I need to tell you about something that happened to me and my daughter during the Joplin tornado. I know how this is going to sound, but I swear on everything I hold dear that what I'm about to tell you is the truth. It was May 22nd, 2011. Sunday evening, around five thirty in the afternoon. I still remember I had a headache from skipping lunch that day. My daughter Emily was only six years old at the time. We'd been out running errands, and I was driving us home when the sky just, it turned this sickly green color. You know that color, if you've ever seen a tornado coming. My phone started going crazy with alerts[ and then I heard the sirens. I wasn't far from home, maybe ten minutes, but I could see it forming in the distance. This massive, dark funnel dropping down from the clouds. And I knew, I just knew we weren't going to make it home. The thing was moving fast, and it was getting wider. I mean, this tornado ended up being nearly a mile across at its widest point. An EF5. Winds over 200 miles per hour. I pulled off near Duquesne Road and we abandoned the car. There was a culvert nearby, you know, one of those drainage ditches under the road. I grabbed Emily and we ran for it. We jumped down inside and I pulled her close, covered her with my body as best I could. The sound, my God, the sound was like a freight train mixed with a jet engine. Just this deafening roar.
Emily was crying, and I was praying out loud, just saying the Lord's Prayer over and over because I didn't know what else to do. And then I saw it. Our car. It was flying through the air, tumbling end over end, and it was coming right at us. I'm not exaggerating when I say it was heading straight for that culvert. I closed my eyes. I thought, this is it. This is how we die. I squeezed Emily tighter and waited for the impact. But it never came. A few seconds passed, maybe ten, I don't know. Time felt weird. And then everything went quiet. Not silent, there was still wind and debris falling, but that terrible roar was gone. The tornado had passed. I opened my eyes and looked around. Our car was nowhere near us. It had landed maybe 50 yards away, completely mangled. There's no way, physics-wise, that it should have missed us. But it did.
I was checking Emily over, making sure she wasn't hurt, and she looked up at me with these wide eyes and said, 'Weren't they pretty, Mama?' I had no idea what she was talking about. I said, 'What do you mean, baby? Who was pretty?' And she said, 'The Butterfly People. They saved us.' I thought she was in shock, you know, just saying things because of the trauma. But she kept talking about them. She said there were two of them, and they had these beautiful, colorful wings, and they stood between us and the tornado. She said they were glowing, and one of them put their hand up like they were pushing something away, and that's when our car changed direction. I tried to tell myself it was just her imagination, a coping mechanism. But here's the thing. In the days and weeks after the tornado, I started hearing the same story from other people. Dozens of other families. people sightings during the tornado were widespread - Mackenzie' Mostly from children, kids who didn't know each other, from all different parts of town. And they were all describing the same thing. These beings with wings, human-like but not quite human, with beautiful colors, and they protected people during the storm.
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