Gillis and I returned to the station. We were already two hours past our normal quitting time. The third-shift sergeant flagged us down. Sure enough, the lady was true to her word. “I’ve got an abuse complaint on you two. I’ll need a report before you go home.†We both sat down at a computer and wrote out a lengthy report. We explained our actions and the reasons we did what we did, always keeping in mind the possibility of a lawsuit.
When I was almost finished with the report, the desk officer yelled, “Hey, Anderson! Do you know what that Malone kid looks like or what he was wearing when you left him?†Gillis looked at me. I looked at Gillis.
“She let that little !&*&#@** get away, didn’t she?†Gillis groaned.
The desk officer held his hand over the receiver of the phone and added, “He slipped away from the juvenile home just now. All Mary Poppins has to say is ‘The little skunk just slipped away. Geez, I don’t know where he could have gone.’â€
Gillis and I turned in our reports and headed home. It was now three o’clock in the morning. I wondered if the public had any idea what could happen in a cop’s day at work.
My wife and I have a private joke. She uses it when she thinks I’ve had a bad day. She will ask me, “Well, what was the score last night?†and I usually come back with, “Well, we got shut out. One to nothing or two to nothing or whatever.†We usually lost; but once in awhile we’d get lucky and score.
That morning was a different. When a cop gets killed, it takes the life right out of you. I hadn’t even processed all that had happened. I poured milk on my oatmeal and just quietly replied, “We got skunked.â€
A River Wide and Deep
by Tom Brosman
In shirts of blue, in the dark of night
They roll to wrecks and danger
Before the medics come on scene
They comfort injured strangers.
Troopers are idols of kids who dream
One day they’ll drive a patrol car
Behind a wheel, so white it gleams
But it’s not the way things really are.
Things you would never want to see—
First at crash, the awful scene
Broken glass, blood—fatalities
Uniform far from clean.
A trooper with a few years on, sees
The best and the worst in people.
The number of friends the trooper trusts
Dwindles down to digits single.
Oh, lots of people do brag and say
They are going to be a trooper
But when the chance is on the table,
They choose to be a plumber.
Only a few, a vital few,
Wear the badge proudly and live the life
Work the nights and weekends, too
And don’t complain the cost is high.
There are those that talk and those that do
A river deep between the two.
Lots of troopers pay the price
And proudly wear the shirt of blue.
“Let not the conceit of intellect hinder thee from worshipping mystery.â€
M.F. Tupper, Proverbial Philosophy
Unexplainable
Phenomena
This culmination of unexplainable phenomena addresses the “higher end†of the transpersonal perspective and may help to expand our grasp of what may be possible in the Universe. Such encounters address the range of our potential for interaction and, thus, go beyond the person. It includes encounters with alien beings, UFOs, shape-shifters, curving bullets, and other anomalous phenomena such as out-of-body experiences. The nature of this chapter is not to prove or argue with these exceptional police experiences but to simply keep an open mind and listen with deference.
“These experiences . . . seem to catalyze a process that eventually can lead to the realization of the person’s higher human potential. Lives, worldviews, and even identities can be transformed. When this process of transformation is initiated, an exceptional experience becomes an exceptional human experience.â€
Rhea A. White, “Becoming more Human as We Work,â€
Transpersonal Methods for the Social Sciences
“It happens, by a common vice of human nature, that we trust most to, and are most seriously frightened at, things which are strange and unknown.â€
Caesar, De Bello Civili
Bizarre Weather
When I was a brand-new recruit at the St. Joseph Post I was assigned to work with Larry Boger. Trooper Boger was a short, stocky, stubborn, old man with a gruff voice, deep lines on his face, gray hair, and a cigarette in his mouth. He was the epitome of what we call “old school.†I was green and shy.
We were having coffee at the local gas station when dispatch requested assistance on a train/pedestrian accident. This type of accident is usually fatal, so my heart started to pound. I had never been to a serious accident before.
We arrived at the train tracks in the area where a pedestrian was supposed to have been hit by the train. We didn’t see anything immediately. It was a sunny winter day and the sky was blue.
Larry advised, “Take your time and walk carefully down the tracks.†(Larry always sauntered to my fast pace.)
As he grabbed the radio prep from the patrol car, I got out. These were the days when you had to have a “repeater†in the patrol car for the hand-held radio to work, and sometimes reception was poor.
Larry was not overly excited, so I tried to copy his behavior. They always said in recruit school that new troopers are reflections of their senior officers. I wanted to act cool, stay relaxed, and be just like him.
Larry suddenly stopped. I thought to myself, Oh my God, but Larry remained calm. Larry put his cigarette in his mouth, took a puff, and slowly blew out the smoke.
Then he matter-of-factly said into the prep, “Central dispatch, we got a leg.†My heart was racing but I pretended to be calm. We continued walking down the track.
