No one knows why UFOs appear when and where they do. Their behavior, as reported, is usually cryptic. As though bored by greetings, they may simply reveal themselves and vanish. Yet however briefly they are seen, their presences tend to inspire deep and lasting shifts in those people who encounter them.
Barry M. Koplen is a photographer and author who has published memoirs, works of history, collections of poetry, and Young Adult novels. He is retired from the position of adjunct professor at Danville Community College (in Danville, Virginia), where he taught Humanities, English and Creative Writing.
He was born in 1945 in Greenville, South Carolina, the son of a quartermaster sergeant and a registered nurse. His family was Jewish, which set them apart in the little southern towns where Koplen was raised. In his early adulthood, Koplen worked as a teacher and helped to integrate the South Carolina high school from which the Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. had graduated. Later, he returned to his hometown of Danville, to help his father run the family’s menswear store.
In 1978, Koplen saw a flying saucer. In 2023, he told me the story, and in his voice were astonishment, and concentration, and wonder.–MS
Max Scheinin: What was going on in your life at the time of your sighting?
Barry M. Koplen: I was in an advantageous position here in Danville to actually work with my dad, since it was the family store and I was the heir apparent – since my brother didn’t want it and my sister didn’t want it. And it just gave me a lot of time to explore life and write and – he was so good to me. I didn’t have any real restrictions; he wanted me to just explore my life and see what it was I wanted from it.
During that time, when I was working with my dad, is when I had the experience with the flying saucer. That took place in October ’78.
I was with my cousin. We were at the house that his parents owned – his father was a medical doctor.
We used to go to the lake where his parents’ cottage was, because it only took about 45, 50 minutes to get there. The house was like a cottage on the lake that his parents had built, just to have a getaway for the weekend. And in the early fall, it would be nice to go there, because we could get his dad’s boat and go fishing, and there wouldn’t be anybody else on the lake.
And that’s what we did. We were fishing on the boat, and when it got dark, we went back to the house, went back to the cottage.
There was a sliding-glass door at the end of the dining-room table that led to a little balcony. And while they were eating pretzels or whatever they were doing, I went out on the balcony. The balcony was so small that all I had to do was reach my arm behind me, and I could open it up and go back inside.
MS: What state were you in?
BMK: Virginia. It was at a place called Smith Mountain Lake, which was a man-made lake. They built a dam to create power, and they literally flooded acres and acres of the countryside, to create this lake and the dam that held it all together.
MS: So you were with your cousin – were you with anybody else?
BMK: Yes. There were two other people – two other guys.
My cousin, of course, whose father and mother owned the house – he’s Jewish. And a third guy, whose father and my father grew up together, who owned a women’s wear shop just a couple of blocks from where my dad and I worked at our menswear shop. He was with us.
And finally, there was a guy named Gerald, who was a friend of my cousin whose father and mother owned the house.
MS: What time of day was it when the saucer arrived?
BMK: It was such a clear, dark night – probably by that time it would be maybe 8, 8:30, maybe even 9 o’clock.
I could see the lights of Roanoke, Virginia, from where I was standing on the balcony. And that would have been 40 miles away – that’s how clear the sky was. That’s why, when I looked up at the sky and I saw this – light; it was like a point that a laser beam might have made, and it was as high as the stars – it just didn’t make sense to me that it would be there, because what would a red dot – how could it possibly belong in the sky? What was it doing there?
So I watched it for a while. I compared it not just to the stars in the sky, but also to the lights of the city of Roanoke, which was how I could tell that this dot in the sky was exceptional. I focused on the dot – I wanted to see whether it was stationary or whether it was moving. And it ended up that I couldn’t tell if it was moving.
And in retrospect, I know that it was moving at a speed that was just phenomenal, but when I finally detected the slightest motion in that red dot – and I don’t know if you can do this, but if you can snap your fingers quickly, that’s how long it took, maybe less than that, for the red dot that began moving somewhere deep in space to appear before me, two hundred feet away. It was that fast.
And I didn’t really understand at the time that the red dot was caused by the element that was being used to develop the power.
If you think about it – when I saw this craft enter our environment, I knew how fast it was traveling, in the sense that I knew it was faster than any object I’d ever seen.
In the world that I knew – that you and I knew – if we have a craft that’s coming into our atmosphere, there has to be some sort of shield on the craft when it’s coming in at such high speeds, to keep it from just burning up.
When I saw how fast this craft was coming – I think it was much faster than light-speed, and I didn’t see any indication of any problem with regard to friction. For years, I thought about that and wondered about it – finally, I saw a guy named Bob Lazar talk. [Ed.: Lazar claims to have worked on a project to reverse-engineer a recovered UFO at Area 51, but whether he in fact held high-level clearances there is disputed.] And he had discerned that in the craft, there was a generator that was used to create power that this ship used, and what it did that made it so easy to move – not just with such speed, but without any friction at all – was that the craft was able to generate its own gravity.
Anyway, when the craft finally settled, it just stayed there.
