They're Coming to Take Me Away...

Over at a BB that I frequent, I happened to mention that I've actually seen a black helicopter, and of course that led to someone asking me to tell the tale...

Since that's more blog fodder than BB fodder, I decided to put the story up here.

Ok... now despite the definitions put out in wikipedia, to me a black helicopter is any helicopter without the mandatory tail numbers or markings indentifying it. Now I never thought that it had to be black in color, just "black" as in "off book".

I've heard tales of black helicopters for years, and although I never dismissed the stories, I never really thought much about them as being true either. I guess they're just like Nessie, some people say they've seen her, others think it's crap. I dunno...

But there I was one late summer afternoon, up in the middle of nowhere hauling hay. I was putting along in my stacker just minding my own business, when I happened to notice something out of place. I couldn't tell you what it was, but for some reason my mind just said... "That ain't right." So I ignored it, and went back to picking up the bales, but I kept looking back up that way just to see.

Now this area is actually in an MOA and so I'm accustomed to having military jets and things sneak up on me all the time, but this time... it wasn't the same. So I wanted to figure it out. Now I've seen F4's, F-111's, B-1B's, B-52's, F-16, F-15's, A-10's and a few real screamers that I couldn't identify, and they're always right at "tree top" level practicing their terrain following skills. It's pretty cool. I'll tell you a few of those stories sometime too...

But anyway, I turned my outfit back around, scanned the skies, and finally had some movement below the horizon (actually about 200 feet off the ground) catch my attention. "What the heck is that?" I asked myself, and could see that it was heading toward me. It was a dark spot against the grey mottled sagebrush sidehills. "Oh... that's a helicopter. Ok." And went back to my task.

When I recognized it, it was a couple of miles away, and so I didn't think anything more about it, but every time I had to turn back that way, I looked up there and it kept getting closer. It was about this time that I just pushed the clutch in and stopped to watch it, and it was fairly easy to see now. And there it was... a black helicopter. Literally. It was black in color. It was also one of those little bubble choppers like TC flew in Magnum P.I. and it came right to me and started hovering. I got a pretty good look at it, because they were hovering at about 80 feet. There were two guys in the front of it, and they hovered there for about 10 or 15 seconds, then the turned on the steady axis, and I was shocked...

There were no markings on the chopper. No numbers, no letters, it was a solid matte black. I'd never seen anything like it before. As they finished their turn and headed around the little mountain I was stacking next to, I could see the other side of the helicopter. It was blank too...

Of course at this point, I knew nobody was going to believe this story, but I also know that my cousins were around the mountain putting up their own hay, and that's where the chopper headed. That evening when I quit for the day, I drove down there and stopped in to ask them if they'd seen it too. The answer kinda surprised me. Yeah, they'd seen it, and this was the third day in a row that it'd done the same thing...

I looked for it the next day, but I've never seen it again. And there you have it, my not-so-famous black helicopter story.