Larry stopped, put his cigarette in his mouth and took another puff. He looked up into the sky, and this time he blew smoke rings. He said into the prep, “Central, we got us an arm.†His voice was monotone, and he seemed undaunted. We continued walking.
Larry came to an abrupt stop. He had spotted something in the snow bank. He took another puff of his cigarette and said, “Central, we got us a torso now.â€
The snow was so bright I had to adjust my eyes. I was trying hard to see what he was looking at. In shock, I said, “Oh, okay. Now I can see him!†I thought, Wow, how does Larry stay so calm? I don’t know if I can ever be like him.
Larry looked at me and like a teacher, said, “Now young man, walk over there and see if he’s alive. Check and see if you can get a pulse.†I was so sheepish! The torso lay motionless, its head partially facedown in the snow bank. It was probably one hundred feet from the train track. I thought, Holy mackerel, that poor guy had to be hit pretty hard to be laying way over here.
As I approached the torso, I could feel myself hyperventilating. I was scared. I had never seen a dead body in this condition before. My pulse throbbed in my neck. Very slowly and cautiously I extended two fingers towards his neck to check for a pulse.
Suddenly, the man swung his body around, his face only inches from my nose, and blurted out, “Hey, I think I need an ambulance!â€
The man’s eyeballs were nearly popped out of the sockets, like a freak at a Halloween party. I could almost touch the whites of his eyes! I let out a shriek, jumped back nearly ten feet, and landed flat on my ass in the snow! Yes, it was a sight Larry and I never forgot.
The train had pushed and dragged the man at such a high rate of speed that his limbs were cut and thrown from the track in different directions. The man’s limbs were severed so quickly and
it was so cold outside that his blood coagulated and the man survived.
Two months later, I stopped him on the roadway for speeding. He proceeded to show me his prostheses! He was delighted to see me and enthusiastically said, “Thank you so much for helping me! See? I got a new arm and a new leg and I can drive!â€
I decided not to give him a ticket. Somehow it just didn’t seem appropriate.
Colors Never Seen Before
When I read the local newspaper headline “Mysterious Flying Object Might Have Been a Planet,†I shook my head in frustration. I couldn’t believe it. The unidentified flying object (UFO) I saw hovering over this lady’s pole barn was not a planet rising over the horizon! I wanted to shake some sense into the local college astronomer who suggested it. Even NASA engineers said the object was not a planet and gave their opinion that the metal was not manmade. I still have their report. And, fortunately, I videotaped the event . . .
It happened one early morning just before Christmas. It was still dark outside. My desk sergeant received a call from an excited, but frazzled, thirty-some-year-old lady who reported a “thing†hovering over her pole barn. She wanted to know what it was. I was dispatched around 6:30.
Both the sergeant and I admit we thought the call was from a “mental,†given the fact so many people had recently been released from a state mental hospital in our area. To this day, however, I regret not arriving at this woman’s house sooner, when the UFO was closest to the ground.
After I took my time writing a citation for a typical speeder on his way to work, I arrived on her front porch, and knocked on the door. I wasn’t too excited about this visit.
The woman answered and appeared visibly shaken. “Did you see it? Did you see it? Did you see it when you pulled into the driveway?â€
I said, “Nope. ‘Fraid not.†I was unenthusiastic.
It should be noted that I am a fifty-year-old, cantankerous police canine handler, and have been a trooper for many years. I am conservative, a member of the school board, and a Christian Protestant. I may not attend church regularly, and I smoke cigarettes like a fiend, but I’m a quiet-spoken, mild-mannered guy who loves his family very much.
The woman urgently beckoned me in. “Then come in! Come with me! Right now! I will show you.†She grabs me by the hand and hustles me through the kitchen and dining room to her back sliding doors. I stepped out on the deck and suddenly my knees buckled! I looked up and was shocked! I felt all the blood drain from my face. My eyes must have been big as tennis balls. Even my body started to quiver, which is very unlike me. I had seen some strange things in my police career, but nothing like this.
This UFO was massive! It was as big as half a football field and hovered silently above this woman’s pole barn. Apparently it had risen since she’d first spotted it—but I could still see it clearly. The colors were amazing. I was scared and excited.
The lady was grateful I had come as she requested. Later that day, even Paul Harvey said it was the wisest thing the woman could have done—to call the state police. I don’t know if I would have believed just one person’s story. As we found later, it became important that we had each other to talk to.
I radioed my sergeant and advised him that this sighting was no prank and that the woman had a legitimate concern. My voice rarely cracks over the radio, but it did that day.
I know, you might think I’m a trooper gone wacky, but the object we saw could not have been from this world. It was too weird. I’ll never forget how silent it was.
