Companion images for audio book excerpts from Hidden Experience (on THE UNSEEN)

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An audio reading of two chapters from my recent book Hidden Experience will be featured on THE UNSEEN. This weekly podcast is hosted by Whitley Strieber on his site, Unknown Country.

The two chapters were both heavily illustrated when they first appeared on the blog back in 2010. The images posted below are meant to accompany my spoken words on the audio book excerpts. These photos and illustrations should help the listener visualize the verbal stories.

  The companion audio podcast is linked HERE  

(Click on any image for a hi-rez view)

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(the first audio excerpt)
CHAPTER 6
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The Map

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane. 

― Philip K. Dick

Lotsa owls in Missouri

Tuesday March 9, 2010 

Mac Tonnies' book, The Cryptoterrestrials (above) arrives in the mail. On the same day an series of amazing owl image (below) arrive in my email inbox.

14 owls in one photo

28 owls (doubled from above) in one photo

Photos by Faren Fite, over 200 owls he saw in rural Missouri. 

Video footage of the owls

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Byron North Dakota and Anya Briggs

Friday, March 12, 2010

The yellow line passes between Lockwood and Greenfield along US-Highway 160 in Missouri. This is the approximate location of those amazing owl photos.

Low tech tools incorporated in the detective work.

Without really thinking about it, I took a plastic ruler and set it against my computer monitor, and the three push pins line up EXACTLY in a straight line. I gotta say, this partially freaked me out, and at the same time, I sorta knew they were gonna line up before I even started.

A weird line, connecting the three dots across a BIG section of the US map. Byron in RED, Kansas City in YELLOW and those owls in BLUE.

I used some of the google-map tools to create a straight line on the map. There are 820 miles between the red push pin up North in Byron and blue push pin down in Greenfield Missouri, on the road where the owl pictures were taken, with that straight yellow line plainly bisecting Kansas City

The hometown of my pal Mac, and the yellow line passes right through the city.

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audio download / 19 minutes long / posted March 12, 2010

The push pin making Byron North Dakota also aligns with another line

Okay, even more weirdness. A straight line (690 miles long) passes directly through BYRON ND and BYRON WY and goes straight though my house in Idaho, and I mean EXACTLY!

This pink push pin marks my cabin in rural Idaho. The blue line ends right at my home after passing (in a razor straight line) from both BYRON's.

My gut reaction to that razor sharp blue line was that it was somehow pointing directly at me! It felt like the floor dropped out from under where I sat. 

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Update on the yellow line on the map

Friday, March 26, 2010

Pink Pin: My cute house in Idaho

Green Pin: Byron Wyoming

Red Pin: Byron North Dakota

Yellow Pin: Kansas City Missouri

Blue Pin: The site where the guy saw over 200 owls!

Yellow Line: 835 miles long

Blue Line: 690 miles long

White Line: 995 miles long

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Mysterious star map?

Friday, April 9, 2010

coffee spilled on some map notes nearly drove me insane!

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Three days in the Pryor Mountains

December 2018

15 mils north of Byron Wyoming is the Montana border, 15 miles north of the border is the Pryor Range

The traditional home to the Little People

The lonely sagebrush landscape of the Pryor Mountains

The closest owl I have ever been to in the wild, close enough to touch. (this is a found photo, but closely matches what I saw) 

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Dream image with a raven

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

tidy art direction from the 1970's

I had a vivid dream just before I awoke, this happened on the morning of August 18th. I clearly saw a  graphic poster with Helvetica bold text.

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CHAPTER 8

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The Night in the Tent

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

—H. P. Lovecraft

Irrational fear inside our tent

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Image drawn a few days after the event

image from my sketchbook, made the morning after the event

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(the second audio excerpt)

Sweat lodge and a curious scratch

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Sketch book image of the very humble sweat lodge in Arizona. A simple structure made from arching re-bar, old blankets and canvas. In the foreground is a fire pit with collection of VERY hot rocks. 

