Incident at Uxmal

A phone call from afar the other day reminded me of something about which I had not forgotten, but don't ordinarily share with others. Since this site is currently read only by a few friends and some "stumble-ons," I now join the ranks of Dennis Kucinich, Jimmy Carter, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, and numerous others. Yes, I'm one of those wackos who claims that they have seen an unidentified flying object, and to this day I can't deny the following story.

It started with another phone call back in 1977, from a friend who had at one time been a New York City cop, but who was working for our local school system. The summer before we had been talking about (of all things) Meso-American archaeology, and we talked vaguely about making a trip to Mexico.
"You need to get a few days off," he said. "I got three ladies who want to go to Mexico with us."
"That's great," I said, "but I can't really get away this time of year." I was working for a seafood producer, and it was the height of mackerel season.
"Well, you have to." he said. "I've already bought your ticket." The next week, right after school got out for the Christmas holidays, the five of us landed in Merida, Yucatan.

The next day we drove south in a rented VW Thing to the Mayan ruins at Uxmal, arriving late in the afternoon. The Mexicans had installed equipment for a "sound and light show" in the ruins. The English version was at 9:00 PM. We decided to check it out, and after finding a place to stay and getting some food, we went back to see the show.

The viewers were led to a spot alongside what they call the Nunnery Quadrangle, a football field-sized enclosure formed by four ancient buildings. The sound system was enhanced by the natural acoustics of the quadrangle. As the story unfolded, lights appeared on the pyramids is the distance, synchronized with the music and unfolding story from the sound system.

The girls sat on folding chairs with most of the other 60 or so people who were there. My other friend (the former NYC cop) and I stood at the back, better to see the whole scene. He was never one to "miss a trick," and he said to me, "Something's coming down, something's coming down!" He pointed to a Mexican lady looking over to our right, and grabbing her child up to her chest.

I looked over to the right, and there, just past one of the buildings that formed the quadrangle, was this thing in the sky, no more than 100 feet away. At first it looked like some kind of merry-go-round, a rotating array of colored tubes hanging down from a disc-like cover. I remember also thinking that it looked like a giant Portuguese Man-o-war, with purplish tentacles hanging down from a rounded body. I assumed that it must be part of the light show, as, I am sure, did some of the other people in the audience.

Then, as we watched, the tubes changed color, and seemed to soften, so that they appeared to be dragging behind the circular motion of the disc. Then they were simultaneously drawn up into the disc. The thing continued to move forward and slowly gained altitude. It was silver in color, and about 80 to 100 feet in diameter. There was a rounded dome on the upper side, which gave off a reddish glow. Around the outside were yellow and orange lights, which rotated with the disc.

It's hard to explain, but we had the feeling that there was some kind of intelligence on board, and that they were having a good chuckle at our amazement, but not in a malicious way. The thing, whatever it was, slowly gained in altitude, and it was then that we noticed another one, high above us in the night sky. I had actually seen it before, but discounted it as an aircraft. When the one that we had seen close up got near it, the two of them went off in tandem toward the west.

All this time I remember pinching myself, as if to test if what we were seeing was real. I had a watch and remember that we had the two things in sight for a good twenty minutes. Unfortunately none of us had a camera with us. We did make drawings of it later, and they looked a lot like the picture above (which I crudely "photoshopped" recently).

After the show the Mexicans were in a big hurry to shoo everyone out of the place. One woman tripped and turned her ankle, and taking care of her took up much of the staff's attention. Of the other spectators, only a few seemed willing to talk about what we had seen, and they all agreed that it was something extremely unusual.

Later I told one of my neighbors, who was a retired Air Force officer, and also an astronomy professor, what we had seen. He told me that Project Blue Book, the Air Force's project to investigate UFO's had never really been closed. (He also called my attention to the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, which some people claim also speaks of a UFO sighting.) He later told me that his contacts in the Air Force had investigated this incident, and had placed it in the category of "a true unknown."

Later that week, newspapers reported a story on two mysterious sonic booms heard off the east coast of the US. It was later speculated that they were due to "exploding swamp gas."

Last I heard, one of the teachers had taken a job up on Florida's west coast. The other two got married, and eventually retired from teaching, and the cop is running a cattle ranch up in the Panhandle.

So there it is. PS: We went on to visit a lot of other archaeological sites, making the grand tour of the Yucatan Peninsula, and got home safely. It was a great trip, but nothing else happened that was as exciting as that evening at Uxmal!