Episode 14: Tennessee UFO Encounters

On today's episode, Tennessee Ghosts and Legends will boldly go where no man has gone before. We'll explore some of the strange occurrences from around the volunteer state attributed to visitors from other worlds. From strange lights in the sky to an up close and personal alien encounter, we'll try to ascertain if we are alone in the universe, or if aliens walk among us.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Tennessee Ghosts and Legends Podcast. My name is Lyle Russell. I am your host, and I love a good ghost story. 

But before we embark on this episode, I would like to offer a personal note of thanks. Over the last year, I put podcasting on hold to finish my degree. During that time, the thirteen published episodes of Tennessee Ghosts and Legends have developed quite a following, more than I ever could have imagined. I received emails and messages from listeners all over the world inquiring when the next episode was coming. I want to thank you all for your kind words and patience. Now that school is over, I have set a goal of two new episodes per month, starting with this one. I am grateful for all of you who tune in and for your kind messages of support. It means more to me than you could ever know. Now, on to the episode.

Today, we’re going to shift genres from the supernatural to the extra-terrestrial. Tennessee has its fair share of UFO sightings and alien interactions, so many in fact that there was a proposal to build a UFO landing pad in Nashville. In this episode, we’ll explore some of those reported encounters throughout the state, as well as an extraordinary historical UFO event in 1853. Today, Tennessee Ghosts and Legends will boldly go where no man has gone before. Engage.

The Legend:

Prior to television becoming the main form of entertainment in homes around the world, families would gather around another device in their living rooms to listen to spoken-word dramas on the radio. Spoken word dramas dominated family entertainment like Little Orphan Annie, Howdy Doody, Dick Tracy, The Phantom, and Superman among many others. Without visual references, listeners were required to use their imaginations to attach action to the words they heard over the airwaves. Perhaps the greatest example of the power of radio comes in 1938, when Orson Welles shocked the world with his realistic radio drama on Mercury Radio, and adaptation of H.G. Welles novel called War of the Worlds. On Halloween night, Welles depicted realistic radio scripts as if an invasion from Mars was happening in real time over the airwaves. Though he gave the fictional disclaimers at the beginning of the program, many who tuned in late did not know the broadcast was fiction. Using newscasts, voice actors, and compelling sound effects, his production caused real world panic in some places, sending families to shelter in basements and prepare for a war against another world.

The possibility of life on other planets is one of the most enduring mysteries that mankind has yet to solve. Much like Welles tapping into a fear of the unknown, modern storytellers have used all sorts of media to spark the imaginations of the world. Is there life on other planets? And if so, how long before they come to earth? Many believe that we have already been visited, while some others believe that otherworldly beings already walk among us, hiding in plain sight with an unknown agenda and pretending to be one of us. While the western United States in places like Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico get most of the attention, Tennessee has its fair share of reported encounters with visitors from other worlds.

Every one of Tennessee’s 95 counties has at least one reported sighting registered with the National UFO Reporting Center in Davenport, Washington. Davidson and Shelby counties have the most reported sightings by count, but Bedford and Clay counties have the most sightings per capita. I live in a county adjacent to Bedford. It is mostly rural and flat with low hills and very good views of the night sky. 

A recent Tennessee encounter occurred in Jacksboro, a city in Campbell County, in March of 2024. The report states that a triangular craft  with an aura around it and multiple lights and about the size of a football field appeared to the north of their home from about 500 feet away. The report reads:

Black triangle craft silently traveling directly above me, emitting no sound save for a humming vibration that I could feel and hear. I was standing outside, admiring the clear night sky before I noticed this craft "flying" right over me, around 500ft. in the air traveling towards the West. I scrambled as quickly as I could to snap a few pictures of it and a very short recording of the craft to showcase the complete lack of any blinking lights on the underside of the craft. It was completely silent save for the vibrational humming that filled the air that I could "feel" and "hear" all at once. The craft was traveling at a fairly decent and consistent speed without disturbing the environment around it. The craft had one light on each corner of it, with one light in the middle of the craft. Towards the end of my sighting as it traveled towards the West, it just flat out disappeared from my vision. I don't really have any better way to describe its disappearance other than it seemed to "fade away" for lack of a better explanation.

