Sightings: The Little Sun Above The Barn

Editor's Note:

This was originally written by Gaines M. Crook in  August 2004 and is presented as a "historical document". Therefore, no effort has been made to update or correct subsequent discoveries, research, or investigations.

This report was found among the "electronic documents" recovered after Mr. Crook's death in 2013. I have slightly reformatted and edited the paragraphs for legibility. 

We had chosen to go camping for the 4th of July Holiday week end in 1974 at a location in the Antelope Valley north of the bottom of the valley. Our campsite was located on the high ground to the north where a house and farm of some sort had once been located. From there we had a clear view of the valley to the south, all the way to highway 138, way beyond the bottom of the valley.

In our camping party, there were my wife, myself, my oldest son, his wife  and their two month old baby daughter. We had gone to bed on the ground in our sleeping bags at, perhaps 10 o’clock. After flopping around on the ground for a while, I went to sleep.

About two o’clock in the morning, my wife woke me up to look at something. I got up and went to where she was sitting in a folding chair and she pointed out a scene in the valley below which she was watching through binoculars. She was focused upon a scene near an abandoned farmhouse, perhaps a mile away which had a barn in the rear (which was a little closer to us than the house) whose exterior was covered with corrugated galvanized roofing. Hovering just a few feet above the barn was a globe of fire perhaps 20 to 30 feet in diameter.

It looked like pictures of the sun where there are flames of fire licking out of it. The flames were small in proportion to the size of the globe. It reminded me of a very curly man’s head, the curls being the relative size of the small flames and the man’s head being scaled to the size of the ball. It just sat there and shimmered. The whole ball of fire was completely still while the small flames were incessantly active.

My wife wanted to drive down to get closer but in order to get closer in the car, we would need to turn on the lights and that would have probably ended the scene we were watching. I don’t know how long we watched to but I then got very sleepy and went back and lay down, while Bettie continued to watch it. For how long, I don’t recall. Somehow, I always fancied that whatever the intelligence was that was associated with the little “sun” knew that we were watching and that the “show” was for our benefit.

The date of this event has been easier to remember than most dates because we know that it was on a 4th of July Holiday and it also was the first camping trip for the baby at two months of age. She was born May 8, 1974.