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This is unnerved. Welcome back to the Unnerved. Podcast. It's where normal people share their. Abnormal Stories. And if you enjoy true stories of the strange and terrifying, then you're in the right place. I'm your host, Chris Fricke. When was the last time you were in a place that felt completely secluded away from civilization? Growing up in Nebraska in the country, this was fairly easy to accomplish for me.
I was fortunate enough to have nearby access to hundreds of acres of land where I could hike without seeing a single person for miles. The seclusion from others and the hustle and bustle of the city are crucial for mental recovery, and one of the best ways to do this is typically by camping. Camping may seem like the perfect way to escape and be alone, but even when people are out of sight, a different kind of presence may present itself.
In today's story, Boris and his friend were camping in a secluded area where they were confronted by a mysterious light and not only left them perplexed, but also seemed to warp space and time. This is his story.
I'm Forrest Smith. This story took place in the summer of 2005 in a remote Alpine lake known as Swagger Lake in central Idaho. The summer of 2005, I just graduated from high school and didn't really have a lot of responsibilities, was just kind of using the summer before I went to college to just have fun and go camping and, you know,
just waste time. A friend of mine, Wayne and I decided to spend the day fishing at a lake called Upper Swagger Lake, and that's deep in the Lost River mountain range in Idaho. That lake is, it's very remote, it's very hard to get to and it's it's really only visited by, you know, locals in the area that are aware of it. And it's it's at the end of a really long kind of dry Canyon. It's not an easy task to actually get up to this lake.
It it takes about 100 miles if you're driving from the nearest large town which is Idaho Falls and then you've got to do some 4 wheel driving up some dirt roads for a couple miles and then when you get to the trailhead you've got to hike another 2 miles and you you know about 1000 foot elevation gain on that hike. It's it's pretty grueling once you get up there. You're just about above the tree line and you can see all the bald peaks of the Little Lost River range.
It's so nice and secluded and quiet. It's it's well worth the the hassle of getting out there. That day we got in around noonish and set up camp and then we just spent the rest of the day fishing and hanging out and, you know, chatting. It's not unusual on federal, you know, public ground to hear people, you know, target shooting, you know, especially in rural areas, you know, people target shooting is just one of the normal things that they do.
We kept hearing this periodic blast coming up from the the Canyon and we just figured it was somebody target shooting. But it was really loud. It had to have been a large caliber muzzle loading rifle. You know, it was just, it was huge at first how far away it was and and these blasts were spaced out long enough. We knew that, you know, they probably were manually reloading and you know, putting in powder and all that stuff. So it it really didn't throw us
off initially. We were just, you know, somebody's out shooting guns and we're off fishing in the mountains. Nothing, nothing to worry about. It was we basically put it out of sight, out of mind, and we were just periodically interrupted with these explosions as we fished throughout the day. Nothing really eventful happened for the rest of the day. Towards the evening, when the the lights started to get a little bit dim, we still could hear these spaced out
explosions. And it was getting to the point where if you're target shooting at night, it's really dangerous. You know, you don't know what's beyond your sights. You, you just don't do it. It's irresponsible. We kept hearing these explosions and we were getting ready to, you know, get ready for dinner and settle down around the
campfire. And my buddy Wayne, kind of, you know, taps me on the shoulder and he, he points down into the Canyon. And you can't really see anything down in the Canyon. It was towards the direction of the last explosion. But there was a light down in the Canyon, you know, from the angle of the trees and the shadows and the way it was positioned, you, you couldn't see the source of the light, but you could tell that it was way
off the ground. And it was kind of moving through the Canyon. Like the shadows were kind of creeping around and it was high up. And it was so bizarre like you. You've never, I've never seen anything like that. It was just very, very strange. So we just sat there and watched it, watched this light move through the Canyon. There was, there was no, there was no sound. It was all, you know, absolutely silent as this thing moved around.
And then there was another big explosion like we've been hearing throughout the day. And this one, actually, I could feel it like reverberate my chest, like it felt like it was a lot closer. And when that explosion happened, the whole Canyon lit up like it was daylight, like it was just super bright. And then it it went back down to just that normal background light that it was.
It was showing. We sat there kind of like unsure of what what is going on because this is unlike anything we've ever seen. 10 to 15 minutes later, this ball of light starts to creep upwards above the tree line and it just keeps kind of raising up. And then it's it's about eye level of where we are on the horizon and then it just kind of keeps going up another maybe 100 feet or so.
And it's hard to estimate the size, but this ball of light and sparks and you know whatever it was, it was about 20 to 40 feet in diameter. It was. It was pretty good size and it just kind of stops. It had to have been maybe 300 yards from us up in the air.
