UFOs And My Family

By James Donahue

When I was a teenager living on the family farm in Michigan I discovered that the window next to my bed easily opened to give me easy access to a gentle-sloping roof over the side entranceway to the house. From there I could climb up on the peak of the roof of our two-story brick house. It was great to sit there on a warm summer night, feeling the soft breeze against my face and listening to the songs of the frogs, crickets and other creatures of the night. It was a great place to meditate and tune in with nature.

In later years something strange began to happen. I started having vivid dreams about sitting on that roof and watching a large orange glowing ball of light rise up from behind the barn. Even today, writing about those dreams, makes my heart pound. I have wondered if the dream was a recollection of a real event and that I may have been one of the many people in the world who experienced abduction by aliens. If it happened I have no other memory of it.

Earlier in my childhood, however, when growing up in our house in Harbor Beach, I remember a strange sensation of flying during that time between awake and sleep. It happened for weeks, if not months, every evening after getting tucked into my bed. It was a distinct feeling of physically flying through the air, into and above the clouds. It never frightened me. In fact I enjoyed the sensation so much I looked forward to going to bed in the evening. I remember asking my mother about it. She had no explicable answer other than to suggest they were “fever dreams.” I was a healthy little boy and it seemed odd that I would be experiencing fevers every night. The dreams stopped at about the time I reached puberty.

In later years I overheard our son, Aaron, telling someone about experiencing this same sensation when he was a young boy. When we compared notes, we began to wonder if we weren’t both being “abducted” as young boys for some odd experiment involving our family. My father was still living then and the next time I saw him I made it a point to ask him if he had ever experienced this same sensation as a young boy. At first he said he could not remember it. Later, however, he said he had been thinking about it and did remember “flying” when he was dozing off at night.

During my college days I took some time off to work for a season for an oil well service company. I was on a crew that cleaned paraffin from wells. It was hard tedious work. One hot summer day, while my partner and I were trading off at “spudding” our brush through a thick coat of paraffin, I took my break and dropped down on my back in some nearby grass. As I was lying there, looking up into a pure blue cloudless late afternoon sky, I noticed what appeared to be a star directly overhead. I thought it odd that a star would be so bright that it could be so clearly seen in the daytime. I examined that star for a while. Then, without warning, it flew off toward the horizon at what had to have been an incredible speed. I realized that I had been looking at a UFO. When I told my partner what I had just seen he laughed. He did not believe me.

Not long after Doris and I were married, her brother George had what was, for him, a frightening experience one night while driving on the main highway just outside of Caro, Michigan. As he was passing the mental hospital located there, he said a bright green lighted object appeared directly over his car and began following him. He said it hovered over him for several anxious seconds before disappearing again.

After I retired from the Times Herald and my wife and I embarked on our Arizona adventure, we lived briefly in Sedona. While there, several people in the town told of seeing a large alien ship hovering directly over the gully that passed directly past the downtown area. What was odd about this event was some people said they clearly saw this ship, while others said they could not see it. One woman said she saw it and her husband, who was with her at the time, could not see it. She said it was so low it was level with where she was standing. She said it was very large and she could see that it had windows. Doris and I were disappointed that we did not have an opportunity to be in the area to see it.

Later, after taking a job with the White Mountain Independent in Show Low, I had the privilege of doing a personal interview with Travis Walton, the man who claimed he was abducted by a UFO in 1975. The movie Fire in the Sky was based on Walton’s experience.

Later, while living in working on a bureau for that newspaper in Springerville, Doris was walking from her night job at the hospital to our apartment and observed a large orange ball in the sky north of the town. She said it was massive in size. At about the time she reached the apartment, I was getting prepared to go to my newspaper job and the telephone rang. It was our daughter, Jennifer, calling from her apartment in Show Low, some sixty miles away. She was all excited because she was watching the same glowing orange ball in the sky. When I heard the story, I ran outside to look and could see nothing through the buildings and the trees. I jumped in our car and drove out of town, my eyes scanning the sky. I never saw the orange glowing ball.

After we returned to Michigan, Doris’s other brother, Frank, was with a hunting party in Indiana when everyone in the party observed a UFO in the sky over their camp. It was so close they succeeded in snapping a picture of it. They reported the sighting to some agency that investigated these sightings. After conducting interviews with the members of that hunting group, and getting each man to draw the ship was they remembered it, it was determined that it probably was a valid sighting. 

I had one more strange sighting. It happened one morning while I was driving from Bad Axe, Michigan, to Sebewaing where I was working as an assistant editor for a weekly newspaper. I was in a line of traffic all headed toward Sebewaing when right ahead of me appeared a large silvery oval ship that seemed to be coming in for a landing. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It appeared to be a very large ship, it had the classic shape of a UFO as drawn by other observers, and windows could clearly be seen. The ship dropped behind a cluster of trees to the left of the road I was on and it was obvious that it had landed in a farm field. I could hardly wait for the traffic to move so I could get another look beyond the trees. When I got there, however, there was nothing to be seen of it. What I found odd about that sighting was that none of the other drivers that morning seemed to be aware of it. There were no brake lights going on, no heads turning to stare, no vehicles stopping so drivers could get a better look. It was as if I was the only one to see it.