Alternate Perceptions Magazine, January 2026
The morning after, I knew what to expect…
By: Barry Koplen
Four of us had traveled less than an hour from our homes in Danville, Virginia to a cabin at Smith Mountain Lake. Once there, we used a small boat and fished until dark when we docked the boat and entered the cabin for snacks.
That’s when it happened. While the other three men were dining on beers and pretzels, I was on the balcony just outside the second story dining area staring at the stars on that clear night of October 11, 1978.
Minutes later, I spotted a red dot in the sky that appeared adjacent to what I knew to be a star. Although the red dot seemed to be the same size as the dot that was a star, I knew it had to be something else.
I had never seen a red dot in the sky before. Questions I began to ask included my concern about why it was there and what it could be.
Many minutes passed. I didn’t leave the balcony. Nor did I stop watching the dot. I wondered whether it was stationery.
Not until almost ten minutes later did I notice that it seemed to be moving. In an instant, it traveled with unimaginable speed from being a slightly moving red dot to a flying saucer that stopped near me without a sound. It hovered 200’ away from me at a height of about eighty feet.
I moved the sliding glass door that separated me from the others and told them to hurry to the balcony. They did. All of us watched for a few minutes as the craft hovered silently and without moving. Then it zipped off at a sharp angle and flew away as quickly as it had come.
Speechless, the other three men went back to their pretzels. I retrieved a pair of binoculars in hopes of getting a closer look if the craft returned.
Minutes later, it did!
Less than an hour later, we left.
On the way home, no one had much to say. Even so, I couldn’t stop thinking that, for the rest of my life, almost no one would believe what I had seen while on the exterior balcony at the cabin.
What concerned me also was that our Earth had been invaded!
The next day, I called offices of the different branches of our military. No one wanted to talk to me. I wasn’t given numbers to call. It seemed that none of our military branches had any interest in the invasion we had witnessed.
Discouraged but determined, I finally found a man named Stanton Friedman, a college professor who was interested in UFOs. With a little research, I found his phone number and called him.
He was both courteous and very interested in hearing what I had to share. When he began asking questions, I had to reflect on what I’d seen when I had used the binoculars during the craft’s second visit.
We talked for more than forty minutes. Just before we ended our conversation, he told me that, “…of all the credible reports of UFO sightings I’ve heard, yours ranks in the top one half of one percent.”
For decades after that, I shared my story with many people, including those I met in Europe and the Caribbean.
What intrigued me about that was a few of the responses I received from some who listened to my story. They described similar sightings. What made me accept that their stories were true was that they described the sharp angle the craft used when it left.
The crafts they saw, like mine, never made a sound.
For decades after our sightings, I didn’t share my story as often as I share it now. But now, when I see so many UFO sites, so many UFO news reports, so many ‘investigators’ who share their notes from historical accounts, I admit to being frustrated.
If I appeared on every TV show that speculates about UFOs, or even talked with newscasters who have supercharged imaginations, I know that my testimony would be challenged, only partially believed until they, too, had an encounter like mine.
However, those who appreciate that I underwent a lie detector test BEFORE I wrote my book about seeing the saucer will appreciate that I would only do that to help them with the process of validation.
Indeed, even though I knew few would believe me (and us), I wish I hadn’t been as silent as I have been for too long.
Editor’s Note: For a more extensive reading of Koplen’s story, you can order his book, Close Encounter at Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, from Amazon, either as a Kindle edition (for $3.50) or a paperback ($22.50).