You know, we're just watching. It's like a little, it was almost like a little sun that was up in the sky and you know, it had had like these little feathers of sparks that would occasionally jump out of it. And it was the surface kind of shimmered and danced. It was like looking basically. I get a little sun. It was really weird.
Wayne looks back at me and I'm looking at him and I I the only thing I could do is just shrug my shoulders and like, I I have no idea what we're looking at. Like this is totally out of the realm of anything I've ever, ever seen. And after a few minutes the the ball just kind of freezes up, like the surface stopped kind of shimmering and there there was no more sparks. It just stopped and everything was still. There was no sound.
There was nothing. And then the whole thing just exploded, like in this blinding light. The explosion just shook everything and I could feel it. Like in my skull, it was just massive. It was just a massive explosion in the sky. Wayne and I instinctively, like, jumped into the dirt, you know, and covered our heads because, I mean, what else can you do, you know? That light from that thing was so bright. It felt like I didn't even have my eyelids closed. Like it just, it was so intense.
And even if, even though I had my head down in the ground, it was just so bright, the next thing I know, it's gone. It's absolutely dark. It's silent. You know, there's nothing in the sky except stars. It's just, it's gone, you know, the whole event couldn't have been, you know, maybe a couple of seconds long, but it felt like forever, you know, for this whole thing that happened.
But it couldn't have been more than 510 seconds from the explosion to when we looked up and saw that there wasn't anything there. So now we're just kind of alone in the dim light and picking ourselves up off the ground. And, you know, I'm just like, what was that Wayne? And he just kind of, he kind of laughed, but he didn't say anything, you know, he just kind of chuckled.
And that was kind of it. We we surveyed the camp and kind of the surrounding areas, 'cause, you know, with all the, with all the sparks, this thing was dropping off of it. You know, we figured there might be like some brush fires or something, but we never, we never did see anything firewise, which is lucky for us. You know, the only thing that was really off about the whole situation was it was twilight when this thing came up above the tree line.
And when we actually checked our clocks, you know, after that, this thing exploded, it was like 2 in the morning. That was baffling, you know, That was truly, really weird. At the time, Wayne had been cooking some fish and some other stuff, and that fish was completely cinders, you know, in the pan on the campfire. I'm aware of the, you know, phenomenon of missing time and everything. Like, I've heard stories about that, but it just doesn't seem,
it just doesn't seem possible. Like the stupid thing exploded, we fell into the dirt and then picked ourselves up and that was it. But it, you know, according to our watches, it was several hours that went by. It was really, I've never experienced anything like that before. It was very strange. You know, we didn't really have the mental capacity to kind of process what what had just happened. So I just went to bed, as weird as that sounds like.
It's not like we left and just went hiking through the night to get back to the the trail hit or anything. It's just like I'm going to go to bed. I'm not dealing with this crap. So I went to bed and and you know nothing happened. I just had a really deep deep sleep and woke up in the morning you know, the sun and and Wayne was already out fishing by the time I I'd woken up and you know I kind of asked him like what do you think happened last night?
He said, well it either didn't happen or we saw something we probably shouldn't have, I don't know. But maybe Marvin Martian was trying to kill us, you know, and we just both kind of laughed about that and there there wasn't any kind of like panic you know with us or any kind of like urgency to get out of there. So we we fished for a few more hours that morning and and you know we we did decide against our you know, our judgment to
not camp there again that night. So we we packed up and we headed back down before the sunset. But we we didn't stay another night like we had planned on. Now that the years have. Passed. Do you have any more guesses or insight as to what you think it may have been? I've tried to piece together what it possibly could have been and the only kind of scientific explanation I could ever find was like ball lightning, which seems to fit kind of exactly
what it was. But you know there were there were no clouds in the sky. It was it was a nice summer day.
So you know I I it's hard to say and I I do have a bit of a background in geology and I know that there's inactive fault lines and with mountains and stuff there there can be releases of of energy as you know the rocks move around and it could be something like that but I mean it could also be just the fact that I don't know I I kind of lean towards ball lightning but it doesn't explain that missing time that we experienced and ball lightning doesn't tend to continuously
explode and throughout the day it it's usually kind of a one time deal. So I I don't know tell you the truth it's it's that's, you know even it's been almost 20 years now and I I still don't have a perfectly good explanation for it. If you've never heard of ball lightning, it's a rare and unexplained phenomenon. Described as a bright orb of lightning ranging in diameter that usually appears during thunderstorms, it's known to levitate above the ground while moving, regardless of wind
intensity or direction. It's even been described as entering buildings and exploding, lighting the area on fire or even injuring people in its vicinity. Dustin Bonk met with a family today who had a close encounter with a rare phenomenon called ball lightning, which entered their home. The event happened about 30 years ago, but the Vashon family says they'll never forget it. White bluish ball come floating out of that room.