Another reported sighting in Manchester, a city in Coffee County adjacent to Bedford, described a similar craft back in 2009:

I was driving on I-24W toward Nashville; I took exit 111 into Manchester to drive onto Tullahoma. After I made the left turn on Highway 55, I saw a hovering pyramid above the treetops. The object was a three-sided pyramid. It was a metallic, shiny black color. On the first side I saw, there were 10 circular white lights, stacked in rows (4, 3, 2, 1). The best way I can describe these lights is to compare them to the lights that overlook a baseball game. On the next side, I looked back to see three small lights near its top, each different colors- red, green, and blue. I was topping a hill when I first saw it and after crossing it, I could see underneath the craft; it was hollow.
 
 The craft was hovering just above the treetops, I'd say about six to eight feet above the leaves. On the opposite side of the median/road, cars were pulling over. On my side of the road, all of us were slamming our brakes and two cars ahead of me, there was nearly a wreck. This was proof to me that I wasn't the only one witnessing this. The craft was about 20ft wide and was a proportional triangle on each side, so perhaps about 20ft tall as well. As I've said, the craft was hollow.

These are two of many reports describing a similar pyramid-shaped craft with the same light patterns. What could be the source of these sightings? 

Perhaps one of the most unique and potentially terrifying reported encounters in Tennessee happened in Cheatham County on the northwest side of Nashville in 2010, where the report describes an encounter the person had not with a craft, but with the aliens themselves:

I reside in Cheatham County, Tennessee, and observed an alien in my yard in February this year. The reason I am coming forward is because the description the woman in Georgia provided of the 3 alien beings she observed at a campsite where she and her husband were camping the latter part of 2009 is almost exactly the same as what I saw.
 
 It was approximately 5:00 in the morning. There was still snow on the ground from the last snow. I had gotten ready for work and was sitting in my Suzuki in the drive letting it warm up before leaving for my job in Nashville, Tennessee. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye in the area of my garage (which is used for storage and not to pull a car into). At first, I thought it was one of the neighbor's dogs. I turned to look and saw something which very closely matched the description of the alien creatures which the woman in Georgia observed. Its body, extra-long arms and hind legs were so thin. Its head was very large and bumpy. It was pale in color and hairless.
 
 It was very cold outside, and the creature appeared a light grayish color (I'm not sure whether the cold temperature would have affected the appearance of the color). The only difference in my story and hers is that the 3 creatures she saw were upright. This was moving on all 4's, however, the way it was moving made it appear like a monkey or gorilla that are oftentimes upright, but then use their arms in conjunction with their legs to propel themselves forward.
 
 On all 4's, it was about the height of a large dog, and I observed that it would be considered short, compared to most humans, if it stood upright. Its legs were short, quite a bit stockier than the body and arms, which were long and skinny. It kept looking back as though it thought it was being followed, and so it was surprised to see me sitting inside the automobile when it looked around, directly at me, for the first time. I got a good look at its large, round eyes which were darkish in color. They appeared a dark brown. It was as though it sensed I wasn't going to hurt it, and it continued across my yard, across the road, and continued out a connecting road which is directly in front of my home.
 
 There are lots of wooded areas in the direction it was traveling, and lots of wooded area behind my home. I am not comfortable just ignoring this occurrence. Questions are racing through my mind - questions which need to be answered. What are these creatures doing in our wooded areas, hiding out by day, and wandering by night? Where did they come from? Are they depleting any of our resources? Will they become dangerous if someone acts aggressively toward them? (I was so busy looking at its eyes and bumpy head that I cannot describe a nose and/or mouth.) I am a sane individual who is employed at one of Nashville's most prominent law firms.

