Post by swamprat on Jul 8, 2020 20:36:56 GMT
DeVoid
Another hat in the ring
By Billy Cox Tuesday, Jul 7, 2020
Strange how memory works, the way our moments of joy, sorrow and everything in between blur into each other over the decades, until details once seared like hot irons grow cold and vague. Things we thought we’d never forget – how to tie a string to the leg of a June bug, the name of a first crush, the room where the baby took her first steps – all lost to time. So many personal, intimate images reminding us of who we are and where we came from, just footprints at low tide now.
After watching History’s “Unidentified” series last summer, retired USAF Lt. Col. Larry Rider decided it was time to add his voice to the mix./CREDIT: Larry Rider
And then there are those glimpses of things that have no direct bearing on our lives (or so we think, at first), things that seem to slide so fleetingly through our screens, so long ago, we sometimes wonder if they occurred at all. Yet they can persist, growing larger as the years roll by, with disproportionate heft and stature, until one day, almost impulsively, you decide, OK, that’s it – I’m not alone anymore. And I’m reaching out.
That’s exactly what Larry “Kimo” Rider did last year at the conclusion of History’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” series. He wasn’t one of these guys who had UFOs on the brain. What he’d had was a stellar career in aviation, an Air Force arc in which he commanded the F-4C Phantom, once America’s state-of-the-art fighter-bomber, into action over Vietnam. He became a glider instructor at the Air Force Academy after the war. His students included the likes of astronaut Story Musgrave, “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Chesley Sullenberger, and glider altitude record-holder Jim Payne. Rider retired from active duty in 1984 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he spent 10 years as a civilian flight-simulator instructor.
He can’t remember the exact date it happened. It was sometime between the death of his first wife in 1992 and his remarriage in 1996. He suspects 1994, maybe ’95. He was living in Phoenix. He was in the back yard of his condo, well before the March 13, 1997, “Phoenix Lights” incident set switchboards ablaze and made national headlines. It was late summertime, maybe. August? 9 p.m.? Dusk, anyway. He was taking a cigar break.
It wasn’t an airplane, or at least, not like anything Rider had seen before. What he saw were extremely bright lights, 10, 15, maybe 20, arrayed in an absolutely silent, rigid, V-shaped formation; from his angle, they appeared to be lining the underbelly of a flying machine whose other details were indiscernible. The lights reminded him of halogen lamps.
Rider guesses the thing was two to three miles away and, judging from the spread of the lights, maybe twice or three times the size of a Boeing 747. As it began to bank left, to the northeast, it was flying so low – 2,000 feet, maybe – that “no pilot in his right mind is going to maneuver a plane that big that far away from an airport,” Rider recalls. Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport was a good 10 miles off.
He had watched fellow pilots get shot down over Southeast Asia; he had seen the spectacular crash of the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie bomber over the Mojave in 1966 when its wing was clipped in mid-air by an F-104. Bracing for the worst over Phoenix, Rider dashed inside to fetch his binoculars. When he returned, the thing had vanished.
Ten seconds — that’s it. A 10-second performance. A good quarter century ago. But ask what he ate for lunch that day.
“I thought, man, what did I just see? I knew instinctively this was not an airplane,” he says. “All I could figure was, I’d just seen a UFO.”
In fact, mystery objects had been spotted over Phoenix well before the 1997 extravaganza, which was witnessed by hundreds of Arizonans, if not thousands. Rider had moved to Laguna Beach by then. When he first saw the footage replayed by the networks, recorded at the tail-end of a display that began more than 100 miles to the north and allegedly ended at the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range, Rider knew right away he was looking at a flare drop. But that didn’t explain everything that came before, during the three hours callers began alerting authorities as the object cruised north to south.
So he started paying attention to the phenomenon, the reports. And when last year’s “Unidentified” series ended with an appeal for more eyewitnesses, Rider fired off an email. After all, with the Navy F-18 UFO footage beckoning others to step out of the shadows, there was nothing to gain by holding back. Consequently, in the trailer leading up to Saturday’s premiere of Season 2, you can see a snippet of Rider on camera saying he completed “115 combat missions.”
By phone from his summer home in Colorado Springs, the part-time Sarasota resident says he doesn’t know how much of his testimony will actually make the program. How much, after all, is there to say about a 10-second event? And he never had another sighting, before or since, on duty or off.
Still, he says, what a time to be alive, to see the fringe getting appropriated by the mainstream.
“I would love to get involved in this (research) somehow. Not on camera,” Rider insists, “but to contribute something, or just to be a fly on the wall. This is fascinating.”
It is indeed. But there’s a flip side, too. Because it’s hard not to think about all the time we’ve wasted, about how much farther along the research path we might be today if folks with technical expertise and curiosity, like Larry Rider, could have been openly engaged 50 years ago. Now that we appear to be taking corrective measures, however halting and awkward, are we intrepid enough to follow the trail, wherever it leads?
