncertainty but uncertainty is the point of this post, he told us that it was possible that the natives of Brazil couldn't see the fleet of portuguese caravels floating in the sea because they had never seen such vessels. Their brain couldn't understand what their eyes were seeing, and therefore they couldn't perceive what was there. This is a debunked myth called Invisible ships.

This memory was unearthed from my brain when on the night of July 7th, 2017. I was driving from my home town of Campina Grande towards Natal, 300 km away, to take a plane to Lima. My weird night started in Parnamirim, about 13 km before Natal.

In small brazilian cities it is common that the main street also happens to be a highway. To me it's less clear to identify which cities sprouted from the commerce along the highway and which were empaled by the thing. Parnamirim is no exception and, as usual in such setups, the highway when going through a town is equipped with traffic lights, radars, and speed bumps. This all comes with the occasional bit of traffic jam, which was also the case that night.

Traffic was moving very slowly, O Rappa was playing in my car, and I heard a strange noise. A repeating noise of wind being struck by propellers, but softly, very softly. I opened the window of my car, wanting to see what that was, hoping that I'd see an helicopter in the distance. I really like machinery, I can't explain, they are facinating, and helicopters are awesome; and if there's one going by I want to look at it. But I didn't see anything and the sound stopped. Too bad, such is life.

I turned the music off and a couple minutes later I heard it again, this time it was moving, as if it was crossing the highway from above from my left to my right, fast, but yet taking a good couple of seconds "to cross". I looked past the window of the passenger side trying to see something and I saw a light. It's always a light in these reports isn't it? It was a faint light bobbing in the air at a good distance, not close, not far. But I didn't think anything of it, I thought it was just too dark for me to see what it was.

A few more minutes and they came back. Yes, they. There were 2 flying objects. They seemed to be the size of a hatchback car, hovering side by side more or less above the car to my left, though they were as high the lamp posts; I'd guess 6 meters high. They had a very soft sound of propellers, that's why I think they were not helicopters. Helicopters are as loud as Hell. However I just couldn't see what they were, they were invisible to my eyes. The only reason I knew they were there was because each one of them had 4 lights. Their lights were arranged as the 4 vertices of a square, equally far from both neighbouring lights in this imaginary square. These lights were not strong, they were just visible. The environment was bright, given that the lamp poles in those highways sections cutting through cities are very bright, yet I couldn't see them.

Several logical things might explain why I couldn't see them:

• They might just have been very black against the black sky.
• The light from the lamp posts might have been obfuscating me.
• They each might have been 4 drones that didn't sound like drones I've heard, and as such there was nothing in their middle for me to see.
• I might have been under the mythical Invisible Ships effect

And then they moved. But they didn't move like flying saucers move in the movies. They moved like helicopters, tilting towards the direction they intended to move before being propelled in that direction. And then they stopped in the other side of the highway, before tilting again and going away.

I don't know what they were, though I think it's very unlikely that they were helicopters; they were just too damn quiet. I don't have any idea of what on earth they were, or what had just happened. But that night didn't stop surprising me there.

The airport had been inaugurated a couple of years earlier, and infrastructure around it was still kinda lacking. The road that I took to reach it had long stretches without lamp post illumination. That would usually be fine but on that night my car went dark. The car kept going, but neither the headlights, or the panel indicators, or the internal lights were working; nothing electrical was. And I needed to make a decision. I could keep driving that heavy metal box in the dark, or I could stop, turn the car off, and try to turn it on again. The risk of the second option was the car not turn on again, and the risk of the first was to cause a serious accident. I chose to keep driving in the dark.

A couple of times I got too close to an accident. Once a car coming in the opposite direction dodged me in the last moment, and in another moment I noticed I was going out of the road through the vibration on the car wheels. I decided it was time to stop, it's better to miss the flight than to miss the rest of my life. Gladly the car turned on again, everything working perfectly and I could continue my merry way. Two more times the car went dark again and I needed to perform this little restart on it, and I traveled resigned that when I come back I would need to get the car towed somewhere to get fixed.

When I came back my car was working fine, it never had that glitch again for as long as I had it, and to this day I don't understand the events that happened then.