I Got Sucked Up by a Tornado

I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry, I plan on covering everything here in this story. Although, I’m still not exactly sure if what I believe happened actually happened. This was few years ago, and recent events caused what transpired to replay in my head like a Hollywood Blockbuster.

I’m no stranger to the noise. Growing up in rural Oklahoma taught me all too well what it meant. While I’m too far away from the nearest town to hear tornado sirens clearly, I did, however, have the Emergency Alert System on both my TV and cell phone. As you’d expect, I don’t have the best service being in, what might as well be called, “Tumbleweed-ville”. That means sometimes my emergency alerts would be a little delayed on my phone. That’s why I normally had my TV on whenever I expected a storm to roll through.

This story may be a little convoluted and blurry but it all starts with me sitting in my big red recliner at home, watching the Kansas City Royals lose yet another game. I remember they lost their second in a double-header with the Detroit Tigers. Not long after the post-game show started, all the audio from the program just went away for a minute or two followed by the loud and persistent tone of the emergency alert system.

**THIS IS AN ALERT FROM THE EMERGENCY BROADCAST SYSTEM, A TORNADO WATCH HAS BEEN ISSUED IN THE FOLLOWING COUNTIES: BOWIE, HOYER, INDIGO, JACKSON, LINCOLN, KENT, ROLAND, VISER. THIS WATCH WILL LAST UNTIL 01:00 AM ON MAY 3RD**

The alert repeated a few times before finally returning to the program, but I wasn’t worried. Nine times out of ten, a storm system that only has a Tornado Watch won’t even produce a tornado. On top of that, the likelihood of that tornado actually hitting your house is astronomical. Unfortunately, the unpredictability of a twister didn’t push the odds in my favor.

It wasn’t long after I heard the Emergency Alert that the rain and thunder started pouring in. The sound of the heavy precipitation hitting the roof always relaxed me. Sometimes, if it’s just a light rain, I’ll even sit outside on my porch and just embrace the soothing storm. This time was different. This storm was heavy. The rain was deafening and the thunder was even louder. The world, as I knew it, had suddenly shrunk to my little neck of the woods without so much as a glint through the madness. I peeked outside and couldn’t see ten feet past my front porch.

“Jesus, this is a big one.” I thought to myself.

And it was true. I’ve been living in the Midwest for such a long time yet this storm is one of the biggest and heaviest I’ve been a part of and that was a recipe for disaster for the clean-up crews. I could tell already that I was going to be spending all of tomorrow picking debris off my lawn and dealing with puddles in places where they shouldn’t be. Iswitched the channel to the local news.

“As you can see, the center of the storm is sticking around the borders of Kent, Lincoln and Bowie counties. The levels of rain are astounding. On top of the Tornado Watch, there’s an active Flash Flood Warning due to the amount of precipitation. We’re keeping an eye on the system, but it’s more than likely the storm will produce a twister at some point. If you live in one of these counties, head to shelter immediately. Go anywhere underground, such as a basement or storm shelter, without any windows and stay low to the ground. If you’re unable to go to your basement or storm shelter, for whatever reason, find a windowless room, such as a bathroom or closet, in the center of your location. If you find yourself outside and you can’t find shelter, find the nearest ditch and get as far below level-ground as possible.”

Since I live on a somewhat bigger plot of land, I have a storm shelter that’s about fifty feet away from my home. The reason for these underground storm shelters being away from the house is so you can easily get topside from underground once the storm passes. Whereas, in a normal basement, you’re taking the risk of being buried under thousands of pounds of rubble. Obviously, this wouldn’t work in heavily dense areas since there’s just not enough space. However, the major downside is you would have to run outside in the middle of a storm, and possibly a tornado, in order to get to safety. Now you know why it’s so important for me to stay as up-to-date as possible on my weather forecast to ensure I don’t reach an untimely demise. While that didn’t happen, my luck, however, did run out.

