A listener writes “The main encounter happened when I was 11, my neighborhood friend was 8, and my sister was 5. We had about 100 acres of wooded land to explore in northeast Battle Ground, Washington, back in the early ’90s. We knew every inch of that place.
One day, we were pushing through incredibly thick vine maple growth. If you know those woods, you know even adults would struggle to move through it. As we were making our way along, I caught something out of the corner of my eye what looked like a massive stump. But it didn’t fit. It was huge, like an old-growth rotting stump sitting where it absolutely shouldn’t have been among vine maples.
We got within maybe 15 feet of it when it suddenly turned and ran.
It was jet black and crashed through the woods like a locomotive. The sound and force of it were unreal. Afterward, we talked ourselves into believing it had to be a cow, because it was way too big to be a bear. But nobody around us had cows, and honestly, there’s no way a cow could have gotten through brush that thick.
So I did some serious pre-internet, 11-year-old research in the ’90s and eventually decided it must have been a moose. I believed that for about four years until I realized there are no moose in southwest Washington. Whatever it was, it was enormous, and it moved through the forest like a freight train.
My brother-in-law also had an experience with three other witnesses while deer hunting. They were overlooking a draw when they heard a crack that sounded like a baseball bat hitting an 80 mph fastball. They were stunned, so they did a crack back in response. Almost immediately, they got answers from three different directions.
It scared them badly. There was no chance it was other people they were deep in the middle of nowhere. After that first crack, whatever made it started moving away from them, doing another tree knock roughly every hundred yards until it faded off into the distance. At the same time, they were still hearing responses from both the left and right sides.
I’ve also had two UFO encounters, both in places with almost no light pollution.
The first was near the Lewis River. I saw a light about four times brighter than any star in the sky. It moved in ways no plane or satellite could making semicircles and sharp zigzags. Then it blinked out completely and reappeared twice. The final time, it showed up near the horizon. If it was a physical object, it would have had to move hundreds of miles in seconds.
The last sighting happened at Two Rivers Resort, near where the Columbia and Spokane Rivers meet. I was walking my dog around 11 p.m. when an extremely bright light crested the hill across the river and moved halfway down toward the water. Then it split from one light into three red lights, moved to the right maybe 500 to 1,000 yards, and suddenly vanished.
Maybe none of it is episode-worthy, but they were definitely experiences I’ll never forget.”