It's night, and I wait until Mom and
Dad have retired to their bedroom, then I walk around the house
turning off all the inside and outside lights. Living at the end of
Fairway Drive, we have just a few neighbors to each side of our
house. My bedroom window faces the backyard, and beyond our fence the
wooded hill we call Mount Baldy, not really big enough to be a
mountain. My brother Larry and I climb to the top on occasions when
we feel like hiking for hours. The hillside is protected Open Space,
although there's a fire road it's blocked off to all vehicles.
I put on a bathing suit and grab a
towel. Our upstairs bathroom has a door that opens out to a deck and
a stairway down to the backyard with a pool and a cedar hot tub. Mom
designed the pool as two hexagons that are slightly offset. It looks
pretty cool, but in practice two corners project into the pool,
creating a narrow 'waist' that's a bit of a hazard to swimmers. I
step into the hot tub, with the temperature set at 103 degrees. Many
nights I stay in the tub for more than an hour. Tonight it's clear
and there's no moon. It's dark, and there's a good view of the stars.
I look up at the sky. Some nights I can see a satellite. My vision is
better than average, 30/20. It's 1978, so there aren't too many
satellites passing overhead. I like to see if I can spot them just as
they rise over the horizon, so I can watch them cross the whole sky.
I soak in the tub for about ten
minutes. Then, below the peak of Mount Baldy, I see lights, a
horizontal, rectangular array of lights, each of the lights is about
the size of the side of a train boxcar. The whole array of lights is
5 lights wide and 5 lights high. Not all the lights are lit at once.
They flash on, and off, in a complex pattern, white and yellow and
orange, for two seconds, then the lights are gone. From where I sit,
at the end of a narrow valley, it looks as though those lights were
meant to be seen by me. That bright, silent signal to me conveyed at
least two meanings: we're here, and we know you're here.
I'm not quite sure how I feel or what
to think about what I just saw. I calmly step out of the tub, wrap my
towel, drip my way up the outdoor stairs, and go directly to my
roll-top desk and write down every detail, and draw a sketch. I tell
nobody.
Seeing the UFO raised the same
questions again as my other paranormal experiences: What just
happened? What part did I play? What does it mean? Will it happen
again? What next? Is it safe to talk to anybody about it?
For more than 30 years I never told
anyone about my UFO experience. Eventually I began to share my
experience. One of my friends commented, “That sounds like the
lights in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I had seen the movie
when it came out in 1977, but I hadn't seen it since then, so I
re-watched it. Sure enough, in the scene when the UFO lands at Devils
Tower, the rectangular lights look very similar to the array of
lights I saw from my backyard in 1978. At that time, I didn't make
the connection between my UFO sighting and the scene in Close
Encounters. The similarity seems incredible, but Spielberg did his
homework. For me the most salient scene in the movie is not when the
humans meet the aliens, but when Roy (Richard Dreyfus) is madly
piling mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of Devils Tower,
struggling to make sense of his paranormal experience, and Ronnie
(Teri Garr) is mortified. My main takeaway the first time I watched
Close Encounters was that your family and other people will think
you're crazy, even if you're not.
To this day, I risk my reputation, and
other people risk theirs, by announcing our interest in the
paranormal. Not to mention our beliefs and experiences! The only
solution is strength in numbers. Make the Paranormal Normal. Take the
Paranormal Pledge. Talk about your paranormal experiences. You'll be
quite pleasantly surprised that when you do, many people also share
their experiences.
Seven years after my UFO sighting,
it's 1985. I'm dropping out of University of California at Davis,
smoking weed from a bong named Phil, taking a long-distance hike in
the Eldorado National Forest with my girlfriend, getting her pregnant
in a tent in the snow, and then working in a tofu shop, when “they”
came in disguise.
I work the late-night cleanup shift at
Wildwood Tofu in Fairfax, California, among shops, restaurants and a
tiny nightclub where greats such as Dylan and members of the Grateful
Dead used to show up unannounced to play a set. The tofu kitchen is
relatively small; the walls and floor covered entirely in white tile,
and filled with commercial-sized kitchen equipment including a
massive vat for cooking the soy beans, numerous stainless steel
tables, a three-basin sink, and a soymilk bottling station. I work by
myself, often starting after midnight. The kitchen is at ground
level, with the offices upstairs. The glass entry door and the
windows abut the sidewalk. While I hose and scrub the whole place,
the glass steams up. One night, a man stops and looks through the
window, and he looks so friendly that I open the front door and
invite him in.
