1988-10-22 - Green River, UT - Cone

Top shaped object /light sitting in the night sky right in front of me

I was driving truck eastbound on I 70 about 55 miles west of Green River, UT at 23:16 PST hours on October 22, 1988. The sky was clear and I had enjoyed beautiful meteor showers all evening while listening to a Utah-Hawaii football game earlier. I was pulling a slight grade and moving rather slow.

Suddenly, what appeared as a meteor appeared straight in front of me but this one was coming straight at me instead of moving across the sky! The object was moving at a high rate of speed, leaving a bright green trail in the sky behind it. My first thought came out loud, very loud “Holy s**t this thing is gonna hit me!!” My first instinct was to get into the breakdown lane and stop. The object however, stopped directly in front of me. I would guess the distance at approximately 1 mile, more on this later. Being night, it was very hard to “guess” the distance, but the object was quite large and shaped exactly like tops that I had as a kid, the kind you wrapped string around and tossed out to spin. I immediately looked at my watch and clock, set at PST and checked where the moon was – behind me.

I turned my headlights off and sat and watched the object through my windshield for a full 11 minutes. It did not wobble or move about but sat stock still and emit an orange colored light similar to some street lights you see. There was no definite outline, just a top shaped dark color inside the light. At the widest part, just below the tapered top was a darker line. Windows perhaps? After watching the object for a few minutes, I flashed my marker lights a few times. After another couple of minutes I flashed my headlights three times. Not getting any response I just sat and stared, I know any one there should have seen my lights, as I was the only vehicle on the road.

I remember getting the impression that the object seemed to glower, maybe from a slight pulsation of the light. My windows were down, and I shut my motor off. There was just dead silence, not even night sounds of animals or anything else – very eerie.

Suddenly a very bright white light shot out of the bottom tip of “top” and shone straight down steadily and the object just slowly sank out of sight. I was alone again.

After sitting for a few more minutes trying to digest what I had just seen, I fired my rig back up, turned my lights on. Right in front of me was a view area sign. I pulled up to the view area and went in, turned my rig around so I could see where the object had been. I shut ‘er down again and took a look around. There were a couple of other rigs and a few motor homes there but everyone was asleep. I sat and had a pipe and a cup of coffee, waiting to see if it would come back up. After an hour of walking around and stretching, I decided to go to bed.

Next morning I took a walk around the area. There were deep, ragged canyons all over the place. I took off for Green River again. Approximately 1 mile up the road was a bridge over a very, very deep canyon/river. This canyon ran directly toward the area where I saw the object sink down, so I am assuming this is where my “top” went down.