An East Tennessee UFO encounter: This story was shared with me by a distant cousin. It’s something his great-grandpa experienced way back in the early 1900s, deep in the old mountains of East Tennessee.
Back then, his great-grandpa lived close to his mother-in-law, a widow who was absolutely terrified of storms. One evening, a big thunderhead rolled in—dark clouds and fierce winds. Sensing a bad storm, he decided to head over to her place to bring her back to his home for safety.
She didn’t live too far away, just a short walk through a wooded path. So he set out, wind howling around him, trees bending under the pressure. He made it to her house, got her ready, and they started back down the path together.
But then… something strange happened.
Suddenly, the wind just stopped. Dead calm. The sky above still flashed with lightning, lighting up the thunderheads—but no thunder. Just silent bursts of light rippling through the clouds. No sound at all. They paused, unsure of what to make of it.
As they kept walking, they noticed the darkness around them had taken on a strange orange hue. Everything glowed as if bathed in the light of a dying fire. Then, out of nowhere, three strange lights appeared in the sky above the mountain ridges. Perfectly round orbs, glowing intensely but not casting any light—like glowing eyes with no beam.
They hovered there, watching.
The orbs began to drift—gliding over the ridges, one dipping into the holler before rising again. They moved in eerie silence, circling slowly, almost like they were exploring. Then, in a sudden shift, the three lights merged into one massive glowing ball. It circled the area once—slow and wide—then shot straight up into the sky in the blink of an eye.
As soon as it vanished, the silence was shattered by the loudest clap of thunder they’d ever heard. The ground shook. Leaves trembled. It was like the whole mountain let out a roar.
Terrified, they rushed home.
When they got back, they began telling the great-great-grandmother what had happened, apologizing for not returning sooner. But she looked at them strangely and said, “What are y’all talking about?” She said the wind had blown a little, and it got dark, but there was no thunder, no lightning—nothing out of the ordinary.
They were stunned. How could she have missed that? The light, the sky, the shaking ground?
The next day, they asked around the mountain. Nobody else had seen or heard anything. Not a single person—except one man. He’d been outside trying to wrangle his horse when he saw one of the lights come down from the sky. That was it.
Everyone else… nothing.
So what did they witness? Was it a UFO? Some kind of natural phenomenon? Could it have been something even stranger—like a dome over that part of the mountain that only let certain people experience it?
We may never know.
But it’s definitely one of the strangest tales to come out of those old Tennessee hills.
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