Joe Vashon of Gwynn came up close and personal with Ball Lightning. He and his wife, Rose, were entertaining friends. On a hot August day in 1980, Joe was making a drink when he turned around. I could. See a light white blue ball. Just and there it was. You're speechless when it happens. You you don't experience anything except what's going in your eyes. I was just staring. I I was in awe.
The ball entered the room from the hallway, floated about a foot off the ground, and touched the TV, disabling it. The whole event took about 15 seconds. When the ball came into contact with the TV, it imploded with a deafening bang and it shook the house. It was just a very loud bang and poop. It was gone and everybody's kind of just standing there staring at each other, looking. They describe it as about the size of a soccer ball floating silently in the air.
Joe says it was a bright blue and white and looked more like liquid. According to the American Meteorological Society, ball lightning is rare, so online footage is scarce and often low quality. The Vachons have no footage of their encounter, but Joe says he'll never forget it. If I was the only one that seen it, I probably wouldn't even talk about it. Be like a UFO. On that August day, there were no thunderstorms until after the ball was gone.
Thankfully, no one was injured. Then it just imploded with a loud, loud bang. If Ball Lightning wasn't what Forrest and his friend experienced that night, then what else could it be? You could easily classify this as a UFO encounter and it does have similarities to a previous story episode. If you want to hear that story, look up the episode titled Chased by UFO. Now there are many sightings described as UFOs showing a bright light, so this isn't necessarily uncommon.
But what is uncommon in Forest story is the loud explosion sounds at this object repeatedly made UFO crafts are usually observed to be completely silent. The repeated explosions that this craft created were very strange, but it's not the only time the sounds of explosions
were heard in that area. I I remember reading some stories about when Lewis and Clark initially went, you know, because Lewis and Clark went through kind of that area like a little bit farther north up in the in the mountains. But if you read some of Lewis and Clark's diary entries, they talk about being in the mountains in that area and hearing these mysterious cannon shots that they described him as, and they couldn't find a source of what was causing it.
But it was, it was a clear, bright day, and they just kept hearing cannon shots. And that that story always stuck with me too, because it it kind of describes close to like what we were experiencing, you know, these loud explosions that were out of sight on a clear day. And it's kind of comforting knowing that Lewis and Clark had to deal with something kind of
similar. They would have been the only ones that could have gunpowder and and firearms and things of that nature correct, like during that time. Yeah, at that point it was just, yeah, it was just those guys that had that kind of stuff. The strange noises that Lewis and Clark heard were reported in their journals in July of 18 O
5, Lewis's entry says. Since our arrival at the falls we have repeatedly witnessed a noise which proceeds from a direction a little to the north of West, as loud as resembling precisely the discharge of a piece of ordnance of 6 lbs at the distance of three miles. I was informed of it by the men several times before I paid any attention to it, thinking it was Thunder most probably which they had mistaken. I am at a loss to account for this phenomenon.
Clark also mentioned this event in his journal, saying a rumbling like cannon at a great distance is heard to the West of us. The 'cause we cannot account. Now it's worth pointing out that the 6 LB Ordnance that Lewis is referring to was a large cannon that had to be driven around on wheels. These were usually used by field artillery, and as you can imagine, these cannons were very loud and likely the only sound they could compare it to at the
time. And in that area, there certainly wasn't a big enough gun to make a noise like that. In the end, Lewis and Clark had no explanation for that sound. Another strange phenomenon that that explosion seemed to trigger was the unexplained loss of time that Forrest and his friend experienced. According to their watches, several hours had gone by in the blink of an eye and their dinner was part of the evidence. Right before the explosion
happened, the main explosion. Had your friend just put the fish on the pan at that point, like soon before the explosion happened, I guess. Like what period of time before the explosion? How long had the fish been cooking? He couldn't have been cooking it for more than, you know, 5-10 minutes before you know, before we stopped and just started watching this, this craft. It wasn't long, certainly not long enough to turn it into a
charcoal briquette. So from your point of view is few minutes big explosion, few seconds go by and then it's just completely charred, like it's been there for hours. Right. Yep. Exactly. Stories of others that find themselves move forward in time are few, but that doesn't mean it's not possible in Forrest's case. Others theorize that the missing time that he witnessed may be the result of the UFO being capable of using interdimensional or anti gravity technology.
The time either slips or warps around the craft, causing space and time itself to go haywire. Whether this theory is true or not, the question still remains what was the mysterious light that Forrest and his friend experienced at Swagger Lake? Thanks again for listening to Unnerved if you enjoyed this episode. Please share. It with your. Friends and Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you guys want to see. Photos related to each episode, be sure.
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