The Copley Woods Encounters | 399

Tonight's episode is brought to you by my newest supporter, Jane. Thank you for making the show possible, Thank you for listening, and welcome back. I'm your host, Nick Ryan. Tonight's episode is going to be a bit shorter than usual, and that's because I'll be out of town for a couple of days. But I'll be back on Monday with episode four hundred. Until then, I wanted to leave you with an interesting story that I came across that was featured in an article on Mysterious Universe, and after reading it, I just had to share it with you. Now, many of you may already be familiar with this story, as there have been many publications and multiple books that have covered it over the decades. It's a bizarre tale that took place in nineteen eighty three near a location known as Copley Woods in the state of Indiana, and it has several aspects that I found fascinating and I hope you'll agree. This is a portion of that article. It was a hot summer night on June thirtieth, nineteen eighty three, and Debbie Jordan Cobble was going about her usual routines on what had until then been a very ordinary and mundane evening. At the time, she was living in a rural area near a place called Copley Woods, just outside of Indianapolis, Indiana, along with her two young sons and parents, and on this particular evening, her father was off at his second shift at an automobile factory. That night, Debbie and her mother and her two sons ordered take out fried chicken, and it couldn't have been a more normal evening. But as they finished eating and she was washing dishes, things would begin to get weird and spiraling into a harrowing experience that would change her life forever. Debbie explains what happened. I was washing the grease off my hands before I left to go to the neighbor's house to cut some more patterns out. She lived just one block over and one road behind us, so I wouldn't be far in case my mom needed help getting the boys to settle down. As I stood at the kitchen sink and looked aimlessly out the window, I noticed an odd light which was coming out of the swimming pool pump house. First of all, I knew the door should be closed because I remembered wrestling with the rusty slide lock. I had been out there just a few hours earlier putting some more chlorine tabs in the pool load. It was getting dark out, so the strange light really caught my eye. It was not like the incandescent bulb that was in there. It looked more like a fluorescent white light, and it was very bright. I pointed this out to my mother, and I asked her if she wanted me to stay home. She did think that it was odd, but she told me not to worry about it. She said that she would lock the doors and if she needed me, she would call me now. In the five minutes it took me to get into my car and make a quick detour to the turnabout in back of the house in order to check on the light before I left, the light was gone and the door to the pump house was closed. However, the pedestrian door to the side of the garage that was attached to the house was now open. I don't know why I didn't stop then and go back inside. I should have, but I just didn't, and I just headed on to our neighbor's house. Moments later, Debbie reaches her neighbor's house without incident and calls her mother to tell her that she arrived safe. At this point, her mother was calm and sounded normal, but shortly after this, there was a phone call from her mother, who now sounded frightened and urgently implored her to come back home right away. Debbie would later find out that her mother had seen a basketball sized ball of light which was hovering in the backyard, but at that very moment, it was not clear why she was so panicked and scared and incessantly begging Debbie to come home. So Debbie then excused herself, apologizing to the neighbor, and then driving the short distance back home, where she found her mother cowering in the house and frantically looking through the window outside. And Debbie describes what happened next. Once I arrived, I pulled around to the back of the house again. This time I stopped at the sun room outside access door and found my mom standing there waiting for me. As I walked in, I went for the shotgun that Daddy had behind the trash compactor. Mom made a comment about the gun not being loaded, and I said to her that whoever was out there didn't know that, and I could always just beat the crap out of them with it. Now, I have to say, at this point, I do not know what came over me. I'm no fool, and at that time in my life, I was the biggest chicken in the world. If I had known why my mom called me back that night, I would have never gone back out. I would have gone in the front door, grabbed my mom and my kids, and I tailed it out of there so fast it would have made your head spin, making the whole situation even eerier and more surreal was at the time, Debby's mother not only had no idea why she was in a panic, but she didn't even remember calling her daughter. At this point, they both thought that it was just an intruder, so Debby crept outside with the shotgun and approached the pump house, ready to wave around her empty gun to frighten any trespasser away. However, no one was in the pump house, nor was there any sign of an intruder anywhere. The only thing that was out of place was her dog, which was now cowering under a truck and growling uncontrollably. As she continued her search of the yard out buildings in garage, she was suddenly aware of a growing burning sensation throughout her entire body, which she would later equate to being splashed with acid. And this sensation grew in intensity until she had the sudden, undeniable urge to get