An odd this scratch made of tiny blisters

Natascha, Howard and me (with a cat) early in the morning at the Spider Rock campground

Canyon De Chelly, The Navajo Nation, Arizona

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a chapter dedicated to my friend Mac Tonnies

Here is an entire chapter from my most recent book, Hidden Experience. This is a collection of my memories and blog posts about my friend Mac. This was terribly emotional to write. I am adding it here ten years to the day after his death.

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Chapter 4

Remembering Mac Tonnies

Last night I dreamed I was an android. Someone told me, very casually. I wasn’t particularly surprised, but the revelation left me with a vague sense of existential unease. Speaking of dreams: that’s one very good reason for creating a blog that I hadn’t thought of moments before, when it just seemed like a Cool Thing To Do. A dynamic medium like this welcomes dreams... in 30 years, we’ll be carrying around personal dream recorders and thrusting them into the faces of friends saying, “Watch this!” But everyone will be too engaged in their own half-forgotten Technicolor reveries to pay much attention.

—Mac Tonnies

January 26, 2003 (the first week of his blog)

Mac Tonnies, dead at 34

Friday, October 23, 2009

Mac Tonnies, my friend, is now dead. He was found in his apartment on Thursday, October 22.

Mac was one of a kind. He was a brilliant thinker, very funny and a beautiful speaker. I’m crying in a coffee shop in Moab as I write this. 

You need to understand something—I needed Mac to reassure me that I wasn’t delusional or insane. He got some desperate late night calls from me, during my moments of darkness. He was enormously supportive of me, and my confusing issues.

A little over a week ago, he’d called me out of the blue. We would occasionally have ridiculously long talks about UFOs and the paranormal, and this was the first time he’d ever called me. We spoke for about three hours, and that was normal. I shared some deeply personal stuff, and he was understanding and humorous.

Mac and I never met in person, but I considered him a close friend.

Text added Dec. 2018:

The post above was written at a coffee shop in Moab, Utah. I added it to the blog within minutes of hearing the awful news.

Mac was a remarkable young writer, whose thoughtful voice could have changed the way we think about UFOs. He was a blogger, and his site Posthuman Blueswas perceptive, creative, wry, shrewd, smart and funny. It debuted in 2003, the dawn of the internet era, and he played with ideas about the future, humanity and UFOs. He lead the quintessential bohemian life, working as a barista in a Starbucks in Kansas City, Missouri while producing a remarkable outpouring of creative work.

He was an author, playwright and essayist. He hosted an episode of Supernatural Investigator, a Canadian television show about the research and implications of extraterrestrial life—and watching that now is heartbreaking.

His death hit me hard, and it took me nearly five months before I could collect my thoughts enough to write about him.

My Pal Mac Tonnies

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 

in his element

Just a few days ago, I wrote an email to a friend about Mac Tonnies’ final book. I typed out the word posthumous, and was struck by how much it looks like the title PosthumanBlues, the name of Mac’s blog. My mind can get trapped in an unhealthy obsessive spiral, and I see every little coincidence as a sign of something deeper.

This is a long post, a rambling self-examination on the loss of a friend. I’d been dealing with a jumble of spinning memories, and needed to get them out of my head and written down. I may remove it from the blog at some point, but it feels honest. 

~          ~          ~

In late October of last year, I drove back from a small UFO conference in California (Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland event in Joshua Tree). This was a decidedly heady time, and a lot of intense stuff had invaded my life.

I stopped in Moab, Utah to visit a friend, and camped in the desert at the edge of town. The next morning I had a smoothie at a small breakfast shop, and for some reason I’d requested bee pollen as an extra. I’d never had it before, and figured I’d give it a try. Within minutes of finishing the drink, my face turned red, my lips puffed up, and I was itchy all over. I left the restaurant, walked around the corner and threw up on grass next to the sidewalk.

I was having an allergic reaction. At no point did I feel my airway closing up, but believe me—I was one step away from driving to the emergency room. I took a Benadryl, and waited for it to pass.

While in the throes of this anaphylaxis event, I went to visit a UFO researcher named Elaine Douglass. We had met once before, and had spoken on the phone many times. 

When I arrived at her home, she saw something was wrong with me. I tried to explain, but was worried I would be sick again. I ended up lying on her bathroom floor for the next half hour. Eventually the symptoms began to subside, and we drank tea together at her kitchen table.