In my other research on Tennessee stories and legends, this description could also match others I have found of cryptid reports, such as dogmen, the beast of land between the lakes, or the white bluff screamer. With these odd sightings, it is difficult to be certain what the witness is describing. Could it be an alien? Or a cryptid? Or is it the result of an overactive imagination seeing things in the early morning darkness? In my early years working in the golf business in Florida, sometimes I had to be at work on busy days at around 4am. During my 45-minute drive that began at 3:15 each morning, I would usually catch the end of a syndicated radio show called Coast to Coast AM hosted by hall of fame radio presenter Art Bell. During his show, he would take calls from all manner of citizens claiming to have encountered aliens, Bigfoot, dogmen, vampires, lizard people, and any other supernatural or paranormal creature you can imagine. The show was wildly entertaining, and I would look forward to my early morning drive just to hear what would happen next on his show. 

I can speak from experience that when you listen to these stories, seeds are planted that activate your imagination. I am a skeptic by nature, but the power of suggestion is strong and can make you see and hear things that aren’t there. I worked outside at that job I was driving to, and I would see things moving in the dark, or at least, I thought I did. There were mornings I felt I was being watched from the woods. There was even one morning where I opened the dumpster doors and a startled raccoon leapt up at me, sending me into a panic and prompting a change of my underwear shortly after. While I am not discounting the experiences these people describe, I also want to entertain that there could also be a real-world source of what they are seeing. However, in some of these cases, the evidence is compelling that what was seen is not of this world.

While modern sightings can have more modern likelihoods of human technology being the culprit, there is a famous pre-aircraft sighting from Spencer, Tennessee in Van Buren County that cannot be explained so easily.

Burritt College was an isolated Christian university established in 1849 in rural Spencer, Tennessee. It operated with a classical curriculum comprised of Latin, Greek, philosophy, mathematics, logic, natural philosophy, and evidences of Christianity until its closure in 1938. The site also served as a Union encampment at the end of the Civil War where most of the school grounds and buildings were destroyed. However, before the first shots were fired between the north and south, the school had another kind of invasion.

In the early morning hours on June 1st, 1853, the students were about their morning duties while the staff was preparing for the day’s lessons. As the sun crested the trees over the Cumberland Mountains to the east, two large orbs appeared in the sky above the school on the northern horizon. One of the students would later describe them as one looking and shining like a large star while the other resembled a small moon. A crowd of students and faculty gathered and observed the two orbs as they moved across the sky; the moon-shaped object getting further away and eventually disappearing while the brighter star-shaped object moved closer and revealing itself in detail as a great, shining sphere. 

A witness of the unexplainable event, Burritt professor A.C. Carnes took copious notes on the sighting and wrote to the editors of Scientific American magazine asking for an explanation of what they had seen at the college. In his letter, he described the sighting as:

"The first object then became visible again, and increased rapidly in size, while the other diminished, and the two spots kept changing thus for about half an hour. There was considerable wind at the time, and light fleecy clouds passed by, showing the lights to be confined to one place."

He speculated that they had witnessed some type of electrical phenomenon, possibly ball lightning or its like. In the response, his theory was rebuked, and an explanation of their sighting was attributed by the experts at Scientific American to distant clouds of moisture and dismissed. Ball lightning and clouds of moisture were poor descriptions of what the faculty and students saw that morning in the Tennessee sky. Many of them remained unconvinced of either explanation being adequate, and many of them would never know that other areas of the United States at that time were experiencing similar sightings of unexplainable objects in the sky. One such recurring sighting happened in the plains state of Nebraska, even prompting a late 19th century folk song to be written about it, saying:

Twas on a dark night in '66 

When we was layin' steel 

We seen a flyin' engine 

Without no wing or wheel 

It came a-roarin' in the sky 

With lights along the side 

And scales like a serpent's hide.

