The next day he called the church and told them he wanted to become a Catholic. The church treated him warmly but they said the process would take a year. A daunting task, Warren thought, but he decided to do it. He went to the classes, attended services, and a year later he was baptized a Catholic.
Lansford lost contact with Warren but he never forgot the man who tried four times to shoot him. One day he ran into Warren’s parole officer, and he learned the man had cleaned up his act and was living near Portland. So out of the blue, Officer Lansford called Warren’s home. The time was right, he thought.
Warren’s mother answered. Remarkably, she said her son had wanted to contact the officer too.
Warren said, “I had been wanting to go to the police station but I was concerned the officers would think I was up to no good. So I decided I would write him a letter.” But Officer Lansford called him before he could send it. “We were both uncomfortable,” Warren said, “but we agreed to meet at a restaurant.”
It was indeed strained at first. They debriefed the incident piece by piece and it became a real healing moment for them. The second time they met, they hugged.
Subsequently, Warren and Lansford joined forces—the burglar and the cop—to talk to church youth groups about their experience. They talked about Warren’s long life of crime, the shooting, and their friendship.
Rarely was there a dry eye to be found, even among the “tough kids” in the crowd.
“I feel bad,” Warren says, “about what I put Officer Lansford and other officers through over the years. Officer Lansford saved my life when he shot me that day. I feel better off now without my legs than when I had them.”
Warren looks off in the distance for a moment. “You know,” he says. “When I was little, my grandfather raised me to be a Christian, but I closed that door. Jesus didn’t forget me, though.”
Note: This story was taken in part from an article I wrote in 1998 for Catholic Digest. I met with Lansford and Warren (not their real names) at a restaurant where I interviewed them at length. The atmosphere was a tad strained—no wonder: two cops and a former bad guy—but we were all polite and respectful of each other’s journey. They showed me a picture of the gun’s open cylinder and the four dented primers. I have lost contact with both men and I hope they are doing well.
DIVINE INTERVENTION IN THE NEWS
Utah
A Utah woman was driving home at 10 p.m. with her 18-month-old daughter beside her in a car seat. For some unknown reason, the mother lost control. The car went off the road into the Spanish Fork River, killing her, and leaving the toddler hanging upside down in her car seat and just above the freezing water.
The child would remain upside down for the next 13 hours.
The next day, a fisherman called the police and said he had spotted the overturned car. Three police officers and four firefighters arrived at the scene, and all waded into the freezing water. It was so cold the seven men were subsequently transported to the hospital and treated for hypothermia.
What happened during the rescue has left the men and everyone that hears about it baffled.
“The only people in the [submerged car] were the deceased mother and the child,” one officer said. “We were down in the water and we heard a distinct voice say, ‘Help me, help me.’”
Another officer adamantly said, “It wasn’t just something in our heads. And it wasn’t the child. To me it was as plain as day.”
One of the officers even answered the voice. “We’re trying. We’re trying our best to get you out of there.”
Another officer added, “We’ve gotten together to talk about it, and all four of us can swear we heard somebody inside the car, saying ‘Help.’ We’re not sure where the voice came from.”
The baby survived.
Source: All News Pipeline
*
Oklahoma
Two officers were patrolling an unfamiliar road in the country, tree-lined on one side and pastures on the other.
“A lot of what we do is just police instinct,” one of the officers told the news cameras. “And the other is just blind luck. But what happened last night had nothing to do with either. It was … divine intervention.”
The officers were patrolling when something caught the driver’s eye off to his right. It was a gravel road, practically hidden in the weeds. They slowed and that’s when they saw the tail light on an old truck 30 feet off the road in tall grass. Thirty minutes later it would have been dark and impossible to see.
The officers approached the truck and instantly knew something was wrong by how the man was acting. When the driver shifted into reverse, they thought for a moment he was going to try to ram them. But when he hesitated, the officers quickly approached him.
“At first we didn’t see the little two-year-old girl in the truck. The man had his pants undone and I asked him what was going on.”
Then they saw the child.
One officer grabbed the man and the other grabbed the little girl.
That’s when the call came over the police radio that the girl was missing. The description of the girl and her clothing matched perfectly the child they had just saved.
The twice convicted sex offender is now behind bars.
Source: News on 6
*
North Carolina
The lieutenant had gotten off duty three hours earlier when he saw a car run a stop sign.
“I heard the Lord speak to me,” he said. “Get the car stopped.”
Though most police officers know it’s not a good idea to get involved with minor traffic infractions when they are off duty, the lieutenant went after the car. Within seconds a high-speed chase reached 115 mph.
When the car finally pulled over to the side of the road, the driver bolted into the woods. The lieutenant started to pursue but stopped when he heard screaming coming from the trunk.
“I would have ran him down,” the lieutenant said. “But when you hear screaming coming from a trunk that takes priority.”
He managed to gain entry into the trunk and freed a woman who had been kidnapped.