We talked about her research, and I told her about my ongoing weirdness. I felt progressively better, and after about an hour I seemed fine. I thought our visit would be short, but we ended up talking for hours. It was late in the afternoon when I finally said goodbye.

At that point I had a long drive in front of me, from southern Utah to my home in Idaho. I went into a little cafe on the main street to fill up on coffee. I pulled out my laptop, checked my email and found out that Mac had died. I sat alone in the back corner of the cafe and cried.

I had talked with Mac just a week or so earlier; it was a typical conversation for us—deep, wide ranging and lots of laughs. It spiraled on late into the night.

I’d assumed that one day I would sit in a coffee shop with Mac, we’d drink espresso and talk, just like we always had. And now he’s gone. 

I wrote a short notice and posted it on my blog. 

Mac had a reverence for espresso—he wrote about it lovingly, and often. I went up to the counter, ordered a double latte short, and savored every beautiful drop.

At that point nobody really knew how he had died, but from what I’d found online, it was assumed to be a heart issue. Earlier in the year, Mac had told me of an experience where he had gone to the hospital to get some sort of heart exam. This was after he’d fainted at work. He was calm and dismissive about the whole thing, treating it as a nuisance.

I got in my car and started driving north. The emotional numbness was oppressive and scary. I chose to travel on the two-lane desert highways, avoiding the inhumanity of I-15 and Salt Lake City.

The drive was astounding beautiful. I had a series of podcast interviews with Mac all loaded up on my iPod, and I listened to them as the sun set in a glorious display of red and orange. The route was empty and desolate, and I drove for as long as an hour without seeing another car.

One of the downloads was a four hour long Coast to Coast interview from just twenty days earlier. This was particularly beautiful and bittersweet. You could hear the delight in George Noory’s voice, it was obvious he was perfectly charmed and engaged talking with Mac. As silly as this sounds, you could sense his mind expanding trying to keep up with Mac’s big ideas.

During this time alone in my car listening to Mac’s calm and wise voice, my chest began to ache. There were sharp pains right behind my ribs, and I knew something was wrong. I have a minimal amount of first aid training, and the symptoms of cardiac arrest are severe “crushing” pain. That wasn’t what I was feeling, it was presenting as something less intense, but something was wrong. 

The pain in my chest seemed related to the allergic reaction from that morning, but at the same time, it wasn’t lost on me that it could be some sort of sympathetic reaction to Mac’s death. I pulled into a gas station, bought a single aspirin in a little foil packet. I swallowed it and hoped this wasn’t the big one.

I got back in my car and drove off into the lonely night. 

When I finished all of Mac’s interviews, I started over and listened again.

 click "Read more >>" thingy below to read the rest 

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My first Amazon book review for Hidden Experience

Laura Bruno wrote a wonderful review for my recent book. It is posted on her blog, and also on the book’s Amazon page. Laura was featured in chapter 12 of Stories from The Messengers, as well as in a recent audio interview on The Unseen (linked HERE).

Excerpt below:

     As the posts and years go by, Mike wrestles with existential crises, clinical depression, and deep inner healing. We follow the development of close soul friendships, as well as the loss of friends through death. We see how Mike’s public grappling with personal trauma and the Big Questions opens doors for others to share their stories, too. And we see how some relationships break rather than expand into larger implications. These are universal human experiences on the path of self discovery — told in an intimate, vulnerable way. Often in real time.

     The time looping and spiral journey nature of this book also models a process for embracing the “little things” that connect us to the Great Mystery, and to each other. By sharing so many of his own specific memories, details, timestamps, and experiences, Mike taps into the universal. Though true, the book kind of reads like an epistolary novel. My favorite parts are the hypnosis transcripts, his eulogies, and especially the passages about his friendship with the late Mac Tonnies. A tension between mind and heart runs throughout, yet despite the struggle, his heart keeps shining.

     The Introduction begins with Joseph Campbell’s quote: “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” In the Conclusion, Mike says, “Recently, someone asked me how my life has changed because of these experiences. I thought for a moment and said, ‘I now live in a magical universe.’ I meant that, I see reality as something much richer and more mysterious than I could have ever conceived.”