That line refers to 1866. Remember, this was before man’s first flight at Kittyhawk. Humans had not yet visited the sky. So, what was it these early settlers were seeing in the night? Many naysayers in those days stated the people reporting these sightings were drunk, much like skeptics today can be dismissive of UFO reports. One consistent factor between reports is the shape of object. Many are described as triangles or pyramids, while others are orbs like the Burritt College sighting. A modern report of a similar object seen at Burritt happened in March of 2024 in Murfreesboro. Four military personnel reported seeing two large gold-colored egg-shaped objects circling each other while moving together along the tree line. The report states:
 
The two objects were very shiny and staying the same distance from each other the entire time. They were circling each other in a very fluid motion but moving through the sky together slowly. We first saw them southwest of our house and they were moving northeast towards us. They got to the tree line 2 houses down then shifted to the west. They got just beyond the trees at the end of our street, 3 houses down, then started going south. They slowly moved out of sight beyond the trees. We were able to see them through binoculars and they were very clearly visible. About the size of a car though it was hard to gauge because they never came in front of the tree line. They stayed just above it. Perfectly sleek giant metallic eggs spinning around each other like a mobile.

Another compelling report comes from a YouTube video with video clips of the object by a Nashville musician named Mikey Mike. He and his band attended an outdoor musical performance in downtown Nashville in 2022. After the show, he and his friends witnessed an unexplained object in the Nashville sky. He says they first saw a silver formation of lights in a square box shape against a cloudy sky, then after it disappears, multiple lights come from several directions moving in erratic patterns and varying speeds. In the video, you can see the orbs as he describes and hear the reactions of the others present, so this was witnessed by multiple people at the same time. Comments on his video vary from supportive of the theory of aliens to others lamenting the effects of ‘shrooms on the brain. In any case, the video evidence is there to scrutinize for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Though it was originally meant as a joke, in 1989, Nashville city councilman George Darden suggested building a UFO landing pad in north Nashville. He used the attention from the outlandish suggestion to shed light on an underserved part of the city and gained international attention for the idea. Though the project was voted down, Darden stood behind his suggestion. The Tennessean quotes him as saying to the rest of the council, ”You might live to regret this day,” following the 27-1 vote against his proposal. “Many people have come to me expressing the fact that they are seeing these unidentified flying objects.” As outlandish as the proposal may sound, Davidson County has the most reported UFO sightings in the state at 251 reports since 2000. 

The National Archives and Records Administration is home to several collections of documents pertaining to UFOs. One set of documents, known as Project Blue Book, includes retired, declassified records from the United States Air Force, currently in the custody of the National Archives. It relates to the USAF investigations of UFOs from 1947 to 1969.  During that time, a total of 12,618 sightings were reported to Project Blue Book. Over the decades, these reports have been thoroughly probed and scrutinized for even a hint of more information and proof of alien existence, or to discover a natural explanation for what was reported. Of those 12,618 reports, 701 remain marked as “unidentified.”  The project officially ended in 1969 but reports of encounters with UFOs and aliens did not end with it. Sightings in Tennessee continued to be reported, but none so many as there were during a sixty-day stretch in the fall of 1973.

This time period saw the largest collection of UFO sighting reports in U.S. history. Newspaper and broadcast accounts chronicle hundreds of stories of unknown objects being seen in the night skies along with reports of "high strangeness" on the ground across the southeastern United States. September and October of 1973 became affectionately known as the "Autumn of Aliens.”

The first report started in Nashville on Sept. 3, when The Tennessean reported a sighting witnessed by a mother and her three children, who described a distant light that changed colors, then a red triangular object with three white lights moving rapidly across the sky. Nashville Metro police investigated the claim but decided the lights to be out of their jurisdiction for any further investigation. No further explanation was offered.

Soon after, The Tennessean again reported that Shelby County deputies in Memphis spotted a whirring, hovering craft sweeping the ground with two white spotlights on September 25th. Later in that same week, similar sightings were reported by sheriffs in Lauderdale and Obion counties. The first report in Middle Tennessee was in Giles County on Oct. 1. The Pulaski Citizen reported that three teenage boys witnessed the landing of an egg-shaped craft near the Anthony Hill community piloted by a large, hairy, stiff-walking alien.