I kept my eyes on the radar which displayed across the television when my hearing was taken over by what sounded like a freight train crashing through a building. Looking outside my window, a huge bolt of blue lightning revealed the sound I heard wasn’t far from the truth. A tornado had touched down about two miles down the road where it had just demolished my neighbor’s barn. Judging by how quickly it tore through the wood, the twister couldn’t be any smaller than an EF-3.

It felt like I levitated out of my chair with how quickly I jumped up. I didn’t even have enough time to put on my shoes, I just dashed out the door like a gazelle toward my storm cellar. The rainfall was overwhelming to the point where I was soaked almost instantaneously and the wind nearly knocked me over more than once. The torrential downpour made it hard to see, but I saw enough. While making my way to the shelter, the lightning lit up the sky to the point where I could see the tornado making its way onto my front lawn. I attempted to open the door to my storm cellar, and it did exactly that, but with the gust of wind’s help, it flew open extremely quickly, taking me with it. I was holding onto the door for dear life as my feet were dangling in the air. I looked behind me to see the large twister bee-line it in my direction as if it had some sort of malicious vendetta. It sped directly toward me like an alligator snapping out of the water toward its next meal. It took all of 3 seconds for the tornado to rip off the handle of my cellar door, engulfing it and myself into the swirling vortex that it was.

I felt dirt all around me, hitting from every direction. They say what kills you in a tornado is getting ripped to shreds by all the debris, but all I could feel was sheer wind force and dirt pelting my body. Normally, debris will stay in a tornado for the entirety of its duration, but this one was being picky. I saw the tornado take the neighbor’s barn, my cellar door, and even quite a few trees, but somehow I wasn’t being hit by any of it.

I couldn’t see anything through my squinted eyes but darkness and the occasional flashes of lightning. Suddenly, I felt nothing. Then the brightest light I had ever seen blinded me, even when closing my eyes completely. Looking back down, I noticed I was above the storm cloud, peering into the top of the vortex that had sucked me up in the first place. I could feel myself being pulled toward the light’s source and, as I got closer, the light dimmed while a large opening appeared in front of it. A colossal and circular saucer floating in the sky was pulling me toward it. I tried to swim away, if you can call it “swimming”, but the beam from the saucer was too strong. I was being pulled by an invisible force into a vast darkness bordered by a bright light. Whomever, or whatever, was controlling it was maneuvering the tornado and possibly even creating the storm below, clouding the sinister actions it was performing.

I could see the pieces of my cellar door, the neighbor’s barn and the equipment inside of it ahead of me in the saucer’s beam. Then they completely disintegrated after passing through a large red field of energy. As I drew closer and closer, the fear in my body had grown into the realization that this would be my killer. My body would turn into a red mist showering the land below. When I came within three feet of the energy field, I shut my eyes tightly in fear. Yet, I felt nothing. Not pain, at least. For several seconds, I felt nothing but the continuous pull of the saucer’s beam. I opened my eyes slowly. Ahead was another opening. Turning my head, I could see the red energy field behind me now. All of a sudden, I was engulfed in nothing but blackness. Not the feeling of lights turning off but more-so the darkness ahead of me wrapping around like a pitch-black blanket. Just like that, I fell unconscious.

It’s scary to be in this situation but the added feeling of time passing by at an unknown rate is unsettling. Lights blared above me and I awoke, after who knows how long, strapped to a cold, metal table. Actually, “strapped” isn’t really the right word. I couldn’t move my body except for my head, and when I looked, I saw I had been stripped down straight to my birthday suit. Although there wasn’t anything physically restraining me, I couldn’t move my arms or legs. Then I heard the sound of a machine whirring to life followed by deafening screams a few seconds later.

I turned my head over as far as I could toward where I heard the sounds of someone in total agony. I can’t exactly explain everything I saw, but I do know this. I saw Travis, my neighbor who’s barn I saw get sucked up by a twister not too long prior. Not only that, I saw three figures standing around him. But their physical traits were all blurred to my eyes. No matter how hard I tried to focus, it’s as if I was looking through a very poor pair of glasses when staring at them. But everywhere else I looked was fine.