  Read Laura’s full review HERE  

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I'm now on Twitter

Follow @ClellandMike

I've just added a "follow" button for Twitter, it's on the top of the upper left side-bar. I now have three UFO books and these all need some promoting.

If there are any Twitter coaches out there, please contact me. This is new for me, and I'm a bit out of my comfort zone. Any help or insights would be appreciated!

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Audio interview on the new book with Jim Harold

I spoke with Jim Harold on his Paranormal Podcast. This was my first radio show on my new book, an excellent one hour interview. Linked HERE, and also on the player below.

important story missing from the new book!

missing pages — click on the image for a high rez-view

One important post never made it to the first edition of my new book Hidden Experience!

For anyone who bought the paperback book book before July 19, you will need to download and print this single page. It can be folded and added to the book!

  Download a PDF of a single page HERE  

Or...

  You can read the original blog post HERE  

The story involves a floating or and a hooting own, seen and heard simultaneously on a desert night in Utah back in 2011.

This gets story is referenced several times in other parts of the book, and it plays a vital role in the chapter title My Confirmation Event. All print and kindle editions purchased after July 19 have this short story included.

If you purchased a Kindle version before July 19 just "refresh" the file and it will re-upload with the revised version! A few typos got cleaned up too!

If anyone has self-published their own book, they'll understand this oversight. There is a lotta stuff that all needs to come together to create a book, so please forgive my mistake.

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Rosemary Ellen Guiley has died

author, researcher and friend

I was heartbroken when I heard that Rosemary Ellen Guiley had died. She has been so helpful for me over the years, both as a researcher and experiencer. She was soft spoken and gracious with her time. She helped me a lot with my first owl book, and treated me as an equal—and that meant the world to me. This field, and the world, is a lesser place without her.

We did an interview back in 2012, and it was wonderful fun. We talked about the split in bigfoot research, between the ones who see this as a flesh and blood ape and the others who see it as something paranormal. I asked her who would win if there was a pie fight between the two camps. She skirted the answer by saying, “There were certainly more of the flesh and blood believers.”

  2012 audio interveiw linked HERE  

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powerful new interview on THE UNSEEN

NOTE: this is NOT a audio player! Click the link below...

  direct link to the audio interview HERE  

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Will Bueche talks about his work with the late Dr. John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist and author of the 1994 book ABDUCTION, and the 1999 book PASSPORT TO THE COSMOS. Over the years Will has been cataloging, digitizing and transcribing the sessions and writings of Dr. Mack. Will has worked closely with the John E. Mack Institute, to help keep the important work of Dr. Mack alive and available.

Will is also an experiencer, and this is a powerful interview. The conversation went deep into the emotional experiences than define the contact experience.

A note from Mike:

I have known Will for about 10 years, and I am continually amazed at his composure and sensitivity in the face of these challenging experiences.

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audio reading from Hidden Experience, the introduction

The eBook and paperback versions of the book are both avialable. There will be an audiobook too, but the process of recording and editing is excrucaitingly slow. I've been plugging away, and wanted to post a sample here.

There will be more of these as I proceed forward.

Eight minutes and thirty seconds

  Link to the book!  

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For the visual types, you can read the the text below.

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Introduction

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned 

so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

—Joseph Campbell

I wrote about the most difficult time of my life as it was happening, and posted it on a blog. 

I just reread that sentence, and I’m astonished I could do something so bold, but I did. I’d been confronted with a chain of strange events that seemed impossible to understand. I tried my best to dismiss what was happening, but that became increasingly difficult. All the clues pointed to one thing, and I was forced to ask myself, “Am I a UFO abductee?” 

My blog was started ten years ago as an attempt to answer that question. I was 46 years old, and had come face to face with something that seemed to want to break me. I was lost in fear, doubt, insecurity, tension and disbelief. Yet at the same time, the power of these events left me in awe. There was a kind of shining wonder mixed in with all the overlapping stresses.