She told officers she had stopped for gas when a pregnant woman asked for a ride. When the driver agreed, the woman’s boyfriend also jumped into the car.
The couple said they had a gun, and ordered her to drive them to another location where they robbed her of her cell phone and cash. They then forced her into the trunk. The man drove, dropped off his pregnant partner somewhere, and then continued with the kidnapped woman still in the trunk.
Officers later arrested the couple.
“We don’t’ know what their purpose was going to be,” a police spokesperson said. “I’m just glad we were able to intervene.”
The woman now refers to the officer had her guardian angel.
Source: The Blaze
SECTION FOUR
UFOS
I was in the fourth grade when news about UFOs seemed to be everywhere. I would clip the newspaper stories and read them to my class. Some kids laughed at them and others were frightened. Little did I know that in a dozen years I would experience UFOs up close and personal, and I’d be ordered by the military brass not to tell anyone, including family and friends.
The acronym UFO was coined by the United States Air Force in 1953, about three years before I read the stories to Mrs. Clark’s class. UFO stands for unidentified flying object, and by definition means the thing seen is unknown. Still, most people associate it with a spacecraft from another world.
When researching early news stories, I came across the January 25, 1878 edition of the Denison Daily News, which contained an article about a Texas farmer who saw a large, dark, circular object flying over his property. At least the doubters couldn’t argue that it was a secret government airplane or, more ominously, a Russian spy plane, since the Wright brothers were still nearly three decades away from developing their first flying machine.
There are reports of UFO sightings somewhere in the world eve
ryday. Are all of them valid? No. After we exclude hoaxers, attention seekers, and witnesses that are just plain goofy, what remains are the credible. Of the credible folks—regardless of their solid standing in the community and their believability—are those susceptible to error. For example, what they saw and believed to be an UFO was actually a bright planet, moon, legitimate aircraft, clouds, falling stars, or eye stigmatism, i.e., floaters.
Once all those things have been removed from the equation, what remains are unidentified flying object sightings, that is, UFOs.
Skeptics argue that the only reason unidentified sightings cannot be explained by conventional means is because all the evidence has yet to be gathered. They contend that a sighting that remains unexplained doesn’t automatically mean the object was part of an alien invasion. Similarly, the fact it cannot be proven that aliens didn’t abduct a woman shouldn’t, therefore, default to the belief that she was. And just because pilots, astronauts, and scientists cannot explain a given sighting, it doesn’t automatically mean aliens are here.
Or, if I may, all these things just might mean they are related to alien visitation.
Skeptics would argue that because the UFOs in my story that follows were not identified doesn’t automatically mean they were from Mars. True. But how would I know they weren’t identified as coming from somewhere beyond Earth? I was a lowly army specialist with all the status of an earthworm. I didn’t have an inside to the bigwigs at Homestead Air Force Base. I wouldn’t know what occurred after the colonel and his associates visited my missile battery and ordered us not to shoot at the objects and not to tell anyone.
All I know for sure is what we saw, what the radar picked up, and how the flying craft affected our dogs and the zillions of insects and animals in the surrounding jungle.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE SECOND KIND
By Loren W. Christensen
Nocturnal Lights: Lights in the sky at night.
Radar Visual: UFO reports that have radar confirmation.
Close Encounters Of The First Kind: Visual sightings of an unidentified flying object less than 500 feet away that show an appreciable angular extension and considerable detail.
Close Encounters Of The Second Kind: A UFO event in which a physical effect is alleged. This can be interference in the functioning of a vehicle or electronic device; a reaction in animals; a physiological effect, such as paralysis, heat, and discomfort in the witness; or some physical trace: impressions in the ground, scorched or otherwise affected vegetation, or a chemical trace.
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: UFO encounters in which an animated creature is present. These include humanoids, robots, and humans who seem to be occupants or pilots of a UFO.
~ Based on the Hynek Classification.
Before I went to Vietnam, I was stationed in the Florida Keys working as an Army Military Police Dog Handler on a missile battery, one of four in the area, each with missiles aimed at Cuba. The bases were built earlier in the decade during the Cuban Crisis, that scary period that brought us to the brink of World War III. As you entered Key Largo from the mainland, you would hang a left turn onto a winding, one-lane road, and proceed for seven miles through an encroaching, claustrophobic jungle that bumped into the Everglades, to a fenced military base—B company headquarters—set on a 50-acre clearing.
It was smallish by military standards, with an L-shaped building that housed offices, a barracks for 60 men, a small chow hall, and radar dishes. Another mile down the road in another cleared-out area of the jungle were three long barns, each containing six missiles. While both locations were well-groomed with cemented walkways, asphalt roadways, high cyclone fences, and an assortment of buildings, the constantly cutback jungle, teaming with creepy life forms of every size and shape, hunkered patiently to reclaim what it had owned for eons.
