Tuesday, November 30, 2010

An Encounter With A Time Traveler?

Jake Kell, a student at Ozarks Technical Community College in Springfield, Mo., pulled his 1999 Chevrolet S-10 next to a Git-N-Go convenience store gas pump in May 2003, stepped out of the pickup and started pumping gas.

A few minutes later, sweat rolling down Kell’s back in the humid late spring Missouri air, the nozzle handle clicked and the tank was filled. It was only 11 a.m.; he knew the day was going to only get more uncomfortable.

He didn’t expect it to get weird.

“I went in to pay for the gas,” Kell said. “The humidity made me weak, so I just wanted to pay for the gas and leave.”

After paying, he stepped from the air-conditioned store onto heat-radiating asphalt and the day quickly got strange.

“As I left the gas station, some large melon-headed man dressed in a business suit yelled, ‘What year is it?’” Kell said.

Kell stopped near his truck and turned to look at the man. The stranger’s stature was imposing.

“The large man was 6’ 7”,” Kell said. “He could have been taller.”

The “melon-headed man” stood in front of the store at a spot Kell would have noticed when he walked out to the parking lot – but he hadn’t. The man wore a dark black suit “with a rough fiber texture,” Kell said. “Along the lines of the things Teddy Roosevelt could wear.”

“What year is it?” the man yelled again.

The man, white, about 35 to 40 years old, wasn’t just tall, he was big, “not too thin, but not fat.”

“He was just a big man who was acting strange,” Kell said. “He was clean-shaven, no mustache or beard. He just looked like an average tall American. If you saw him in a large group of people you’d just think he’s tall.”

But he’d asked an odd question. Kell answered it. “Two-thousand three,” Kell told him.

The man’s face contorted in anger. “What year is it?” he screamed at Kell.

“Again I said ‘2003,’” Kell said. “I was starting to get ticked off.”

The large man screamed again. “What year is it?”

“I said ‘2003’ so he could hear me,” Kell said. “Then he quit asking.” Kell tried to ignore the man as he slid into his truck. “I said to myself, ‘is this guy an alien?’”

But when Kell turned to get another look at the large man, the man was gone. “He disappeared from the front of the gas station,” Kell said.

The only place the man could have gone that quickly was inside the store, but when Kell looked, the man wasn’t there.

“When it happened I thought nothing of it,” Kell said. “It’s only afterward that I happened to listen to Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (the nation’s top late-night radio talk show) where I heard about a time traveler sighting by a truck driver in Texas at a truck stop. Someone kept asking ‘What year is it?’ to the truck driver. The driver was annoyed and left.”

There are documented reports of time slips throughout history, such as RAF pilot Sir Victor Goddard who encountered airplanes in 1935 that didn’t exist until 1939, a 100-year-old Swiss watch found in a Chinese Ming dynasty tomb, and a man named John Titor who purported online to be from 2036 and made some accurate – and not so accurate – claims about the near future of mankind.

Although stories of out-of-place humans are common, what did Kell and the truck driver who called into the radio program experience? Lunatics? Pranksters? Or someone who was lost in time?

“These stories are not so rare as people think,” Kell said. “There are many people who have seen them. But the stories are so bizarre that I don’t think anyone would want to come foreword to tell it. Who would believe you?”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.

Monday, November 08, 2010

Black-Eyed Woman in Australia

New faces at the disability health care center where Janita works in Melbourne, Australia, aren’t uncommon.

“We have lots of part-time workers and casual workers. Every day of the week there is different people helping us,” she said.

But one day in October 2010 a woman came to work with Janita – a woman who terrified her.

“This day was very busy,” Janita said. “We had a new worker with us. She was a female from Sydney. Petite blonde, long-haired lady, green eyes.”

The new co-worker, Sophie, “seemed nice,” but something about her struck Janita as odd.

“For some reason I didn’t feel comfortable being around her,” Janita said.

During Sophie’s first day on the job, Janita was assisting a disabled child in a wheelchair when she needed help.

“My manager asked me to get Sophie,” Janita said.

Someone had last seen Sophie in the break room, but when Janita walked in, the room was empty.

“She had just disappeared from the lounge room,” she said. “My manager went into the other rooms to find her and I went towards the bathrooms.”

Janita made her way to the back of the building to the bathrooms and found Sophie. She wished she hadn’t.


“I will never forget what I saw,” Janita said. “She was standing in the middle of the bathroom. She turned around and looked at me with huge black eyes.”

There were no irises in Sophie’s eyes and no whites – just black voids that burned themselves into Janita’s memory.

“She was staring at me,” Janita said. “It felt like she had no soul. It felt evil.”

Janita shot out of the bathroom and ran toward a room she knew would have people – the kitchen. Her manager was there.

“My manager just looked at me,” Janita said. “Then Sophie appears from the back room towards the kitchen like nothing happened. Her eyes were back to green.”

But Janita knew what she saw, and she knew the evil she felt radiating from that woman.

“I didn’t want to be around her,” Janita said. “I had to leave work that day. I told my manager I would be taking a couple of days off.”

When Janita returned to work days later, Sophie had returned to Sydney (598 miles) – but Janita couldn’t dismiss her fear.

“I found out that Sophie kept asking my manager about me,” she said. “It was scary. I never want to see her again.”

Sophie also chilled one of Janita’s co-workers, Emma. Emma said she didn’t feel at ease around Sophie either and suspected something sinister about the woman.

“She felt uncomfortable being around her, too,” Janita said. “When I told Emma what I saw she said, ‘I believe you. But keep away, she might be a lizzie.’”

This comment confused Janita.

“I said, ‘what do you mean?’” Janita said. “That’s when Emma said, ‘You know, reptilians. They’re supposed to run the world and have invaded this planet and they can shape-shift into anything. They’re evil.”

Conspiracy theorists, such as author David Icke, claim all the world governments and major financial institutions are secretly controlled by a race of reptilian extraterrestrials that can appear human.

“After she said that to me, I started reading about it,” Janita said. “It has actually scared me and I don’t want to look into people’s eyes anymore. I try and avoid the eyes.”

Copyright 2010 by Jason Offutt

Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”

Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.