Sky Watch Team Member Gets In Local Paper

Trolling for evidence

by Billy Cox

The massive hovering thing flashed its running lights and parked itself some 50 feet above Gwen Gleason’s house near San Jose, Calif., then vanished as abruptly as it had appeared, without a sound. She was 12 years old. She never figured it out. But she tried.

When she reached her 30s, she even tried hypnotic regression to recover details she might’ve forgotten. But the therapist “was trying to put stuff in my mind,” Gleason recalls. “She’d say things like, ‘Do you remember seeing a door open?’ or ‘Do you remember an alien?’ That wasn’t the way I wanted to go.”

But the impression lingered. She graduated into the Internet age. Images, blogs, chat rooms. Now 50 and living in Bradenton, Gleason saw the video below and got inspired. It was recorded on July 28 in the night skies over Dundee, Scotland, by Gary McDaid. At the 1:03 mark, two apparent UFOs emerge and begin scissoring in tandem, as if tethered by an invisible rubber band. According to the narration, they swing from north to east to west, their proximity to each other fluctuating like breathing rhythms.

Gleason contacted McDaid online and found out how he acquired the images. She got herself a Yukon Night Vision monocular, bought a tripod, hooked her camcorder up to portable TV monitor. She even traveled to Englewood to rendezvous for a skywatch with Jamie Havican.

“And he was right. I can start seeing them right after sunset, one after another, boom boom boom,” Gleason says. “If it’s a clear night, I can count on seeing anywhere from one to 12 — easy.”

She visited orbital tracker Web pages and began realizing the extent of the clutter upstairs.  In fact, given the mindless tumbling volume of derelict hardware and satellites — unclassified and black — reflecting sunlight, she quickly got over her fascination with single white dots traveling in straight lines. She started looking for directional shifts, and/or multiple synchronized targets.

On Oct. 13, from the eastward-facing window of her home, Gleason finally bagged what she was looking for — a UFO that appears to make course adjustments. It’s a subtle thing, practically ambiguous. She vows to improve once she acquires a better TV monitor. She wants to get as good as Scotland’s Gary McDaid, a guy she’s never met. She makes him sound like a NASCAR points leader.

“You’ve got to look for the ones that go really fast. That takes skill, because you never know when it’s going to happen,” Gleason says. “We both use tripods, but he’s got his hand on it constantly. He’s got really good reaction time.”

Maybe it’s skill, maybe it’s luck. Either way, Gleason’s bottom line is self evident. “I am,” she says, “totally hooked.”