- Norman Massie died last Tuesday at the hospital in Carmi,
Ill. He was 91.
-
- The Mount Erie native had taught school in Wayne County
for 37 years and once served as principal of the Geff Grade School.
-
- Many Wayne County residents remembered him simply as
"Coach Massie." For years, he taught basketball skills to grade
schoolers at Center Street School in Fairfield.
-
- Even more residents around Southern Illinois remember
Norman as a sales representative for World Book Encyclopedia, a job he
held for more than 20 years until computers and the Internet came along,
reducing an entire set of books to a few mouse clicks or a couple of CDs.
-
- While the folks in Southern Illinois will remember Coach
Massie for his many years in education, perhaps the world will remember
him for what he witnessed 81 years ago - when he was just 10 years old.
-
- It was a warm day in June 1923 when Norman led a team
of horses into a pasture near his Mount Erie home, looked up and saw what
he was convinced until his last days was a spaceship.
-
- In a 1998 interview with Norman, he told me, "I
opened the gate to let the horses into the pasture. I let them through,
and as I was closing the gate, I looked back down the field and there was
an object with lights all around it," Massie said. "I kept walking
closer to the object until I got about 50 feet away. I stood there and
watched the five men who were on board."
-
- I've heard Norman tell this story many times, and it
was always the same - never embellished from one time to the next. "The
machine was metallic and stood on three legs. The top was a dome with holes
in it. The best way I could describe the top was it looked like melted
glass," Massie said.
-
- "I got close enough that I could hear them talk.
One guy sat in a chair and the others called him the commander. Four others
made trips back and forth in the ship. I didn't know what was going on
until the end. Then, one of the crew members told the commander that the
repairs had been made."
-
- Massie said the whole experience lasted about five minutes.
In a matter of minutes, he said, it came to a hovering position; the tripod
legs telescoped up into the belly of the thing, went straight up about
200 feet and whizzed off to the west like a bullet.
-
- Norman's mom and dad tried to convince him that he really
hadn't seen anything - that he had made the whole thing up. Then, in 1990,
he got up the nerve and told his son who served as a colonel in the Air
Force about the incident. "He told me there was nothing wrong with
me. He said the Air Force files are full of pictures of UFOs. He accepted
my story as the truth."
-
- Norman Massie was never afraid that people might think
he was a crazy old man for what he had seen. "In my own mind and my
own heart, it existed and I saw it with my own two eyes."
-
- Norman is gone now. He leaves his wife, four children,
seven grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren and a remarkable story from
his childhood.
-
- His story has traveled around the globe, and is still
shared by those who remain convinced we've received visitors from other
planets.
-
- © 2004 The E.W. Scripps Co.
-
- http://www.courierpress.com/ecp/news/article/0,1
626,ECP_734_3128914,00.html
|
