SEDONA FLASH

SEDONA FLASH                                                       © by Charles Tromblee

I go to about one MUFON meeting a year.  Not being a member, I restrict myself to meetings where the speakers  might be the nuts-and –bolts type of ufologists.  The speaker on a night in May, 2011, was the locally popular Tom Dongo who I knew has written UFO books about Sedona.  Only about 20% of his talk was about UFOs, the rest being about orbs (maybe 40%), vortices (15%), and the rest on underground bases and tunnels that might be near Sedona.  I enjoyed it, and it was worth the ten bucks I paid to get in.

A strange event occurred in the second half of the presentation.  An orange light flashed near the ceiling.   It lasted only a fraction of a second, and was NOT ultra bright like a flash camera going off.  It was about the size and shape of a football and took place about 6-12 inches below the ceiling. The room had about 80-100 people in it, and I was sitting near the back. The venue was the meeting room of a church, and the ceiling is covered with glue-on ceiling tiles. I looked around to see if anyone else saw it too. The guy in front of me reacted to it so I tapped him on the shoulder and asked , “Did you see that?” He said he did, but that it was only a car light from the street. I have seen this guy at previous meetings, and he believes just about everything about UFOs so I was surprised that he dismissed what he saw as trivial.  I have many decades of seeing car lights indoors, and this was no car light. About 5-6 ladies on the other side of the room also showed a very visible reaction to it. The speaker did not notice it, nor did anyone in the front half of the audience as it was directly above or behind them. (Fifteen months after this event, I revisited the event’s site and did see a ceiling vent where I thought the flash occurred. I don’t know whether that is significant or not.)

My reaction to all of this is very unsatisfying because it reminds me of the story of a WWII military airplane encounter with a UFO. On board was a psychologist who refused to look at the UFO because he knew it violated his pre-established beliefs. I feel contempt for this person, and yet here I am putting my own event in the back of my mind and will not investigate further. Investigating UFOs for me is sufficient.

Just to set you straight, I do not find UFOs to be weird. They are unknown, complex, and mysterious, but not weird. Whatever paranormal behavior they exhibit is behavior that I attribute to much higher technology.  After all, what is weird about scientifically advanced beings visiting an alien planet?  Nothing, in my opinion. If they are capable of getting here, then go for it. It is perfectly natural to explore new things.

I left the meeting feeling kind of eerie. This kind of thing has nothing to do with UFOs, I’m sure, but it could have had something to do with the speaker’s wide experience with orbs. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in orbs. I am still wrestling with how to adjust my world view to accommodate a truly paranormal phenomenon like this seemed to be. I acknowledge at least 5 or 6 phenomena outside of UFOs that are unexplained about which I have few to no opinions, such as various earth lights (Marfa, Brown Mountain, etc.), crop circles, and remote viewing. Maybe I have to add orbs to the list, and maybe there’s something to this weird stuff after all.