A retired Apple systems engineer breaks a fifty year silence about a 1971 UFO encounter at a Florida sinkhole called the Millhopper, describing a silent, motionless craft only twenty five yards away, a low frequency vibration that hit him in the chest, and a single unexplained word that arrived in his mind: abduction. Don, making his first ever podcast appearance, walks through the entire encounter in detail: a disc shaped object with a sloped dish and a single hatch, a wall of glowing rectangles that seemed to hypnotize him, and the moment he asked whoever was behind that hatch a simple question, who are you, and got a stranger answer than he expected. The conversation also follows Don's path after Florida, including an out of body experience in 1972 that led him into Scientology, where he spent roughly a decade as an auditor at the Celebrity Center in Los Angeles, and the strange detail that his UFO encounter never once surfaced across thousands of hours of auditing sessions built to unearth exactly these kinds of memories. Don also shares his take on screen memories, perception manipulation, and why he believes the UFO community needs more critical thinking, not less.
In This Episode• Don, a retired Apple systems engineer who spent nearly thirty years at the company, with stints at Lockheed and Motorola in between, sets the stage for his story: a 1971 UFO encounter he had never spoken about in detail before this episode. Before Apple, he spent his early twenties as a touring musician in Florida and New York, once opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd before anyone knew who they were.
• The encounter happened at the Millhopper, a natural sinkhole outside Gainesville, Florida, where Don and his girlfriend at the time had gone to see the waterfall and tropical vegetation at the bottom. Walking toward the sinkhole, Don stopped to light a cigarette, and his girlfriend's reaction, not what he saw, was the first sign something was wrong.
• Turning around, Don found a disc shaped object sitting motionless about twenty five yards away, close enough to hit with a baseball. He describes a gracefully curved dish, a central section he calls a fuselage, and a single hatch, with no cross bracing and a flat gray surface unlike anything he had seen before or since.
• As Don studied the craft, one edge began fading into invisibility, and he felt an extremely low frequency vibration in his chest, more felt than heard, that intensified and then eased the moment he thought about stepping back, a detail he interprets as evidence that the craft, or whoever was inside it, was reading his thoughts.
• A light on the craft began projecting hundreds of overlapping white rectangular outlines that moved toward Don in a slow, hypnotic wall, and a single word, with no context or emphasis attached, arrived in his mind: abduction. Don describes deliberately projecting an intention not to cooperate, at which point the rectangles reversed course and retreated back into the light.
• Don eventually worked up the nerve to ask whoever was behind the craft's hatch a direct question: who are you. The answer that came back, he says, was stranger than anything he expected, and he and Rye dig into several possible interpretations of what it could mean.
• Decades later, drawing on some background in remote viewing, Don revisited the memory and picked up new environmental details he was later able to verify on Google Maps. He also explains why he believes the sighting slipped from his memory almost entirely for years, and how a chance thought in 2014 led him to finally start tracing it back.
• The conversation shifts to Don's path after Florida: a genuine out of body experience during a 1972 Scientology communication course sent him to California, where he spent roughly a decade as an auditor and later a supervisor at the Celebrity Center in Los Angeles, working with public figures before leaving the organization in 1980.
• Despite thousands of hours of Scientology auditing, a process built specifically to surface buried memories, Don's 1971 UFO encounter never once came up, a detail he now considers as significant as the sighting itself. He closes out the conversation with his thoughts on screen memories, perception manipulation, and why he believes the UFO research community needs to apply more critical thinking to the claims circulating within it.
Best Line of the Night"I asked, who are you. The answer that came back was: it's you."Don, on the strangest answer he never expected to get.
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