Travis screamed again. I saw what looked like a drill or some sort of tool being pushed into his skull by the entities. The sounds he emitted were deafening as they bounced off the walls. I tried to yell out myself, but my throat couldn’t muster it. Then, he fell silent. I looked over at the heap on the table as one of the figures dug their fingers into his skull to open it up. Travis, my neighbor, was no more than a pile of gore being experimented on.

One the figures started making their way toward my table. They were so close at this point that my whole vision was encompassed by a massive blur. I could feel their thin, rubbery fingers on my face. They mumbled something incoherent over to the other figures as they started making their way over to me. Then, as one of the figures opened my eyelids wide into the blinding light, everything went red. Sirens went off in my ears and the figures took their hands off of me. They mumbled to each other quickly before I felt something jab into my neck, knocking me out again.

I awoke again in my storm cellar. At this point, I had no recollection of anything that happened the night prior. From the Royals game, to getting sucked up a tornado, to watching my neighbor getting massacred by a bunch of aliens, it was all completely wiped from my head. I stepped out onto my front lawn from the cellar and saw the destruction the tornado caused. I assumed I got smacked by a flying piece of debris as I went down the cellar.

I went to the hospital to get checked up. I told the doctor I had no recollection of the night prior, but I assume my house must’ve been hit by a tornado. He ran a few tests but, overall, he couldn’t find anything wrong with me. No concussion, no broken bones, nothing. He told me I could’ve forced myself to forget the events of last night due to the shock. I’m not sure what the science is behind that, but I’m no doctor. So, I went home and got to work cleaning up.

For years, I lived my life normally. I felt lucky to be alive. The news reported the death of my neighbor after the tornado ripped through his property. They never found his body. Shunning away an entire night from my mind bothered me. I read up more on the storm and, as far as I can tell, there was only one tornado that night. I also read that some storm chasers managed to get tremendously helpful data from transmitting sensors they put in the path of the twister. Alas, nothing jogged my memory back into place. Well, almost nothing.

Just this past Sunday, I went to my niece’s talent show up in Tulsa. She’s in fifth grade and, every year, her school runs a talent show where students can show off their skills. They can do standup, sing a song, whatever they want.

This year, there was an eighth grader who took up the art of hypnosis. I was sitting with my sister and niece in the crowd as the boy looked in my direction and asked if I could be his subject for this performance. I didn’t necessarily believe in that kind of mumbo jumbo, but I wasn’t going to tell a kid that. So, I accepted.

The boy removed something from his pocket. It looked like one of those old pocket-watches but then he held it up in front of my face. Turns out, it was a medallion that had a small light emitting from the front. He stood directly in front of me, and started swinging the medallion side-to-side. There was a whole process, but to cut a long story short, this is how it ended up.

“Alright, now think of a time where you felt tremendous fear.”

I thought of the twister. But…how? I couldn’t recall the events of that night. I feel like you can’t be afraid of something you can’t even remember. But, fear can never be forgotten. Fear that strong remains imprinted to the very core of your brain. I struggled to remember details, but I knew they were there.

“Sir, can you hear me? Tell me of a time where you felt so afraid. Where you had more fear than anytime before.”

Then it clicked. The wiring in my brain the entities cut off reconnected itself and everything came swirling back like water through a dam. I held my head tightly, fell to my knees and screamed.

“Don’t touch me! No! Let me go! Please! Let me go!”

All things I thought about while laying on that table in the saucer. My sister rushed me to urgent care. Again, nothing was drastically wrong with me, physically, but the nurse said my pulse was elevated, as if I had a surge of adrenaline. It felt like I was having a mental breakdown.

After staying with my sister for a few days, I went home. The thoughts that I believed were once lost forever are now back where I didn’t want them to belong. Little did I know that wiping my memory was a mercy.

I’m telling you all this to get the word out. Tornadoes have always been a force to be reckoned with. Little did I know just how much of a force they truly are. After all, they’re only natural. So, why shouldn’t something extraterrestrial be able to control or even make them? Be careful the next time you’re in a storm that drums up a tornado. You never know what else is lurking above the clouds.

Credit: Casey Rozell

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