A cow and a UFO
This is the third post in the blog series of stories of The Unexplained from my own life.
These two stories don’t have anything to do with each other except that both happened when I was 11 years old. At least, I’ve always assumed they were unrelated events.
The first happening was witnessed by many people who still talk about it 30+ years later.
Our farm was a dairy of about 400 holsteins. The cows wore numbered ear tags to identify them. Number 222 was the favorite cow on the farm. I kid you not, numerologists. For real, on her ear tag three twos were printed in black permanent marker. None of us knew anything about angel numbers back then. This was central Maine, not California.
You can ask any of my siblings, my cousins, my aunt, a couple of my friends from school, or many former farm employees about Number 222.
I know nothing about Holstein beauty standards but I always considered her the most physically beautiful of the cows. She was very friendly but there was something more—she conveyed intelligence beyond what you would expect. I don’t know how else to describe her specialness, and this was noted by everyone on the farm before the following event took place.
The summer I was 11, Number 222 was being kept in the “dry” herd because she was pregnant. When she showed signs that her time was near, she was put in the calving pen. One morning I went to check on her and she had begun delivery. 222 was stretched out on her side with two little hooves and slender ankles sticking out her back end.
I watched for a while and it didn’t seem to me that she was progressing. Worried, I hopped on my bike and rode around the farm looking for my father, who was probably out chopping alfalfa. I couldn’t find him but I told a kind, quiet teenage boy who was working on the farm that summer. He came back to the calving pen with me, where we observed that 222 still hadn’t progressed.
We got into the calving pen and while she pushed, each of us took a little hoof and pulled with all of our might. While she rested we patted and stroked her sides, speaking words of comfort and encouragement. With our help, 222 pushed out a great big bull calf.
According to my father to whom I told this story later that night, 222 was not having trouble delivering and would have done so without our pulling.
Still, the boy and I felt that we had participated in something moving and sacred. We tearfully congratulated 222. When she got up to lick her newborn, she also licked us. We stayed a little longer until the calf stood up and took it’s first spindly steps, when we left them to themselves.
The Unexplained part is what came next.
In the above photo you can get a sense of how large the dairy barn was. It was shaped like an H with the milking parlor in the center. Different herds were kept in the four legs of the H in an open stall design, meaning the cows weren’t tied to one stall. They could move around freely within their section.
For the next seven years that I lived on that farm, whenever I went to the section of the barn where 222 was housed, she would either be there waiting for me or she would raise her head from wherever she was and moo loudly, then run toward me as quickly as she could.
When I say she would be waiting, I mean that it seemed like she knew I was coming five minutes or so before I was visible to her. It’s not that I was showing up at a set time every day or that she waited there hoping to see me. No. According to other observers, she would wait there only when I was already on my way to the barn. When I became visible to her she would moo insistently and get excited, tossing her head and jumping a little, exhibiting extremely un-cowlike behavior—almost like a prancing pony.
She did the same with the teenage boy for the rest of that summer he worked there.
Many people observed this and still talk about it to this day. It was uncanny.
I’m going to preface this by saying that I wouldn’t blame anyone for not believing the following story. There were no other witnesses. I can only say that this is what I remember of this experience.
When I started sixth grade my father was short a calf feeder and it took him several months to hire someone. During that time my siblings and I had to do this back-breaking job every night after school and since I was the eldest, the major responsibility was mine. It was grueling.
We opened doors of the calf barn every evening to a deafening roar. We had to give the calves water, grain, silage, milk bottles for the youngest, and clean up their mess. If there were antibiotics to inject I had to do it. Sometimes it took hours. Often I’d let my brother and sister leave early and I would finish up alone.
The calf barn was on the other side of the brook from my house, a little less than a quarter-mile walk. It took five minutes. One evening that fall I was walking home alone. I didn’t notice the thing in the sky when I first came out of the barn. Once I was on the road walking, I looked up and there it was.
To the side of my house and behind it in the field, there was an enormous UFO. It was shaped like an inverted pyramid. At least, that’s the part I could see. It was dark and I felt like there was more to it that was obscured by clouds or something. The part that I could see was massive, much larger than my house.
Beside and behind our house was an alfalfa field and behind that a corn field, then woods. To me it seemed like the UFO hovered over both the alfalfa and corn field. It was stationary but there were levels of it rotating independently of each other. I could see the motion because these levels were lined with lights.
I closed my eyes and pressed my hands to my face, but when I opened my eyes it was still there. I didn’t stop or quicken my pace. Later when reflecting on this paranormal walk home, I wondered that I didn’t feel more alarmed or awed. The best way to describe how I felt was a calm, yet not untroubled acceptance.
I knew I was seeing something that defied explanation but I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t seeing it.
There was silence. I don’t think it was an utter silence. It was more like, here was this enormous thing in the sky and my mind expected it to be making a noise, but it made no noise whatsoever.
As I got closer to the house I thought of my family and wondered if any of them had noticed it. As soon as I thought of them, a thought entered my mind. “I’m going to go inside and look out the kitchen window, and it will be gone.” I also knew in that moment that no one in my family had seen it, nor would they.
I went inside and walked into the kitchen where my mother was cleaning up after dinner. I looked out the window, and as I expected, it was gone. My mother asked me what I was looking at and I remember she sounded irritated. “Nothing!” I said.
She asked me again and I said, “Nothing. Look—there’s nothing there.”
That was that and I never told anyone about it until recently.
This happened at an overwhelmingly stressful time of my life, and I guess that’s how I always explained it to myself. Maybe I was so stressed I was seeing things. While my perception of reality was always a little unusual (I’ll talk about that in an upcoming post), I didn’t experience hallucinations. I’ve had hallucinations upon waking and sleep paralysis episodes but that’s different.
