“EVACUATION ROAD”
by Jerry Washington
(Excerpted)
In the following excerpt from Jerry Washington’s upcoming book “Evacuation Road,” he tells of a couple of UFO sightings he had during the great “Flap” year of 1973, in his hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (the “Manhattan Project”). A city that along with Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington, served as the birthplace of the atomic bomb. It begins with Jerry and his Norwegian girlfriend Astrid, steaming up the windows of his car while parked in a graveyard bordering the restricted (government) zone. Oblivious to anything but each other at the time, that was just about to change. As Jerry tells it:
“GREAT BALLS OF....LIGHT”
Astrid and I observed several other oddities together in the restricted skies over the Atomic City during the fall of 1973. One of these sightings took place as she walked me home one evening, after hitching a ride over to her place to show her dad a copy of the Hindu text, the Sama Vedas. In Vedantic literature, which predates the Bible by thousands of years, there are numerous mentions of vimanas – flying objects that supposedly visited earth and tooled around our solar system in antiquity.
I wanted to prove to her dad that UFOs had
been around for a long time and that other folks had espied them besides
me. We’d debated the subject often with Lars holding firm to his belief
that UFOs were either misidentifications of conventional objects, or the
imaginings of uneducated minds. Lars had a maddening habit of 
thinking
he was right all the time, an unappealing trait made even more so by his
unflappable Nordic cool. He was employed out at the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory (X-10), so he was bedeviled with a physicist’s need for hard
evidence. “You have no proof,” he’d say to me with that smug little smirk
on his face, “and until you do, I’m afraid your saucers will belong in
the realm of science fiction.” This annoyed me to the point that I often
fantasized about stuffing a wedge of Yjetost, a cloying, sweet variety
of Norwegian goat-cheese, down his patronizing throat. But I never did,
content in the knowledge that I was doing the “big nasty” with his lovely
daughter right underneath his self-satisfied nose, and the ol’ fart was
clueless…
He did appear to be somewhat intrigued by the text. I don’t know if it’s true of most Scandinavians, but Lars viewed religion in much the same way Karl Marx did – as an “opiate of the masses.” The Vedas, however, with their detailed descriptions of what twentieth-century Man would come to know of as spaceships, piqued his interest a bit. It didn’t sway his opinion on the subject fundamentally, but at least he didn’t dismiss it out of hand.
I had triumphed, so to speak, and to the victors go the spoils. So I asked Astrid to drive me home, figuring that we might make a little “detour” along the way. She suggested that we walk, however, ever the practical one.
Astrid, a Scandinavian beauty with eyes the color of jade, had dual citizenship, spoke five languages, and I was seriously in lust. Just being with her warmed the cockles of my heart, which the balmy mid-October temperatures only magnified. I was certainly not thinking about UFOs as we made our way along Robertsville Road, Sama Vedas in hand, about a mile from my house. A third of the way home, I was basking in my true love’s presence when suddenly, from behind a nearby ridge, a glowing sphere of bright red light emerged seemingly headed in our direction. As I watched in wonder, the object approached us, then abruptly disappeared.
“Did you see that?” I queried Astrid excitedly. “Yes,” she replied, sounding decidedly unimpressed. “What do you think it was?” “Nothing,” she replied, “it’s just one of those things.” “One of what things?” I demanded to know as we echoed a conversation Richard Dreyfuss and Terri Garr have in the movie “Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind.” “Nothing for you to concern yourself with,” she replied as she shot me one of those withering looks that said, “If you persist with this line of questioning then you will not be rewarded.” So I quickly dropped the subject and we continued on our way.
About two-thirds of the way there, we took a little detour up to the Linden School playground for that hoped for extra-curricular activity. Reclining in a patch of grass near the swing sets, we had a window on the world and the privacy we sought. Wasting no time, we were well on our way to “effecting a merger” when the damned thing happened again. As before, a ball of luminous red light emerged from behind the same ridge headed in our direction. Then that object, too, disappeared. I don’t know much about triangulation but with the ridge as its apex, the points of the two sightings if diagrammed out would have formed an equilateral triangle. I didn’t make a big deal out of it this time, though. I’d learned my lesson…
Brother James and I would have another sighting of the red balls-of-light only a few nights later. Out for a walk, we’d just crested the top of our hilly street when we observed one of the crimson-red wonders passing lazily and silently over our “crib.” Flying at no more than tree-top level, the object didn’t appear to be attached to anything as it bobbed slowly up-and-down. Continuing on around the block, we watched the light as it meandered across Montana Avenue and the next ridge over before disappearing out of sight.
Excited, but hardly new to the UFO phenomenon by then, Jamey and I kept walking until we reached a clearing that afforded us an unfettered view of the ridge serving as the de facto demarcation line between the restricted and residential sectors of Oak Ridge – only about a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies. And no sooner had we arrived than we noticed a string of little red lights flying in a train-like formation over that same ridge.
Following the topography precisely, the lights moved back and forth over the treetops, reversing course and even dividing in half at one point. That was something to see. As I focused in on the lights through the pair of binoculars we’d brought along for just such an occasion, one of the little boogers split in two and flew off in opposite directions. Eventually the activity died down as the BOLs flew off in a westerly direction, towards K-25.
Show over, we figured, and started to head for home. And just as we did, we caught sight of a “luxury cruiser,” a much larger and longer object approaching at a leisurely pace from the direction of the Uranium Enrichment Facility. Resplendent with a row of green lights running down its mid-section, and a vivid red light on each end, the object reached a point directly opposite us, behind that defacto demarcation line, where it hovered motionlessly for a few minutes before descending ever so slowly out of sight.
It was certainly a “hot” night in the ol’ town that night…
C. 1998 by Jerry Washington. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No portion of this work can be reproduced without permission of the author.
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Jerry Washington