I was 7 or 8. I would get up at night when everyone was asleep and look out my window, this was when we lived in Farmington NM and would have been '77 or '78. I think I saw a weird cigar shaped thing floating through the neighborhood and fly up into the sky. It made no noise. My memory of it is very poor and it seems the knowledge of it has more weight then my memory. I do remember after that night telling people and my parents would tell me to be quite. A year later or so, that TV show "Project Bluebook" came out and the intro had all these drawn images of sighted craft.. The cigar-shaped one was in there and I remember yelling "that's the one I saw!" And the parent's promptly shushed me.. (that wasn't anything new for them).. So.. I can only say I THINK i saw one.... but as a kid I would have lots of dreams of flying through space, so that might tie in to my love of all things space as well. The unknown is fun, it's fun to hypothesize and reflect and pontificate. The real present world isn't nearly as fun.. especially these days it's downright maddening.
At what age...? Short answer: I don't know. Long answer: I reeeeeeeeally don't know. I always wanted to see a UFO but never did. (aww) The closest thing I've seen was a little tumbling light in the sky, when I was eight years old and our family want out into the country to see Halley's Comet. But I reckon it was a shooting star doing weird stuff. I remember being really little -- like three or four -- and going "UFO! UFO! UFO..." and nope it's only a plane. I was interested in space and sci-fi and related topics, really for as long as I can remember, folklore and anthropology for just as long. Since so early actually that I would anthropomorphise the planets in my head, much like Sailor Moon characters or something except that at that time I had never heard of Sailor Moon. So now I'm 33 and still interested. Although to be honest my interest in UFOs is still more as a source of stories than as a real phenomenon. I don't tend to think of them as "Real" in the strictest sense of literal truth, but I do believe in layers of truth -- of which the imagined and the unknown are valid parts. Among my friends I'm known as a sci-fi geek. And yes in my imagination at least, the UFOs are full of little aliens.
I have been interested since age 4 or 5.I can remember always watching unsolved mysteries and any other show or movie that had to do with the paranormal and reading every book i could get my hands on since age 5.I have and will always love these subjects and would like to say thanks to everyone involved in these fields and thanks to everyone interested in the too
6. That was my first sighting and by golly it was the most amazing. Also my father was always interested in the subject so he introduced me to some ideas and books when I grew old enough to read them.
I became interested while I was young, maybe 9 years old. I'm an American Indian, so the telling of folklore is very important family event. I could not help but ask about things I saw on tv, like bigfoot, just to hear an old story from my family's perspective. In my mind these were nothing more than fairy tales until I listened to my father and uncle talk about seeing flying saucers while serving in the Korean war, as well as seeing different versions in rural Oklahoma. Instead of just entertainment, these mysterious things were "real", that really spiked my curiosity. From then on I have been reading books and absorbing everything I could find on the subject.
It was about 1978/79, so I'd would have been 7/8 : my mum had taken me to see Close Encounters and since then I've had a keen interest - to this day the final scene where they all come out of the ship (the e.t's that is) still freaks me out. I fell out of interest in the subject till I got to about 18/19 and started studying physics and I bumped into a girl who was mad about the film and that got my interest going again. Over the passed 20 yrs or so I've dipped my toe in occasionally but since my son (who is now 5) started paying attention to the paracast while i drive, and asking me questions about Ben 10 and other "alien" related shows I read rediscovered my passion for the subject....
Having been born in 1951 and growing up in a city with a large U.S. Air Force presence, perhaps ufology came to me. This was a time when ufo flaps made it into the mainstream media. The dream of space travel seemed real and everyone was looking to the skies--either for saucers or incoming soviet missiles.
Age 7 - 1980 went to the library and picked up a book. it did not depict what strange crap was going on in my life at all. Brad
