What About the UFOs?

Carol Burt
4 min readApr 18, 2021
Photo by Zaji Kanamajina on Unsplash

Pentagon confirms the photos are real and were taken by Navy personnel. Public shrugs.

Humans are strange. We now have the pentagon saying the UFO photos that have recently been released are, in fact, unidentified flying objects. They confirm that they are not balloons or drones. That much they know, they say, because they do not act like any known balloon or drone. High winds don’t seem to faze them. And the ones in the most recently publicized photos were hovering around 700-feet above a Navy vessel.

Good grief and yikes! Unless some other country has something we’ve never dreamed of — and more importantly the pentagon hasn’t dreamed of — they’re out there. Well, something is out there.

So many questions come to mind.

But Americans, in particular, and because I know more about American responses, don’t seem to be very curious or even surprised. Apparently, we’ve heard about UFOs for so long we don’t make much fuss about it anymore.

My Own Experience

A bunch of us — high school kids — were having a party on a sandbar on the Arkansas River near Little Rock. Some people, mainly the boys, were drinking. We had a campfire. It was all fun and games, as they say, until a panther screamed. At least that’s what my mind decided it heard, a panther on the river, screaming in that unholy way they can scream.

It was frightening. We all got very quiet instead of yelling and screaming ourselves as would be expected from a bunch of teenagers in the dark hearing a wild and dangerous cat scream, presumably nearby. I remember even now looking at the faces of others, and seeing fear.

Even now I’m not really comfortable talking about it.

Nothing else has ever happened in my life that simply cannot be explained. I was probably 15 or so. The boy I had come out to the sandbar with was about 17. Several others had driven their cars up to what we called a “dike,” which was really a jetty sticking out into the river. We walked on the jetty — made of big rocks that required some careful footwork — to reach the sandbar. It was a pretty long trek and one didn’t want to have a foot fall down between the big rocks for fear of a cottonmouth hidden…

Carol Burt

Former print journalist, former mayor, retired law enforcement officer. Writing about politics and government along with random personal essays.