I've never told this story on the radio before. I told my family, and eventually I told some investigators, but that's it. This happened to me in the fall of 1981. I was twenty-one years old, living near a little village called Åsum on the island of Funen in Denmark. It's about four kilometers east of Odense, just a quiet farming community. Nothing ever happened there. Nothing strange, nothing unusual. I worked the night shift at a warehouse in Odense, which meant I had to drive through Åsum in the middle of the night to get to work. The village surrounds this tiny beech forest, kind of triangular in shape, maybe a hundred and fifty meters on each side. Three roads frame it. I remember every detail of that place, even now. On this particular night, I left home at around two in the morning. I was driving my Fiat 125 up the street called Snedkerstræde, which runs along the edge of that little forest. There's a small hill there just before a T-junction where Snedkerstræde meets Åsum Bygade. I was about halfway up that hill when my engine just... died. No warning. No sputtering. It just stopped.
Now, the road slopes down after that point, so even though the engine was dead, my car kept rolling forward. I pumped the brakes and brought it to a stop right at the T-junction. And that's when I looked to my right, down Åsum Bygade, and I saw something that has haunted me ever since. About sixty meters away, hovering between the road and the forest floor, there was this... light. I still can't explain it, even now. A ball of light. It was circular, maybe three meters in diameter, floating about one or two meters off the ground. The whole thing was glowing with this intense yellow-orange color, so bright that it lit up everything around it. I couldn't make out the exact shape because the light was so strong, but it seemed round, like a sphere of solid light. The strangest thing was that it wasn't blinding, exactly. I could look at it, but I couldn't see past it. It bathed the trees and the road in this yellow glow that made everything look unreal. yellow glow is consistently described in these cases - Derek' But what I saw next made me realize this wasn't just some weird light in the sky. There was a ramp extending from the bottom of this thing down to the forest floor. A ramp. And at the top of the ramp, there was an opening, like an entrance into the craft. When I tried to look inside, all I could see was what I can only describe as an orange cloud. No details. Just this orange haze.
And then I saw them. The beings. I still can't explain it, even now, but there were two groups. The first group had seven of these small creatures, and they were moving up and down the ramp at incredible speed. Their movements were so fast and continuous that they reminded me of machines. Robots. Something mechanical. They seemed to be collecting things from the forest floor, samples of vegetation and soil, and then carrying them up the ramp and handing them to someone or something inside the craft. They never stopped. Up and down, over and over, like they were programmed. The second group was three larger beings. Two of them stood at the top of the ramp near the entrance, completely still. The third stood at the bottom of the ramp. These three had some kind of instruments in their hands, like measuring devices of some sort. I got the impression they were guards. They never moved. Not once. They just stood there, watching. All of them, both groups, were about one meter tall. They were light gray in color, and their shape... I don't know how else to describe it except that they looked like two triangles stacked on top of each other. A small triangle at the top that I assumed was the head, and a larger triangle below that was the body. The guards were slightly taller than the workers, but they had the same shape. I couldn't see any arms on them, even though the guards were clearly holding those instruments. And their legs, if you could call them that, were just small stumps sticking downward. They didn't walk. They floated. They glided above the ground without moving those leg stumps at all, like hovercraft.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]