Nighttime Greeting

Liberal Translation of Write-up by Pius Keller
in FIGU Bulletin #46 (Schmidrüti, Switzerland: F.I.G.U., Feb., 2004)
by J. W. Deardorff, April 2011

On 9-10 June 2003, at about 00:30, I held the first middle-of-the-night watch. The sky was partly cloudy on this mild night, but with stars showing clearly, on the whole. Thus, ideal weather to observe the majestic night sky, which as always is a profound experience for me.

On this night my luck was especially favorable. Within a short time on my first round, I saw two telemeter disks, which had the apparent size of tennis balls [as observed from some unspecified distance away]. Yet it wasn't long after that, as I was passing by the shelter for the Haflinger [a rugged military-type vehicle, located just to the right of No. 11 on map], I sighted another telemeter disk which, together in parallel with a bright light in a southerly direction, I saw ascend between the trees in the night sky. At first I interpreted the bright light as being an ascending commercial aircraft, which diverted my attention from the rapidly traveling telemeter disk. But suddenly the bright light of the object that I first suspected was a plane became even stronger. So I had to revise this opinion, because the object was brighter than the brightest, most luminous star in the night sky, about as bright as the radiant evening star [Venus] is at times; and in this great and strong light there suddenly appeared still another, but smaller, steadily shining, traveling light, of about the size of the already mentioned telemeter disk. Because this object was not flashing like an earthly airplane, it was suddenly clear to me: it could only be identified as an extraterrestrial beamship. I estimated its distance to be about the same as of the already sighted telemeter disk, and its altitude about five to seven thousand meters. The large object I observed moved in a straight path across the night sky and disappeared after a short time in a cloud bank, out of which it did not reappear. Filled with an inner joy and gratitude over this nightly greeting from our extraterrestrial friends, I continued on my night-watch tour, and at the top of the upper parking lot of the Center met Billy, whose keys I quietly heard klinking at the same moment when I sighted the glowing beamship together with the telemeter disk. Billy however had not seen the described objects, because, I think, at that time he was in front of the house where the high trees and shrubs in the baumgarten (tree garden) covered up his view.

Pius Keller, Switzerland