The above image is a screen cap of the Google Street View of the Winn Dixie at Tyrone Gardens Shopping Center in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Now we're gonna start talking about some aliens, so if ya'll can't handle, don't read. This isn't a scary story, though. Not to me. I am at a point in my life now, and was kind of then, really, where I don't find aliens scary anymore. Humans scare me more. Just like some stories from the 1990's, this one, and another one I will relate on this website that was told to me by another person in the same location, is very strange. I would go so far as to say highly strange. I will note that I never mentioned my own experiences to the people who told me these stories, until after they'd told me their tales. They'd believed me, of course, and I, believed them. Not out of reciprocity, but because they were the kind of people who did not go around making this kind of shit up. They had good reputations and good jobs. And no one with reputations and jobs on the line talks about this stuff. The price you can pay is too high. I hope those days of fear are coming to an end. Experiencing this shit is scary enough (at first). But if you have to keep it bottled up for unbelievers, you'll go bonkers (see the mashed potatoes dude in Close Encounters of the Third Kind for a reference point...though not all of us go to that extreme..) I'm using a *fake name for my ex-coworker in this story to protect her identity. She was an older lady then, and she may have likely passed on, but she has children and grandchildren, and I do not know if she ever told them this, but I will not harm anyone with it's retelling. In the 1990s, the Florida bank I was working for was going through a lot of changes (ironically they were eventually bought out by the institution that my current company banks with) and I was working for the Purchasing department as a administrative clerk responsible for ordering personal banking supplies and furniture for our offices across the state. Cora*, the administrative assistant, worked directly under our boss. For some strange reason, they had moved us from a downtown St. Petersburg location to a shopping center across town that featured a Winn Dixie grocery store, a Chuck E. Cheese, a hair cutting school, a Big Lots, a pizza/Italian restaurant, and a few other odd little stores on the front side and the back. Tyrone Gardens. Middle class to kinda poor people shop there. The main Catholic cathedral in St. Petersburg is right down the street. The main shopping mall, Tyrone Mall, is not far away. It's surrounded by lower-to-middle income apartments and houses. And one day, my co-worker Cora went to go look around at one of the stores during a break period and came back pale and shaking like wet dog. It's been a long time, so my memory, like other memories, is not solid, but I think I remember all the important details. This is what happened to Cora: It might have been the holidays and that's why she wanted to go over to Big Lots or one of those other little stores to look at stuff. Part of me likes the idea of aliens Christmas shopping, but I don't think that's what would motivate them. I think people, and generally crowds of people, might motivate them, if they have a message to get across, and in the 90s it seemed like some of them did (see Phoenix Lights and Ariel School in Zimbabwe for reference). I don't know if this happened to more people than Cora (I've searched MUFON for alien encounters in Florida in the 90s, and didn't find anything) but if it did, I would not have been surprised. Especially if it was around the holidays. I remember it being more crowded than usual, and that shopping center did not usually get crowded during the day. So, I'm thinking it was at least after Thanksgiving. It was warm, though. But hell, this is Florida. We sometimes don't get a cold snap until December. We had finished lunch and we talked about going over to one of the stores to look around because we were having a slow period, and the boss was at a meeting at the corporate headquarters a couple miles away. We couldn't go at the same time, so I said she could go first. So she did. And like I said, came back utterly shocked and pale. What she claimed she saw was even paler. She said she was on the sidewalk, walking past Big Lots toward some new little trinket dollar store (it wasn't in the shopping center for long) when she noticed the two people on the walk coming toward her. They were tall...very tall. And so white. She said they were whiter than copy paper it seemed to her, that that's whiter than most Caucasian people. Caucasian people aren't really white, we're sort of a creamy or splotchy pink or beige, depending on our skin condition and whether we've tanned. Cora said to me "M..The way they looked at me...their eyes were so unnatural...dark!" I asked her if they had whites to their eyes, or if they were entirely dark, like black, but she could not tell. And that wasn't the worst. "You won't believe me," she said. "But...They spoke to me... IN MY HEAD." If she'd told anyone but me, she might have been disbelieved. And laughed at. And mocked. But after my own UAP sighting and hearing stories about some aliens who could speak using telepathy, I did not doubt her. I asked her what they said to her. She said it was something along the lines of "We are here now and you'll have to get used to us." This is not exact...but an approximation. She was too scared to recall it word for word. She would not stop shaking. "I'm so afraid. I've never had anything like that happen before in my life!" she said. Words so familiar to me. Words I've said and heard before. But at that moment, I wasn't afraid at all. I was excited! I told her about my experience seeing a UFO (I didn't tell her everything) and that I had heard of others who had seen UFOs and ETs (now they call them NHI, non-human intelligence, because, well some may actually come from here...more on that later). I calmed her down and told her I wanted to go out and try to find them and see if I could get them to talk to me. She was scared for me, but I was determined. I went out and walked up and down that sidewalk...all around the shopping mall and behind it. I even went into a few of the stores, but my mind was preoccupied with tall extremely paint-white humanoids with dark eyes (I did not know about Tall Whites—a supposed race of aliens, or alien/human hybrids—at that time). I would start researching these things a bit later. As far as I could recall then, the show The X-Files had only featured the Greys. I probably walked around longer than I should have because by the time I got back, our boss had returned from his meeting at corporate. He wasn't mad, though. Cora had broken down and told him...and it turns out my boss believed in UAPs and ETs but he swore he had no stories of his own. Our stock room manager was up in the office with us at this point, and he told us about his own weird experience, not with a UAP or aliens, but with a weird, scary drive home in the middle of the night on a well-known highway in our state, and how he may be the only person who thinks there's more to it than just being haunted. But I'll save his story for Part 2 for another day. As for Cora's tale...there is supposed to be such a thing as a race of aliens called Tall Whites. I don't know if they are for real or not. Snowden's leaks supposedly said they helped Hitler, which has gotta be total bullshit. But who knows? If you believe some people out there (and I don't) there should be around eighty-some different races of extra-and-ultra terrestrials visiting (at last count). And probably not all of them are nice. Still, like I said, humans worry me more than aliens these days. I lost touch with Cora after my husband passed away and I left the company and moved around a bit, trying to get the pieces of myself back together...a hard job. I've searched the internet for her but haven't had any luck. The same with my other former co-worker, whose story I will tell in Part 2 of Stories from Others. Thanks for reading. Stay weird.
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