I was one of several MP dog handlers. We slept and ate in the living quarters during the day, and at night we patrolled with our dogs between two fences around the missile barns. The fences were about eight feet high with a 6-foot expanse of grass between them to allow the dog handlers to patrol with German Shepherds. Throughout the acreage, Army engineers had brought in tons of gravel to make long, 25-foot-high berms. Should one of the missiles have accidentally blown, the massive hills would have forced the blast upward. While we would have all been part of the mushroom cloud, it would have protected the good people of Key Largo. At least that was what the town was told. The missile guys knew it was a lie concocted to stop the citizens from complaining about the catastrophic arsenal in their backyard.
Almost every night we would climb to the top of the berms with our K9s and listen to a transistor radio station that played mellow midnight jazz, and gaze east over a half-mile of jungle to the ocean, or west over a tangled panorama that went on forever.
It was on one of those nights that we first saw the nocturnal lights.
Nocturnal Lights
There were three of them out over the ocean to the east. Brighter and larger than Venus, they moved about in no particular pattern. They would float or fly lethargically far from one another and at other times they appeared to nearly collide. There was no way to exactly determine how far or close they were to each other because we didn’t know how far away they were from us.
At first, we wondered if they could have been from Homestead Air Force Base, 35 miles away on the mainland. But what kind of aircraft could maneuver and hang in the sky like that? We watched them for several hours until we had to leave for a short while. When we returned, they were gone.
But they were back the next night and they had brought two others with them, all moving about randomly in the general vicinity they had the night before.
From our position high on the berm, we could see east over the half-mile of jungle—just a black mass at night—but we couldn’t quite see the water. We tried again to estimate how far the lights were from the battery and how high in the sky, but it was impossible to do so with accuracy. That said, I speculated three to five miles away and only a few hundred feet above the water.
The sightings continued for about two weeks, two or three nights a week. Sometimes there was just one light, other times as many as six. We told our command about it but we never heard anything back.
Next to the line of kennels was the “dog shack,” a small building in which we kept K-9 gear, 50-pound bags of food, and cleaning tools. There was also a counter and sink with a small window above it; the counter was just long enough for a guy to stretch out on for a quick snooze in the wee hours of the morn. I was doing exactly that one night when something woke me. I lay there for a few minutes looking out at the cotton ball clouds that dotted the dark sky. There was a mile of jungle between where I lay sprawled and where the missile guys were sleeping soundly in nice beds in the headquarters’ building. The counter was uncomfortable but I was enjoying a peaceful moment—until I was suddenly yanked from my serenity.
One of the cotton ball-like clouds suddenly illuminated in a neon-white light, not all of it, just around its edge. I had been stationed on the periphery of the Florida Everglades for almost a year, and I had witnessed many spectacular wind and electrical storms, but I had never seen the edges of a cloud light up.
As I quickly pushed myself up to see it better, a beam of light from behind or within the cloud shot down to roughly where our headquarters was up the road.
I half sprang, half fell off the counter, and ran out the door. The light beam was gone by then, though the edge of the cloud remained lit for another moment before going dark. I didn’t hear a sound and I didn’t see anything fly away. I reported it but again I didn’t hear anything back. At least they didn’t lock me up.
Years later, I saw Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the scene where Richard Dreyfuss’s pickup is stalled at a railroad crossing and a beam of light from above floods the interior of his truck, I literally sprang out of my theater seat, shouting at my buddy, “That’s it! That’s what I saw in Flo
rida!”
Everyone in the battery was talking about the sky show. Some were making nervous jokes, some, like me, were taking it seriously, and others weren’t saying anything. The command staff remained quiet.
One night another MP and I were walking our dogs within the double fences on the far side of the missile barns. On one side of us were the fenced-in barns and on the other a swamp from which we would occasionally hear the snap of crocodile jaws. It was pitch dark except for a few light bulbs that lit the sides of the missile barns 200 yards away. My partner and I were talking when something made us look up.
Lights, two of them, and they were straight overhead and flittering about the sky. This time it scared us.
It’s one thing seeing lights moving around at a distance but it’s a game changer to see them over your head. How high? There was no way of knowing because we didn’t know how large or small they were. Again, if I had to guess, I would say they were as high as a low-flying private plane.
Our dogs didn’t react, though the two of us were disconcerted and wondering what we should do. We had reported the lights before but as far as we knew it had fallen on deaf ears, or so we assumed.
I decided to call it in on a field phone attached to the fence. I had never used it before but I figured an attack by alien invaders was as good a time as ever.
“We got two lights straight overhead,” I told the duty officer, trying to sound calm and professional.
“Describe them.” He listened, then, “I’m calling Homestead Air Force Base. Stay by the phone.” Five minutes later, the fence phone buzzed. “They’re going up,” he said, and hung up before I could ask what he meant.
Cops' True Stories of the Paranormal: Ghost, UFOs, and Other Shivers Page 12