out of there immediately because she believed that her life was in danger. And this is what happened next. I suddenly felt as if I was on fire. All the skin on my body started burning. It felt like I was covered with acid, and I thought I got to get out of here right now. I then turned to run out the pedestrian door, and that is when I was hit in the chest by something very bright and electrifying. I have never been hit by lightning, but if I could imagine what it would feel like, I would say it was like this. It felt as if I had first been punched by a huge electric fist right in my gut. This burning, electrical feeling slowly moved down my legs to my feet, out my arms, to my fingertips, and around my head. Then I could feel every molecule in my body vibrating. I couldn't move, and I couldn't see because the flash was so bright. I know I could not have tolerated more than a few seconds of this, but I swear it felt as if this lasted for several minutes, I assumed, though it couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds. I remember thinking, I'm dead. This is what it feels like to die. I was shaking and burning, and I felt like I was vibrating to my very core. The brightness wore off fast, and then the vibrating and shaking subsided, but I still couldn't move. I was able to see bits and pieces, very much like having been flashed in the eye by a camera flash. I had big blind spots in my vision, but I could see some shadow, and I could tell that there was some movement in the yard in front of me. At this moment, I could now feel someone pulling on my right shoulder, as if to pull me down a bit. Then I felt a stabbing, burning sensation in my right ear, and I could hear someone telling me that it was unfortunate that I had to feel pain After this. Debbi suddenly and inexplicably found herself further outside with no idea of how she had gotten there, and above her hovered a bright light about the size and shape of a basketball. The light moved up and down as if scanning her, and then slowly became an oval shape before disappearing. At this moment, Debby saw yet another egg shaped object, and around it she could see several humanoid figures, and she says this, I could see something. It was about the size of the pool pump house, maybe eight to ten feet tall, and it was shaped like an egg. And I could see six people in the yard in front of me. They were at various points in the yard, and at the same time, they all seemed to line up and then slide to the left and then back to this egg shaped thing that was in front of me. They were smaller than me, shorter. I thought they looked like children. They were bullet shaped children, bigger in the head and getting narrow at the feet. I couldn't see much detail, mostly just silowets. Now the rest of this event is still a blur after twenty years. The next thing I remember is hearing someone say it's over, and at that moment I suddenly remembered my kids. I thought, my kids, Oh my god, and I immediately heard the voice say that my kids were okay. Then I heard my name being called and I was able to move, and I turned and began to walk up the lower porch steps and toward the back kitchen door. With each step I took the memory of what had just transpired faded, until by the time I reached my mom at the back door, I did not remember anything. After I entered the garage, I said to my mom, everything's cool, and with that she became animated again. It was as if she was standing there in a daze until she heard my voice before I continue. Please consider showing your support by subscribing, sharing, and given the podcast a positive review. You can also visit me on Patreon, buy me a coffee or PayPal and make a donation, or become a member starting at just a dollar a month. You can even join my Patreon membership for free and get access to all of my future updates. And of course, just listening to the show is the best support of all, and I'm grateful to have you here. Now. Please stay tuned and I'll be right back. After these brief messages. At this point, Debby decides to go back to the neighbor's house, and when she arrives there, they tell her that she has been gone for two hours. Despite the fact that to her, only fifteen minutes had passed. At this point, she rather oddly felt like going for a swim in the pool, and she invited the neighbor and her daughter to join her. As they made their way to the pool, things would get even stranger still, as Debby goes on to describe, as we walked through the back yard to the swimming pool, my neighbor's daughter suddenly jumped and yelled ouch. She said that she had stepped on something that made her foot burn, and now her foot was going numb. By the time we reached the pool, she said that her foot felt numb all the way to the knee, but yet she could walk on it. We weren't in the pool for more than ten or fifteen minutes when we all started feeling nauseated, and my eyesight started getting really fuzzy. Even though I had not had my head under water, I could see halos around all the outside lights, and it was making me dizzy. Then the girls left and I went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, I couldn't open my eyes. They were swollen, completely shut. My mother took me to the emergency room, and they in turn sent me directly to an I specialist across the street from the er, because they said they didn't have anyone on call in the er who was able to treat something like this. This doctor was just across the street and agreed to work me in and see me that morning. He was stunned at the extent of my injury. He kept asking me if I had looked into the ark of a welder's torch or maybe the sun, which I had not. I was then given