Reports continued to trickle in from Tennessee and around the country throughout the first week of October. It was during this time that one of the most famous abduction cases in UFO history was reported on Thursday, Oct. 11 south of Tennessee in Pascagoula, Mississippi. That evening, two dockyard workers said they saw a light approaching them while fishing on the banks of the Pascagoula River. Within minutes, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker were confronted by wrinkly-skinned eyeless gray creatures with long arms ending in claws. Hickson and Parker were paralyzed and "floated" into the hovering craft for a short examination before being dumped back on the shore. The story took the national media by storm, and while no one could explain what had really happened to the pair of anglers, anyone who met them almost all agreed that whatever happened, they had experienced something truly terrifying.

As I said before, the power of suggestion can be a strong influence on the mind. In the week that followed the abduction story, floods of reports citing strange lights, unusual aircraft, landings, and bizarre creatures multiplied across entire United States. On Oct. 15, the Pulaski Citizen reported that a family from Berea, Tennessee saw strange bright lights in the woods nightly behind their house, and a separate witness claimed a being with a glowing white head crossed a highway nearby the same site. Claw-like tracks were later discovered in the road, as well as what appeared to be landing marks in the woods from the weight of an unknown craft.

The Oct. 17 issue of the Nashville Banner reported multiple sightings from around Tennessee — Columbia, Hartsville, Knoxville, Lawrenceburg, Lebanon and Mt. Juliet. The next day, The Tennessean reported glowing cones and saucer-shaped objects in Clarksville, a triangular object hovering over a car near Springfield, and the tale of a Putnam County farmer menaced by two lights that barreled directly toward him before shooting almost vertically into the sky.

The Tennessean again reported on several sightings from around Nashville on the evening of Oct. 18 — including a silver, cigar-shaped craft, a glowing blue mist and a trio of hovering, glowing objects. After showing off for their respective witnesses, the objects vanished with great speed. The next night, the blue mist was back, along with more glowing hoverers emitting a cacophony of humming and whistling noises.

Many reports of supernatural and extraterrestrial encounters can be explained with real-world phenomena and evidence proving that what was seen is either a natural occurrence or a figment of the imagination. However, just as many reports remain unexplained. In the aftermath of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds panic, he stated this the following day in an interview with multiple members of the press:

For many decades The Man From Mars has been almost a synonym for fantasy. In very old morgues of many newspapers there will be found a series of grotesque cartoons that ran daily, which gave this fantasy imaginary form. As a matter of fact, the fantasy as such has been used in radio programs many times. In these broadcasts, conflict between citizens of Mars and other planets been a familiarly accepted fairy-tale.

Hearing that quote, do you think he’s right? Are aliens a fantasy given form in our minds by comic strips, tv shows, radio dramas and movies, or are we not alone in the universe? As I said, I am a skeptic of a great many things, but being a skeptic does not mean that everything I have seen has an explanation. What were the orbs seen over Burritt College, Nashville, and Murfreesboro? What were the pyramid-shaped lights seen in Manchester and Jacksboro? What happened to the two fishermen in Pascagoula Mississippi? What were the early settlers of Nebraska seeing in the sky that they wrote a song about, calling them flying serpents? And not least, what of the close encounter with the beings in Cheatham County? Were those simply early morning imaginations, or do creatures from another planet already walk among us? 

Here in the early 21st century, humans stand on the precipice of what Gene Roddenberry described as the final frontier. We are training and planning for a manned mission to Mars, and soon returning to the moon. While we wait to travel among the stars, we can only speculate what awaits us out there. Humans will always be enamored with the sky and what lies beyond, but it may be possible that the skies we are watching are also staring back at us.

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Thank you for listening to today’s Tennessee Ghosts and Legends Podcast episode. I cordially invite you to visit my website at www.lylerussell.net if you’d like to learn more about this and other stories I’m working on. If you have had an extraterrestrial experience or have seen a  paranormal experience, I would love to hear about it. Feel free to send me a message through my website and tell me about your brush with the spirit world, or with the worlds beyond. I am your host, Lyle Russell, and remember, the dead may seem scary, but it’s the living you should be wary of. Until next time.