Logan Labby says he raised his
night-vision goggles and saw an enormous
V-shaped object moving
over his Air Force base.
He took the goggles away.
He couldn't see it.
Back through the lenses,
it was still there.
Moving slowly. Without
a sound he could hear.
And two more guards were
about to take a look.
I'm Bill Van Nort.
This is Unknown Origin.
Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado.
Sometime in the spring or summer of 2008.
Labby was serving in Air
Force security forces.
His work involved protected facilities,
entry points and the people allowed
through them. This was
his first duty station.
That evening, he checked out a
pair of night-vision goggles.
He had heard a guest on Coast to Coast
AM describe watching the sky through
similar equipment, and
he wanted to try it.
After their checks, Labby and his
patrol leader, a staff sergeant, found a
darker spot inside the restricted area.
Another patrolman joined them.
They passed the goggles
around, looking at stars.
For a while, nothing unusual happened.
Then Labby picked them up again
and looked up to his left.
Something large was moving across the sky.
He describes two broad arms
meeting at a sharp point.
A clean V, with squared ends at the back.
No conventional fuselage
between the wings.
Large circular lights along the
underside—six, possibly seven.
He isn't certain of the count.
He thought the object was roughly the
size of a football field, perhaps a
thousand feet above the ground.
Those are his estimates, made
from where he stood that night.
What struck him was the combination:
that much apparent size, moving that
slowly, and no sound he could detect.
He took the goggles away from his face.
There was no object he could pick out.
No visible lights.
No engine noise giving away a position.
Through the lenses,
the V was still moving.
He remembers the circular
lights as steady.
He noticed no light reaching
the ground beneath the object.
Imagine having to take your eyes off
something that large so the man beside
you can see it.
Labby handed the goggles to his patrol
leader and indicated where to look.
According to Labby, the
sergeant saw the object too.
After watching for a while, he passed
the same goggles to the third man.
Three men taking turns with one device.
While one watched, the
others had the unaided sky.
The whole encounter, Labby recalls,
lasted roughly a minute or two.
Labby recalls the third man
reacting to the object's departure.
But he is specific about the limit
of his own view: he did not see an
instantaneous acceleration. He did
not watch it suddenly vanish into the
distance. His glimpse of whatever this
was ended before the encounter did.
Afterward, the men discussed what they
had seen—and whether to report it.
They could telephone the security desk,
use the radio net, or speak to their
flight chief. Labby says
they decided against it.
He expected questions,
disbelief, maybe laughter.
They were protecting sensitive resources.
Some of them needed advanced clearances.
He worried about what an extraordinary
report might do to their standing.
He doesn't say anyone threatened them.
He describes a decision they made
themselves, because of what they thought
might happen. I understand the hesitation.
When your work depends on people
trusting your judgment, an experience you
can't explain puts you
in a difficult position.
You can describe it honestly and still
wonder whether the person listening
will ever look at you the same way.
We often picture secrecy beginning with
someone powerful ordering a witness
to be quiet.
In this account, nobody
had to give that order.
The men believed silence was safer.
That night, no report from those
men reached the security desk.
There is something we need to
understand about the goggles.
Image-intensifying night vision amplifies
faint light, including visible and
near-infrared wavelengths. It can reveal
things our unaided eyes cannot make
out. That alone doesn't tell us what
Labby saw or whether anything was
deliberately concealing itself.
His account combines that difference
in visibility with an unfamiliar shape,
immense apparent size,
slow movement and silence.
Labby says he shared the story with
friends, family and colleagues over the
years. What changed was his willingness
to take it into a reporting process.
He credits the public testimony of
Ryan Graves, David Fravor and David
Grusch, along with Graves's encouragement
to witnesses, with helping him
take that step.
He submitted his account to
Americans for Safe Aerospace.
That led to further conversations and,
he says, an interview with the FBI.
He describes that interview as
accommodating and straightforward.
He felt heard.
This is his recollection; we don't have
separate accounts from the other two
men. Labby says cameras weren't
allowed inside the restricted area.
The reconstructions
follow his description.
His full interview with
Graves is linked below.
An FBI interview isn't an
identification of the object.
But an experience left outside the
reporting system had finally reached
people who could ask questions about it.
I believe nonhuman intelligence exists.
I believe people have experienced real
contact, both positive and negative.
I don't think we understand the full
range of what those encounters involve.
I can't tell you what Labby saw.
But here's a possibility that bothers me.
If an intelligence was behind that
object, it apparently needed nothing from
the men watching it.
No greeting. No explanation.
Nothing in his account that tells
us it acknowledged them at all.
We tend to imagine contact as an event
in which humanity becomes the center
of attention. Something arrives, makes
itself known, and our world changes
in a moment everyone recognizes.
But suppose presence doesn't
come with an announcement.
Suppose something capable of operating
around us has its own interests—and
we only notice it occasionally.
That thought takes me back to the goggles.
I would want another person
to see what I was seeing.
But I would hate giving up
the only view I had of it.
An intelligence that chooses not
to communicate could leave us with
fragments: a shape, a movement, a
brief look through an instrument.
Enough to change a person's
understanding of the world.
Far too little to explain that
change to someone who wasn't there.
Nothing in that silence would reassure
me that I understood its intentions.
I want to know who—or what—we
might be sharing this world with.
Whether the answer comes from beyond
Earth or from a part of reality we
haven't learned to recognize, I want
us to be able to talk about it without
someone being laughed out of the room.
Labby says that, knowing what he knows
now, he would report it immediately.
He would ask what had been found out.
He regards his failure to report that
night as a failure in the security
work he was there to do.
He is willing to revisit his own
decision, not just insist that everyone
else accept his experience.
If I were in his position, I
would want to make that call.
I'd want the observation recorded
while it was fresh, even if all I could
give was an honest description and
a list of things I couldn't answer.
You shouldn't need to know what something
is before you can say that you saw
it. Think about the view those
men had without the goggles.
The same sky, with nothing
unusual they could pick out.
If no one had checked out that equipment
that night, would they have had any
reason to look twice?
And how many nights have we
looked once—and gone inside?
Unknown Origin. Stay curious, think
deeply, and look for deeper meaning.
Till next time.