several tubes of cream and some drops to try to heal my eyes. It took several weeks for them to fully recover, and to this day my eyes are very sensitive to light. Also, my vision is very far sighted. Sometimes my eyes will still suddenly burn and turn red for no apparent reason. Fortunately, though this only lasts for a few minutes. The following week after the incident, they were all having a barbecue in their backyard when one of the guests noticed an eight foot circle with a twenty foot swath of wilted dead grass coming off of it, which, for some strange reason, seemed to instill a sense of panic within Debbi. This mark on the grass would prove to have some rather strange qualities of which Debbi would describe. The mark in the yard remained there for nearly five years. Every year the snow melted off of it. Animals wouldn't walk on it. There were no bugs in the soil. Even when the grass finally did begin to grow back. The grass in that place was thick, rubbery, and kind of a bluish green color. The dandelions that grew around the mark were three times the size of normal wands. The tomato plants that my mom had out by the pool with the size of grapefruits, but when you would try to eat them, they were so acidic that the skin on your lips would peel off, and the vines were as big around as my forearm. The leaves on a patch of trees behind the mark withered, turned brown, and then fell off. The power line above the mark shorted out and blew a transformer, melted the wiring and then blew out the tubes on the ham radios in the basement of the house, which was right next to the place in the yard. The aftermath of this day was a nightmare. For several years. I was shell shocked. I sat up at night watching over my children and waiting waiting for something, but I didn't remember what it was I was waiting for. I got sick, and I stayed sick for over a year. I developed life threatening allergies, rashes, fevers, swollen glands, diarrhea, bleeding gums, and my hair began to fall out. My finger nails even started growing thin, peeled, and had horizontal ridges in them. I developed irregular heartbeats, and I started having panic attacks almost daily for a very long time. Oh and the dog that was out there with me that night, she had to be put to sleep about two and a half months later, while her hair fell out from the head down. She developed black, oozing sores all over her back, Her eyes got milky white, and she was obviously going daf Her teeth all fell out, and her gum's bled as well. When we took her to the vet, he was shocked to see how quickly she had deteriorated. She was not that old, only about six or seven, and the way she looked you would have thought that she was twenty years old. He advised us to put her down because he felt that she was suffering and he couldn't help her. He figured that she was all eaten up with cancer of some kind. I think of my dog and the fate that she met. In my heart, I believe that whatever she encountered that night was directly related to her untimely deaf and there is a part of me that still worries I will eventually have some kind of cancer related to my experience of that night. There is nothing I can do about it right now, though, except to take good care of myself and hope for the best. It would also turn out that other people in that area had seen basketball sized orbs of light flying about as well, and Debby reached out to a UFO Reas researcher, Bud Hopkins, who would conduct a thorough investigation into the incident and then write of it in his best selling nineteen eighty seven book Intruders The Incredible Visitation at Coppley Woods. And after this it hit the public consciousness and appeared in a nineteen ninety two CBS mini series of the same name. In nineteen ninety three, Debbie's sister would write a book on it as well, called Abducted. The story of the Intruders continues, and it has gone on to be one of the most shocking and intriguing alien encounter reports on record, and it's been investigated by other notable UFO researchers such as Linda Moulton Howe. As for her own thoughts on the whole affair, Debbie herself has remained rather introspective on it all, rather bravely embracing what happened to her and looking at it as a defining moment in her life. And Debbie says this, I often wonder what my life would have been like had I not experienced it. I can't imagine, truthfully, despite the obvious trauma, I don't think I would change a thing. I have become a much stronger person. I don't give credit to the experience or the intruders other than it forced me to be strong and to survive and grow. And I kind of like that about me, And that is the story to this day. You know that when you can name the date and the time of an event, that it must have made quite an impression on you. June thirtieth, nineteen eighty three made such an impression on me that it actually crushed the old me while molding the new one. Now that's a defining moment. These are just a few of the stranger details of this case, and there are many more events that this article doesn't mention. So if you found this experience as interesting as I did, I recommend looking into it even further. And if you'd like to read the entire article for yourself, please visit the show notes and click on the link that I've provided. I hope you enjoyed tonight's episode, and if you'd like to submit your experience or learn more about supporting what I do, you can find all my contact and support information in the show notes and of course at Paranormal Mysteries podcast dot com. Until next time, thank you so much for listening, and please remember, don't wait for the unknown to come to you, get out there and find it.