A listener writes “I’m in the Army, I was recently at Fort Polk, LA. Specifically I was in the woods at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC). If you didn’t know it’s a heavily wooded and rural area where units from all over the Army goes to get dirty and train in “The Box.”
One night had come back to my Litefighter tent (little Army issued pop tent) to hunker down for the night. It’s pitch black with no moon, and cloud cover; so it’s pretty hard to see anything out there. My tent was on the end of our little sleeping area, and I’m about 50ft from the nearest tent and about 10ft from our concertina wire perimeter. Past the wire is thick brush, tall grass and trees. Further past is a small ravine that goes several hundred feet down, and had a small creek flowing through.
I sit down in my tent with a small red light and start taking off my boots. All of the sudden, a pine cone lands at my feet. Now I’m under a pine tree so at first, I think it simple fell from the tree. So it startled me, but I brushed it off. However, I look up… and watch a pine one fly out of the darkness and land at my feet. I do a slow double take, and witness another fly out of the darkness and at my tent. Now, all at once I get that “something not so cool” feeling and I start to get a bit freaked out. I immediately turn off my light and zip up my tent. As I’m laying on my cot, inside my tent in the pitch dark… three more pincones hit my tent in succession. At this point, something is up. I take my NVGs and open the tent enough to look out and shine my IR flashlight as bright as I could. I can’t see anything in the shadows of the woodline. Nothing happens after this.
I wake up, and I pass it off to our security detail thinking it was maybe the opposing force probing the perimeter. Turns out a few people had pinecones thrown at their tents that night. I know I saw pinecones fly out of the woods like they were thrown. The rest of the rotation was uneventful, but I did see some “orbs” floating through the night that were definitely not fireflies.
From research I found, there have been sightings of something in the Fort Polk/Leesville area of La. Not sure what I experienced out there, but it was definitely strange.”