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/
Another hat in the ring
By Billy Cox Tuesday, Jul 7, 2020
Strange how memory works, the way our moments of joy, sorrow and everything in between blur into each other over the decades, until details once seared like hot irons grow cold and vague. Things we thought we’d never forget – how to tie a string to the leg of a June bug, the name of a first crush, the room where the baby took her first steps – all lost to time. So many personal, intimate images reminding us of who we are and where we came from, just footprints at low tide now.
After watching History’s “Unidentified” series last summer, retired USAF Lt. Col. Larry Rider decided it was time to add his voice to the mix./CREDIT: Larry Rider
And then there are those glimpses of things that have no direct bearing on our lives (or so we think, at first), things that seem to slide so fleetingly through our screens, so long ago, we sometimes wonder if they occurred at all. Yet they can persist, growing larger as the years roll by, with disproportionate heft and stature, until one day, almost impulsively, you decide, OK, that’s it – I’m not alone anymore. And I’m reaching out.
That’s exactly what Larry “Kimo” Rider did last year at the conclusion of History’s “Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation” series. He wasn’t one of these guys who had UFOs on the brain. What he’d had was a stellar career in aviation, an Air Force arc in which he commanded the F-4C Phantom, once America’s state-of-the-art fighter-bomber, into action over Vietnam. He became a glider instructor at the Air Force Academy after the war. His students included the likes of astronaut Story Musgrave, “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Chesley Sullenberger, and glider altitude record-holder Jim Payne. Rider retired from active duty in 1984 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and he spent 10 years as a civilian flight-simulator instructor.
He can’t remember the exact date it happened. It was sometime between the death of his first wife in 1992 and his remarriage in 1996. He suspects 1994, maybe ’95. He was living in Phoenix. He was in the back yard of his condo, well before the March 13, 1997, “Phoenix Lights” incident set switchboards ablaze and made national headlines. It was late summertime, maybe. August? 9 p.m.? Dusk, anyway. He was taking a cigar break.
It wasn’t an airplane, or at least, not like anything Rider had seen before. What he saw were extremely bright lights, 10, 15, maybe 20, arrayed in an absolutely silent, rigid, V-shaped formation; from his angle, they appeared to be lining the underbelly of a flying machine whose other details were indiscernible. The lights reminded him of halogen lamps.
Rider guesses the thing was two to three miles away and, judging from the spread of the lights, maybe twice or three times the size of a Boeing 747. As it began to bank left, to the northeast, it was flying so low – 2,000 feet, maybe – that “no pilot in his right mind is going to maneuver a plane that big that far away from an airport,” Rider recalls. Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport was a good 10 miles off.
He had watched fellow pilots get shot down over Southeast Asia; he had seen the spectacular crash of the experimental XB-70 Valkyrie bomber over the Mojave in 1966 when its wing was clipped in mid-air by an F-104. Bracing for the worst over Phoenix, Rider dashed inside to fetch his binoculars. When he returned, the thing had vanished.
Ten seconds — that’s it. A 10-second performance. A good quarter century ago. But ask what he ate for lunch that day.
“I thought, man, what did I just see? I knew instinctively this was not an airplane,” he says. “All I could figure was, I’d just seen a UFO.”
In fact, mystery objects had been spotted over Phoenix well before the 1997 extravaganza, which was witnessed by hundreds of Arizonans, if not thousands. Rider had moved to Laguna Beach by then. When he first saw the footage replayed by the networks, recorded at the tail-end of a display that began more than 100 miles to the north and allegedly ended at the Barry Goldwater Air Force Range, Rider knew right away he was looking at a flare drop. But that didn’t explain everything that came before, during the three hours callers began alerting authorities as the object cruised north to south.
So he started paying attention to the phenomenon, the reports. And when last year’s “Unidentified” series ended with an appeal for more eyewitnesses, Rider fired off an email. After all, with the Navy F-18 UFO footage beckoning others to step out of the shadows, there was nothing to gain by holding back. Consequently, in the trailer leading up to Saturday’s premiere of Season 2, you can see a snippet of Rider on camera saying he completed “115 combat missions.”
By phone from his summer home in Colorado Springs, the part-time Sarasota resident says he doesn’t know how much of his testimony will actually make the program. How much, after all, is there to say about a 10-second event? And he never had another sighting, before or since, on duty or off.
Still, he says, what a time to be alive, to see the fringe getting appropriated by the mainstream.
“I would love to get involved in this (research) somehow. Not on camera,” Rider insists, “but to contribute something, or just to be a fly on the wall. This is fascinating.”
It is indeed. But there’s a flip side, too. Because it’s hard not to think about all the time we’ve wasted, about how much farther along the research path we might be today if folks with technical expertise and curiosity, like Larry Rider, could have been openly engaged 50 years ago. Now that we appear to be taking corrective measures, however halting and awkward, are we intrepid enough to follow the trail, wherever it leads?
devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/author/cox/