A Red Sea sighting, a father’s 1978 hypnotic regression, and a forgotten letter from the Isle of Man — three encounters, one recurring signature.
Every so often, a case that has sat quietly in the archive for years is reopened by a single new document — and reveals a pattern investigators never suspected was there. Case #148080 is one of those files. Logged originally as a solitary Close Encounter of the First Kind on the Eritrean coast, it has, twenty-five years later, grown into something far stranger: a thread connecting two generations of one family, and a phenomenon witnessed an ocean away, decades before either of them were born.
The Massawa Sighting
In January 2000, the primary witness was seated with a companion on the patio of a hotel in Massawa, Eritrea, facing the Red Sea. The night was heavy with coastal haze; no stars were visible through the dark gray sky. Beyond the causeway bridge, at a distance he later estimated at a quarter to a third of a mile, a shape resolved out of the darkness: not a disc, and not a sphere, but a flattened ovoid — a silhouette so devoid of reflected light that he has since described it simply as a « void. »
The object made no sound and showed no running lights of its own. What it did show, at irregular intervals, was motion from below: a slow bleed of glowing material released from a single point on its underside, falling in bursts of larger globs followed by fine trailing droplets. The witness described a consistent thermal gradient in the falling material — a white-hot core cooling through bright orange to a deep red fringe before it faded from view above the water.
His companion, seated beside him for the entire encounter, retains no memory of the object at all.
[Witness-supplied rendering: a dark, featureless mass releasing molten material above the causeway bridge at Massawa]
A Recording Twenty-Two Years Older Than the Case File
The investigation’s turning point arrived not from a new witness, but from a cassette. An archival hypnotic-regression recording made on December 8, 1978, captures the witness’s father describing a close encounter of his own — more than two decades before his son ever set foot in Eritrea.
Under hypnosis, he recounted an evening walk near his home in Tucson, Arizona, along Plumer Ave., E. La Madera Drive, Blackledge, and Wilson streets, around 9:00 p.m. The night was clear, cold, and moonless. Before he saw anything, he recalled an unshakable premonition that he was about to see a UFO — moments before every dog in the neighborhood, including one nearly half a mile away, began barking without apparent cause.
Near the corner of E. La Madera Drive and Wilson, he watched a light emerge from a saddle in the distant mountains and close the distance fast. He described it as roughly the size of a full moon: its upper portion a pure, laser-like emerald green, its lower half a flat white reminiscent of a sodium-vapor streetlamp, the two colors meeting in a sharp line with no blending between them. The object slowed as it neared him, curved over his left shoulder toward the southwest, hovered, and then climbed straight up and vanished.
« It was the prettiest green I ever saw… It was full of light. Just light. »
What followed was harder for him to account for than the sighting itself. He described rhythmic pulses across his skin in place of any engine vibration, a sudden inability to think clearly, and a stretch of missing time: he remembered walking perhaps ten feet and leaning against a lamppost, yet found himself, without any memory of the walk, two full blocks away at Florence and Wilson. Under regression he recalled no fear at any point — only a deep and specific happiness — along with a fragmentary, wordless impression concerning « something about death » and a layer of reality that, in his words, « we don’t perceive. » He stood at the intersection for roughly ten minutes afterward, flashing a torch into the sky in case it might come back, before walking home to his wife and son.
This case supports a long-held hypothesis in UFO research that sightings do indeed run in families, even across generations.
Not a Naive Witness
The father was a retired Major in the United States Marine Corps who served in intelligence — by nature a conservative, methodical observer, and, as it turns out, an experienced hand within the UFO research community in his own right. He was a longtime member, field investigator, and Board member of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), headquartered in Tucson a few blocks from his home.
Surviving APRO records place him on the organization’s Board of Directors by October 1973, when he telephoned APRO founders Jim and Coral Lorenzen to alert them to the developing Pascagoula, Mississippi encounter involving Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker — a call that helped set APRO’s investigative response to one of the most prominent UFO cases of the decade in motion. Two years later, in August 1975, he personally investigated a sighting of a luminous, cigar-shaped object near Picacho Peak, Arizona, interviewing witnesses and seeking independent corroboration in his role as APRO’s « investigative coordinator. » By 1975, the organization itself referred to him as a « long-time staunch supporter » of its work.
That a man with his background and training underwent hypnotic regression over his own encounter — and described total absence of fear alongside genuine confusion over lost time — adds a layer of investigative weight the 1978 recording does not carry on its own.
A Second Witness, Forty-Two Years Earlier and Four Thousand Miles Away
Researching comparable historical reports for objects of a similar description turned up a case with no connection to the family, yet an unmistakably similar physical signature to the Massawa report: a letter to the editor of the Ramsey Courier, published on the Isle of Man on January 17, 1958.
Its author wrote that he had watched a dark, rounded object hanging motionless in the air roughly forty feet up and forty feet away, about twelve feet high and fifteen feet across, for a full five minutes. As he observed it, the object released a bright point of light that shot out and hung in the air a short distance away, briefly illuminating the surrounding area before fading; the process repeated with a second light shortly after, and the object itself disappeared without a sound once the display was over. He noted this was not his first sighting of the same object — he reported having seen it several times before, the earliest occasion dating back to December 1927.
Set beside the Massawa account, the parallel is striking: in both reports, a dark, largely featureless object hangs motionless or nearly so at close range, and periodically sheds discrete points of light or matter from itself before departing in silence.
Comparative Analysis
| Metric | Massawa Witness (2000) | Isle of Man Witness (1958) |
|---|---|---|
| Object morphology | Matte-black ovoid « void » | Dark rounded object, ~12 ft |
| Physical/light emission | Molten ejections, white-hot to deep red | Discrete bright « stars » shot out and hung in air |
| Acoustic profile | Complete silence | Complete silence |
| Recurrence | Case remains under review | Repeat sightings reported since Dec. 1927 |
| Emotional response | Complete detachment, absence of fear | Calm, methodical observation |
Discussion
Two threads run through both accounts. The first is a consistent suppression of the fight-or-flight response: the Massawa witness’s flat emotional detachment and his companion’s total amnesia, and even the 1958 witness’s oddly composed five-minute observation of an object hovering forty feet from him. Neither witness panicked in circumstances that would ordinarily provoke it.
The second thread is the release of discrete luminous or molten material from an otherwise dark, silent object — a detail absent from the majority of classic disc-and-light reports, but present, in two different forms, across both accounts. Whether this reflects a shared underlying phenomenon, a rare but recurring type of event, or simple coincidence of description remains an open question.
The 1958 letter’s closing line is worth preserving: its author would not say for certain what the object was, only that if it was a flying saucer, it « came from our world and no other. » Whether that caution was justified is, seventy years on, still an open question.
Investigative Disposition
Case #148080 has been closed by the investigating team with a disposition of Unknown – Other.
The addition of the 1978 regression transcript gives the Massawa sighting a family history it did not previously have on record; the Isle of Man letter suggests that history may extend further still, to witnesses with no connection to the family at all.
Have you or a family member witnessed a dark, silent object that releases light or material before vanishing — in any decade, in any country? MUFON Morocco welcomes your report for comparative review. All submissions are treated confidentially.