It looked like the old-fashioned flying saucer in the Lost in Space television show, but the metal and its composition was different. As we gazed up, we saw the bottom of it. It was a strange, ethereal, brilliant array of colors and lights, interweaving and dancing over and under each other—difficult to describe well. The bottom looked open and hollow. These brilliant colors and shapes resembled Honeycomb cereal, all woven together. That’s the only way I can describe it. We commented to each other how the colors did not look real. They were colors we had never seen before—and they were BEAUTIFUL! I learned later that scientists believe there are other colors in the universe that we haven’t seen with our eyes. I think we were true witnesses to this concept.
Still shot from the videotape provided by the officer.
The lady had called her neighbor, Michael, just before I arrived. When Michael looked out his kitchen window, as she requested, all he could see was lightning bolts, radiating above her barn. He had to put his robe on and walk over to get a look at it.
I find it weird that neither Michael nor I could see the object at certain angles. It was only until Michael came over that he saw it, too. There was little obstruction in our initial views, from the driveway or from Michael’s kitchen window, yet neither of us could see it from those vantage points. (Maybe this is what they mean by “cloaking†in science fiction.)
At first the lady and I were going to try and assemble a new video camera that was wrapped underneath her Christmas tree, but then we decided we might not figure it out in time to videotape the UFO. So, Michael ran next door and retrieved an old video camera he had stored away. Michael videotaped some wonderful clips of the object, though it seemed to get higher and higher in the sky as time went on.
The UFO was visible for almost two hours, from 6:30 A.M. to 8:30 A.M. I can hardly explain how it disappeared from view. It was moving, but it wasn’t. It just didn’t seem real, yet it was clear as day to the naked eye and to the video camera.
The UFO was completely silent the whole time, yet the lady’s three dogs knew it was there! Perhaps it made a sound that humans could not hear but dogs could, or perhaps the lights affected them—whatever it was, they were petrified! Two of her dogs hid in the doghouse and would not come out when she called. A third dog, an Akita, hid under a bed in the house. Akitas are rarely afraid of anything.
When we first observed it, the morning was still dark, so there was some fog and haze around it, which caused the colors to shift and gleam and look quite eerie in the night sky. Plus, it was so big! As it rose above the barn and the sky got lighter, you could see the metal and the composition better. It had an outer shell that seemed to be spinning.
After about an hour, three military jets flew over the top of the house, as if to inspect it. As the jets flew over, the lights went out on the UFO, and then they came back on once the jets were gone. I called my sergeant and asked him to check with the F.A.A., Camp Grayling, and any other military bases in the Midwest to ask why these Air Force jets had flown over northern Michigan. I know an Air Force military jet when I see one. To this day, the F.A.A. and the military claim there were absolutely no military aircraft in our area. That is a lie! I believe our government knows much more than they care to admit or explain to common folks.
I do not think this object was a military project either. People have suggested it was a military experimental aircraft, but I beg to disagree. We sent our video to NASA, whose engineers inspected it closely. Several of them actually called me and clearly stated the metal did not appear to be manmade.
The lady, Michael, and I remained close friends after this sighting. Despite the amazing incident and the positive changes we experienced in our own attitudes about life—we had some mixed feelings afterwards.
The experience changed each of us in different ways. We talked about it for many years. For instance, the lady, now my friend, chooses not to focus on the sky so much anymore. She is grateful to be living her life, here, now, day-to-day, and to be experiencing everything she has at the moment. She feels the incident and aftermath “grounded†her somehow.
Michael felt much as I do. We no longer look at ourselves the same way as we did before. I’m more tolerant, open, and appreciative of the world we live in. The Universe is so much bigger than I ever thought, and
we are like little grains of sand. I now realize there is a higher purpose, a higher meaning in life that is difficult for man to comprehend. In fact, it’s incomprehensible. The Universe goes beyond our minds, beyond our egos, and I am no longer as self-involved and self-absorbed as I once was. I watch and wonder more attentively now.
I still see those colors dancing in my head and I wish I could share them with people. Our universe has colors we’ve never seen before.
Trooper Glenn Guldner, Michigan State Police, Traverse City, Michigan
Note: Trooper Glenn Guldner is deceased.
The events he shared occurred several years ago.
The Encounter
I retired from the police force in 2002. The encounter occurred in the middle of the night in September 2008 at my home in a rural area near Holland, Michigan, which sits on the coast of Lake Michigan. It had been a warm, calm, uneventful evening; my family was in bed. The last thing I remember was watching TV on the couch.
The next thing I knew, I was standing in the yard outside my home. It was dark and absolutely quiet. I was not dreaming; I was completely conscious. The silence was eerie. Ahead in the near distance I saw a pin-size light, then all of a sudden a very bright wave-like flash that seemed to move through and pass me, almost knocking me back a step. I then felt a presence behind me. I turned around to see three small gray beings just standing there. Shoulder to shoulder.
They were the classic, gray, science-fiction-like aliens standing at a height of about four feet. They had large, black, almond-shaped eyes and long slender arms and legs. Oddly enough, I was not afraid. It was as if I recognized them or somehow knew them. I did not feel intimidated in the least.
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