The birth of the blog came at a chaotic time in my life. I was drowning in synchronicities, and they all seemed connected to either UFOs or owls. Trying to process my emotions meant obsessive journaling. Facing up to that kind of self-inquiry rips away a lot of assumptions, not just about who I am, but the meaning of reality itself. 

My fears and emotions were unloaded into the blog, and what emerged was a sort of public diary. It was also my therapy. 

~      ~      ~

I thought about writing a proper memoir and simply using the blog as reference, but there is such a mood of immediacy in these posts. Many were written not as a reminiscence—they were written in the moment, and the urgency is palpable. It would be fair to say I went a little bit mad in the early years of the blog, and that’s not hidden in text, it’s right on the surface. 

As I write this, there are 848 posts on my blog. Creating this book meant going back and carefully rereading my journey, yet the site itself had its own journey. I wrote a lot, but I also did over ninety podcasts in a five year period, and I’m tremendously proud of those interviews. 

The podcasts ended when I began the first owl book. That project was monumental and needed my complete dedication. After that came a second book. I was still posting during these years, but the tenor had changed—my energy was pouring into the books. 

Some blog posts came in a rapid fire outburst, like the series about the lines on the map and Byron, North Dakota. Reading each post in order isn’t easy—my mind was jumping around, and it’s evident in the frantic mood of the text. For this book, I did my best to streamline the narrative so it plays out as a story, yet keeps the anxious vibe of the original writings.

The flow of the blog could get a bit scattered, it was easy to jump around and post diverse items. If I had a new thought or a funny little story, I’d write it up. If it was simple I’d keep it short. But if something seemed important I’d work to explore it from every angle, and this jumbled mix of ideas shows up in the book.

There’s a sense of immediacy in blogging, an implicit kind of pressure to write fast and click the button that puts the post online. I gave myself over to that urgency, and consequently some of the writing was sort of sloppy. Right from the onset, I’d go back in and rework the text of published posts. I’ve been cleaning up typos and clarifying my thoughts right from day one. If something new came up having to do with one of the stories, I’d go back in and add more. Sometimes these addendums ended up longer than the initial post.

I’ve been endlessly tinkering with the content, so it seemed fine to edit the posts for this book. I used a lot of all caps and italic text in my writing, especially in the early years. It was a bit much and most of it was cleaned up, but not all. It felt important to keep the flavor of the blog.

The blog is crammed with hyperlinks, and it was tempting to flood this book with footnotes, but trying to match the online content would be overkill. Same with pictures; they work great in a blog format, but would be distracting here. 

Some of the stories in this book overlap with The Messengers. A lot of my personal experiences were pared down for that book, and many of those stories are told in a more complete form here. 

Red Pill Junkie wrote the foreword for this book. He’s been a dedicated reader right from the very beginning, commenting on the posts with wit and insight. There was a point early on when I included a short anecdote in a post from a UFO book, and I wrote it in a way that made it seem like I’d read the book—which I hadn’t. RPJ was quick to comment that I got the account wrong, and he was stern about it. I went back in and revised the inaccurate sentence. He taught me an important lesson, people were taking my blog seriously. Someone out there was diligently reading my stuff, and wasn’t gonna let me slide on things like the facts. I upped my game because I knew he’d call me out on any slacking, and I’ve been grateful for his vigilant eye.

I’m writing this in 2019, and I’ve watched the online world shift to shorter zippier formats like Instagram and Twitter. It feels the era of the blog has ended, or at least it’s changed—and so have I. 

Creating this book meant reliving a powerful chapter of my life. Some of it was scary and terribly confusing, yet I’m grateful. There’s a haunting drama to what I’ve endured, and it tells a deeper story. Life is a journey, and I got lost while searching along its strange winding path. Maybe I’m still lost, but I’m doing my best to keep pressing on. 

Mike Clelland

March 2019

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UFO sighting with video—and a UFO hat!

Suzanne Chancellor shared a video of her UFO sighting from May. The two video clips show a bright dot in a clear blue sky, but the story that lead up to the sighting is delightful. The event was seemingly set in motion with  a synchronistic intention, and it all happened while she was wearing a UFO hat!

  videos and report linked HERE

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After a hiatus of over four years, Random Alien Brain Droppings is Back!

