MIflyer
1st Lieutenant
My thread on "Buying the Farm" seemed to be pretty popular so here is another.
I have had a few strange things happen in my life, the most common being somehow knowing things I had no reason to know, but the weirdest thing occurred one spring/summer Saturday evening in 1975.
A friend of mine and I were building a concrete block structure in the middle of a wheatfield about 60 miles north of Oklahoma City. My friend is a serious rocket motor enthusiast, and needed a suitable spot to conduct static test firings. His hobby proved to be very useful for him; he just retired after a long career designing rocket motors for the USN.
We had worked on the test facility until it was too dark to do any more, climbed into his old Ford Econoline Van, had headed home. I can't believe we rode around in that thing. Only the driver had a seatbelt because only the driver had a seat. I guess we were really tough hombres, or at least our butts were.
The salient characteristic of that van, aside from being incredibly uncomfortable by post-Buckboard standards, was its excellent view forward and down. It had no hood in the way to interfere with your vision. We headed down the two miles or so of dirt road that led to the paved highway that ran through a small town about 5 miles to the southwest that had great milkshakes and from there down to connections to I-35 and I-40.
As we drove down the dirt road I noticed something in the glare of the headlights, just over to the right of our track. It looked like a crab, an ordinary crab like you might see at the seashore. It was about the size of your hand.
I thought about that. I've never done an Internet search for "Prairie Crabs of Oklahoma" but I doubt there would be much point. There was no sizeable body of water anywhere around, other than a farmer's pond about a mile or so away to the northwest. I decided that I must have seen something else.
Then my friend, Jim, said, "Did you see that? It looked like a crab!" Okay, so he saw it too. We had a discussion about possible sources of crabs, mostly involving people taking a trip to the seashore (500 plus miles away), bringing back a crab, and then throwing it out the window. This seemed most unlikely and Jim suggested we go back and look for it. I replied that if it really was a crab I'd have trouble sleeping that night.
We got to the paved road and turned Right. We had not gone very far down it when *Something* across the road in from of us, from Right to Left. It looked like a "blob", as in a formless shape that was still nonetheless running briskly across the road.
Once again, I decided that I must have not seen what I had seen. But Jim spoke up again. "Did you see that? It looked like a blob!" He then went on to aptly describe it as looking like a washcloth running. Imagine taking a whiteish washcloth and making it run, using on its edges as legs.
Jim said, "We are going back to find that one!" We turned around and headed back up the highway. We saw nothing in that area but a raccoon standing by the side of the road. Admittedly, that animal looked a bit confused; if I had taken a picture of that raccoon, a good caption might have been, "Hey! Did y'all see that blob that ran across the road just now?"
On the way home to our respective apartments we discussed what we had seen and came to no conclusions. We never saw anything similar in our many subsequent visits to that area. The only other thing that was the least bit strange that occurred was the time we fired a rocket motor and stampeded a herd of cattle. Well, there was also that liquid rocket engine we fired and had go up in ball of fire. Maybe we scared off all the crabs and blobs in the area.
The oddest thing about this experience is the lack of context. If we had seen Bigfoot, a pack of little gray aliens with a flying saucer, or a ghostly Indian war party, there would be a paranomal context that would fit into. Crabs and blobs don't fit anything I can think of.
I have had a few strange things happen in my life, the most common being somehow knowing things I had no reason to know, but the weirdest thing occurred one spring/summer Saturday evening in 1975.
A friend of mine and I were building a concrete block structure in the middle of a wheatfield about 60 miles north of Oklahoma City. My friend is a serious rocket motor enthusiast, and needed a suitable spot to conduct static test firings. His hobby proved to be very useful for him; he just retired after a long career designing rocket motors for the USN.
We had worked on the test facility until it was too dark to do any more, climbed into his old Ford Econoline Van, had headed home. I can't believe we rode around in that thing. Only the driver had a seatbelt because only the driver had a seat. I guess we were really tough hombres, or at least our butts were.
The salient characteristic of that van, aside from being incredibly uncomfortable by post-Buckboard standards, was its excellent view forward and down. It had no hood in the way to interfere with your vision. We headed down the two miles or so of dirt road that led to the paved highway that ran through a small town about 5 miles to the southwest that had great milkshakes and from there down to connections to I-35 and I-40.
As we drove down the dirt road I noticed something in the glare of the headlights, just over to the right of our track. It looked like a crab, an ordinary crab like you might see at the seashore. It was about the size of your hand.
I thought about that. I've never done an Internet search for "Prairie Crabs of Oklahoma" but I doubt there would be much point. There was no sizeable body of water anywhere around, other than a farmer's pond about a mile or so away to the northwest. I decided that I must have seen something else.
Then my friend, Jim, said, "Did you see that? It looked like a crab!" Okay, so he saw it too. We had a discussion about possible sources of crabs, mostly involving people taking a trip to the seashore (500 plus miles away), bringing back a crab, and then throwing it out the window. This seemed most unlikely and Jim suggested we go back and look for it. I replied that if it really was a crab I'd have trouble sleeping that night.
We got to the paved road and turned Right. We had not gone very far down it when *Something* across the road in from of us, from Right to Left. It looked like a "blob", as in a formless shape that was still nonetheless running briskly across the road.
Once again, I decided that I must have not seen what I had seen. But Jim spoke up again. "Did you see that? It looked like a blob!" He then went on to aptly describe it as looking like a washcloth running. Imagine taking a whiteish washcloth and making it run, using on its edges as legs.
Jim said, "We are going back to find that one!" We turned around and headed back up the highway. We saw nothing in that area but a raccoon standing by the side of the road. Admittedly, that animal looked a bit confused; if I had taken a picture of that raccoon, a good caption might have been, "Hey! Did y'all see that blob that ran across the road just now?"
On the way home to our respective apartments we discussed what we had seen and came to no conclusions. We never saw anything similar in our many subsequent visits to that area. The only other thing that was the least bit strange that occurred was the time we fired a rocket motor and stampeded a herd of cattle. Well, there was also that liquid rocket engine we fired and had go up in ball of fire. Maybe we scared off all the crabs and blobs in the area.
The oddest thing about this experience is the lack of context. If we had seen Bigfoot, a pack of little gray aliens with a flying saucer, or a ghostly Indian war party, there would be a paranomal context that would fit into. Crabs and blobs don't fit anything I can think of.
