Published: July 31, 2008 11:53 pm         

It was a big tail, for him to see it from so far away

So many things that have no apparent explanation have happened to me, while I was wide awake and cold sober, that I now tend to shrug them off or shake my head and wonder, What next?

Years ago, I was slapped in broad daylight by something I couldn’t see on the third floor of a house I eventually decided was haunted. That’s not all it did, but those are stories for another time.

As I watched little green lights flittering around in the middle of the night at the Gettysburg battlefield, I simply wondered, “Is it real, or is it Memorex?” Similar lights have chased and scared the bejabbers out of my friends.

They were rather pretty, and absolutely not fireflies. Rather than traveling in a straight line, they wobbled along — about like flat stones skipping across a pond, the way some folks say flying saucers fly.

For as much as I have watched the night sky, I have never seen anything that looked like a flying saucer. That doesn’t mean I disbelieve people who say they have, particularly when they’re experienced airline pilots or Air Force officers. A teacher friend of mine told me a UFO followed her school bus one night, and I had no reason to doubt her.

Such things make life more interesting, and I feel sorry for people who think they have it all figured out. If you tell me something is unlikely in the extreme, I can accept that and might even agree. However, a person who flatly says something is impossible, particularly when it’s not his specific field of knowledge, is someone whose money I could take, if I wanted to.

When my friends and I went to Gettysburg in April, I sat on a rock in the dark at Spangler’s Spring and saw an arched gateway in the trees at the edge of the woods, so perfectly formed that it almost looked manmade. I walked over there to talk to whoever might be listening.

The arch was gone when we went back during the daytime in July. Where it should have been, I found a gap in the bushes and a well-worn pathway that told me other folks are drawn to the place — even though it goes only a few feet into the woods before stopping at a dead tree that obviously fell a long time ago. My buddy Mark said he’d been to the arch himself, and agreed that it had vanished.

Another remarkable thing I found in April was an Indian grave, a round hole that’s just wide and deep enough to accommodate the deceased after he has been folded up. After the hole was filled in, a circle of rocks was placed around it. There are a few examples around here, and I’ve seen them, but little is said about them because no one wants them to be disturbed by amateur archaeologists.

This one was about 3 1/2 feet in diameter, and the earth inside the ring of rocks was a bit sunken, just as it should be. It was right in the middle of the field, where I had to step around it. I’d looked at it and wondered what it was doing there, then walked on after deciding the Indians must have been there long before the Yankees and the Rebels.

However, Mark and Gary have gone through that field numerous times and never saw anything like it. We looked for it in broad daylight, and it was nowhere to be found.

The sudden absence of things, or a unexplained presence that seems out of place — or even out of time — can be unsettling.

Although most wildlife experts say mountain lions are extinct in the eastern United States, folks often report seeing cougar-sized cats, particularly black ones, in places where they shouldn’t be. A fellow from Frostburg was interviewed on a History Channel show about the subject.

One of those big black cats that don’t exist ran across the road in front of my car recently. This was in broad daylight, and at first I thought it was a deer. I’ve seen plenty of deer on this stretch of road.

Then it took off running, only it didn’t run like a dog, a bear or a deer, but with an effortless, loping gait like big cats use when they’re in no particular hurry but don’t feel like walking. I’ve seen this done enough times on TV wildlife shows to know exactly what it looks like.

Did I say, “Hello Kitty”? No, I said the same thing Spencer Tracy did in the movie when he found out who was coming to dinner: “Well, I’ll be a ... .. . .....!”

This critter had a long, thick tail that descended from its hindquarters, then curved upward like the blade of a sickle — just like you see on big cats — and it didn’t wag or bob and weave like a dog’s tail would. The cat was moving from a thickly forested hillside toward another thickly forested hillside on a section of road where nobody could see it unless he was in the right place at just the right time.

The common explanation is that people who see such cats are lacking a point of reference to judge the size, and it was nothing more than a domestic feline.

Not true, here. This one was about 150 yards away, and I could show you where my car and the beast itself were when I first saw it. It had to be fairly substantial for me to see it so clearly at that distance, particularly its tail. I know what a deer looks like from that far off, and this megapuss was at least as long as a mature deer, although not nearly as tall.

It stretched halfway across one lane of roadway, making it five feet long or thereabouts, even though its tail wasn’t fully unfurled. You would need one hell of a litter box to handle a house cat this size.

A friend of mine has since told me he knows a fellow who’s seen big black cats not more than a couple of miles from the spot where I saw this one.

If you have a better explanation than mine, I’d be willing to listen to it. People should be skeptical about strange things.

However, the fact remains that for as difficult as it may be to prove something exists, it’s even harder to prove that it doesn’t.