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Hidden Experience, now available as a paper book!

a decade in the making

Yippee! My self-published memoir is now available as a paperback.

In honor of the big event, I’m offering it at a discounted price for the first ten days!
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  Link to the book!  

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Here’s some of the promotional text I have on the amazon page:

This is a collection of the most vital posts from Hidden Experience, yes this blog. It’s a roller coaster journey of doubts and fears as I wrestle with UFOs, missing time, synchronicities and owls. The story that unfolds is scary, mysterious, disturbing—and at times funny. It’s an insight into the strange challenges of otherworldly contact. Confronting the darkest unknowns ultimately lead to an awakening of consciousness. This is the personal journey from the author of the groundbreaking books The Messengers and Stories from The Messengers.

This book was self published. It was also a book with a lot of pictures and plenty of formatting requrements! This meant a long list of things to solve for the ebook and paperback version. The last six months of my life were consumed with an endless nuber of tiny chalenges. I watched a whole lotta YouTube videos with titles like “How to format an index on Word for Mac”.

Two versions done, a third to go! The audiobook should be available soon!

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weird UFO over Providence Rhode Island

Recreation using Photoshop. The hovering gray potato chip first seen in the sky above the highway. This was drawn slightly larger that it appeared. 

 NOTE: click on any image for a closer view 

At about 6:30 p.m. on Thursday April 25, Andrea and I saw something very odd in the sky. We were driving towards Providence Rhode Island for a small weekend UFO conference. We were headed to Suzanne Chancellor’s house for the night before the event.

While on the highway approaching Providence, we both saw an odd thing in the sky. My first thought was that it was a partially inflated balloon, or a thin sheet of plastic that was floating in an updraft. What I first saw seemed lumpy and irregular, like a giant potato chip. It was gray in the partially overcast sky. My first thought was that it was just a small dark cloud, but it stood out differently than a cloud would (see image above).

Andrea saw it too and we both wondered what it might be. I remember saying, "That's too dark to be some weird little cloud."

We were heading southeast on Highway 146, and the road twists and turns through sections of trees and buildings. We would lose sight of it, and it would reappear when our car came around a corner for a view. After a while it seemed to change shape, it now looked like a slightly curved “credit card” and we were seeing it from a side angle so it seemed very thin.

The object and dot recreated from one of Andrea's photos. This was drawn slightly larger that it appeared in the sky, it was perhaps half that size.

I sensed it was slowly rotating, so when it reached its thinnest orientation, it seemed to disappear—then it would rotate just a bit more and would pop back into view. We were in traffic and there wasn't much we could do. Andrea was frantically trying to get a picture with her phone, but she didn't capture anything. (see image above).

One very strange detail was that this floating gray thing was positioned directly under a single dot in the sky. I kid you not, it looked like a credit card hanging from a pin by an invisible fishing line!

Eventually we turned a corner, lost sight of it, and it never reappeared.

A sequence to show the slow rotation and how it seemed to vanish. The thin object would continue to rotate and pop back into view. The single dot is shown above the object.

For a few points along the highway we had a long clear view. The buildings of downtown Providence were in the distance, and there were big jet planes low in the sky. We were crossing the flight path of a nearby airport. We thought it might be a balloon, but it was too stationary in the sky. It’s hard to know how big it might have been, to me it seemed much larger than a billboard hanging sideways. Whatever it might have been, it was dangerously close to the air traffic.

The rotation was an eerie slow-motion, and didn’t seem to match how something big might be effected by the wind.

We arrived at Suzanne’s house and told her and Jack about what we had seen. Andrea talked excitedly about how you could stare at it and it would pop in and out of view. I think this disappearance and reappearance was from the weird rotation and it was thin enough that it appeared to momentarily vanish (see image above).

This happened to two experiencers in a car, on the way to the home of two experiencers, and all of them would spend the next few days at a UFO conference.

Also of note, Providence is a noun in the dictionary, it means: The protective care of God or of nature as a spiritual power, God or nature as providing protective or spiritual care, and timely preparation for future eventualities.

This image is sized more accurately. The previous images showed the details a bit larger in the sky than they appeared.  Click on the image for a closer view.

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