Henry Dupill was walking home from the paper mill in Rumford after his second shift when he saw a great big ball of red light over the trees. A UFO.

He didn’t mention it to anyone for 20 years.

“It was exciting. It scares you kind of, too. You don’t know what to think,” Dupill said. “I was in the Army myself. There’s a lot of stuff out there secret.”

Beth Snowe couldn’t sleep. She walked into her kitchen one February night in 2002, looked out the window and saw something hovering over Quahog Bay in Harpswell. Her husband called the Navy base the next day. It wasn’t one of their planes.

“I don’t even like to talk about it – people think you’re crazy,” she said.

For 10 minutes back in 1986, Lois Hall watched a bright light zoom over Morse Hill in North Jay. She called the local radio station to report the sighting.

“People have asked me if I was afraid of it. I was more fascinated than afraid,” said Hall, who’d been alone in the house. “It’ll be one of the high points in my memory. I just wish I could have shared it with someone besides the puppy.”

A retired schoolteacher says she was followed by an object covered in red, white and blue lights along the backroads of Turner in 1978, on the way home from shopping. It was about rooftop-height and pulled parallel with the car.

“There’s definitely something out there and I don’t think they’re interest in little old me,” she said. “I certainly don’t want to have an encounter of the first degree.”

In the fall of 1998, Gary Couture was at his brother’s in Lisbon, waiting on a call for a job offer. He heard a crow cawing outside, loud enough and long enough to get his attention.

He looked outside to see a silver, football-shaped object hanging in the sky.

“I wasn’t startled or in disbelief. I simply smiled and said (out loud), ‘Well, there you are.'”

When Couture left and returned with a camera, it was gone.

Bud Bechtel was driving home through Monmouth, on his way back from a UFO conference several years ago, when a star caught his eye. It was a little extra orange.

Eventually, the light followed along beside him, at a high altitude. He lost sight of it when it moved directly over his car.

“I was afraid to get out, frankly. I don’t trust these things totally,” he said.

The drive home took two hours longer than it should have. He isn’t sure why.

NOTE: These are responses to a Sun Journal query.