Curt Collins

Through the years, I’ve had a few sightings of strange looking things in the sky. The first time as a boy in mid-afternoon on a warm day around 1968. I was excited to see a UFO, a brilliant cigar-shaped object gliding across the sky. Before it left sight, the angle changed enough for the sunlight to illuminate the wings and tailfin of the plane. It was quite the letdown. There have been other disappointments, yet there’s one sighting that puzzles me still.

The late musician Johnny Cash spent a lot of time in Jamaica. In 1974 he bought the historic house Cinnamon Hill and owned it the rest of his life. In the 2003 book, Cash: The Autobiography by Johnny Cash (with Patrick Carr), he wrote about how Cinnamon Hill was haunted: “There are ghosts, I think. Many of the mysteries reported by guests and visitors to our house, and many that we ourselves experience can be explained… But there have been incidents that defy conventional wisdom.

The original flying saucer witness, Kenneth Arnold, was taken seriously by military investigators and the press due to the fact he was an experienced pilot. It established a tradition that continues today. Leslie Kean in her 2010 book, "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record asserted that pilots are the most reliable witnesses of aerial phenomena: “[Professional pilots] represent the world’s best-trained observers of everything that flies.