Encounters With Otherworld

The Night I Saw A UFO

The following is true. The incident described below happened and has affected everything I think and believe ever since. Believe my story or not as you will, there’s no way to prove it. It was simply a thing that happened, lost forever to time.

Cities exist to keep the stars out. I believe this. When Cain built the first city he was doing so to keep God out, to feel like he had something to hide beneath which kept him invisible from the eternal sky. “The wicked says in his heart, ‘God does not see.’” Our modern cities have perfected this function, producing enough light of their own to drown out the night sky and keep away the awe that comes from looking at it. Atheists can only live in cities, in places where they are indoors all the time and the night sky is blacked out by the wash of incandescent bulbs and LEDs. For this reason I have always loved the desert, although my time spent there has been scarce. In the desert the sky is open and it is quite obvious that all above you goes on and on for eternity. Sleeping beneath such a sky, it is hard to believe you won’t fall up into it and be swallowed forever by the black. Gravity seems insignificant by comparison.

When I was 14 a school friend slept over at my house. It was about one in the morning, give or take, and we were outside trying to turn flips on the trampoline beneath a sky full of stars. It was summer, there was no reason to go to bed for there was no reason to be up early and he and I and the cows in the field beside us were all that were awake for miles.

We didn’t live in the desert, but it was a rural home, far away from city lights and the sky was open wide. Ursa major was in full view, and the north star shown brightly along with Mars and Saturn. We lived on a road that went to nothing in particular and so traffic was never heavy at any time of day and practically nonexistent at these hours of night. Nonetheless, every thirty minutes or so the high-beams from some station wagon or pickup truck would rise over the hill in the distance and shine across the tree-less fields of grass and grain. As we jumped we would watch them go, speeding down the hill, catching us ever so briefly in their lights before disappearing again into the darkness.

“Try to back-flip.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

“I can’t I’m too fat.”

“Here comes a car. Duck!”

We hid from the cars. Not sure why, it just seemed a natural game to be playing. Something sort of spooky being caught in a light like that in a world so black. The trampoline existed beneath a small, blue-ish light bulb on a freestanding telephone pole. It was barely anything and getting suddenly caught by the headlights of a car seemed unnatural, like the police had just turned his flashlight on you and shouted “Freeze!” So, we would jump down off the trampoline at the first sign of lights over the hill and hide beneath it until they passed. Like I said, who knows why. Before the internet kids amused themselves with simpler things.

“I don’t want to.”

My friend Jamie was tired of this game.

“I think I’m done. Let’s go to bed.”

The headlights caught Jamie, who was still standing. I was sitting down, preparing to roll off and climb under the mesh.

“I’m going to wave at them.”

“No, don’t.”

“Why not? What are they going to do?”

The headlights were not headlights. Or, at least, they were not the headlights of a car.

Jamie turned to wave and we both stopped. Slowly, I stood up beside him. The lights shining on us were not from anything on the ground. For a moment, we were both puzzled thinking that maybe the care they belonged to was still up on the hill somehow, but no. Soon it became clear that the lights were emanating from something in the air. Upon inspection, that something seemed to be a completely spherical black orb floating perfectly silently in the night sky. It wasn’t that interested in us. If it noticed us at all, it didn’t care, for the lights merely continued on their path across the plain and swept past us, as if the orb were scanning the ground, looking for something.

“What is that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Is it a balloon?”

“No. Definitely not a balloon.”

An eerie feeling came over the world then. I say “over the world” and not “over us” because everything then fell absolutely silent. It was as though someone had turned the volume of Earth down to zero. The crickets ceased chirping. The cows stopped tussling about. Even the wind seemed to stop moving, lest it disturb whatever sacred thing was supposed to be happening. Neither of us could talk. It was wrong to talk then. We both knew it.

After what felt like a minute the thing vanished. Vanished meaning, it simply blinked out of existence. It was there, and then, it wasn’t. We didn’t see it “shoot up into the air at incredible speed” or “zip away” or “pass thru a portal”. The sphere simply stopped existing. Sound returned. The frogs in the pond began croaking again. A cow farted.

For the next thirty or so seconds I felt what I believe a Moose must feel when, after an entire life lived away from people in the most isolated forests, suddenly a helicopter passes by. It has no reference for what it is seeing. It cannot place it in anyway. It doesn’t even know if it should be afraid or not. There’s just a thing, over head, from another world. Isn’t that odd.

The helicopter passes.

Oh well, back to eating twigs.

“Let’s go to bed.” Jamie said.

“Yes.” I agreed. “I’m tired.”

Then we never spoke of the incident for twenty years. There was nothing to say. It was so bizarre it couldn’t even really be talked about. Oh well, back to eating twigs.

It was only into my thirties that I began to question if what I remembered even really happened. One day, out of the blue, I messaged Jamie on Facebook and asked him to tell me if he remembered anything weird ever happening at my house when we were kids. I had not, at this point, spoken to him since middle-school and I was somewhat surprised to find him relay the same story I’ve just told you to me.

“Yes.” I typed over Messenger. “That’s how I remember it too.”

“What could it have been?” He asked me.

“I don’t know.” I said. “Something from the other world.”