In the
summer of 1981, when I was fourteen years old, I saw something that was more
than my imagination or any willingness to misinterpret events and delude myself.
I remember it vividly, though
perhaps with many distortions by now… but it remains the event that marked me
at a time when I was ripe for it, needed it, and it has shaped me indelibly and
suggested a deep sense of purpose, though that purpose has always been at best
rather vague. At worst, I’ve felt its seeming lack. I’ve still to this day never
heard anyone else quite describe the thing or things that I saw that summer
night, despite the immensity of it, and partly for this reason I’m left to feel
that it was meant for me, as something intensely personal. I’ve since seen how
these events can seem to communicate very specific if symbolic messages to
different people at the same time, with tremendous economy – which suggests a
vast intelligence, among other things – but this seems to have been for myself.
We would’ve
had the vacation house on Whidbey for only a short time then, a year or so, and
I don’t think I’d had yet the alienation from my childhood friends that would
make me want to avoid them. Yet on that visit, I didn’t bring any of them
along; I went with my parents and their friend Stu. My sister, then nineteen,
would have distanced herself from the family, so she was not present either. I
remember little of the daytime: I could have spent it rowing our small, plastic
dingy over the nearby body of water we called the “lagoon” or walked alone
along the beach, or spent the day reading quietly in a corner of the house. We
had (and still have) a telescope on a tripod kept near the front picture
windows that look out over the Puget Sound, across to the small city of Port
Townsend and beyond that, the Olympic Mountain range.
At some
point not especially late in the evening we all went to bed. I was sleeping in
the loft above the master bedroom and its adjoining bathroom, which was the
only bathroom in the house. When I woke up in the middle of the night and
needed to urinate, it meant that I had to climb down the set of steep steps to
ground level and skirt along the edge of the main living area, with its picture
windows. This night, something caught my eye outside. I went to the window and
saw across the water, far in the distance, yet so immense that it stretched
seemingly as long as the entire length of the far-off mountains, a dully
luminous orange-red “cloud” hanging in the sky. It would have been miles
across. It didn’t have any sort of mechanical structure, but it wasn’t exactly
all that cloud-like either. Rather, it had the appearance of a wide, flat
paintbrush stroke slapped against the dark sky as though it were a
two-dimensional canvas, and had a variety of tones within it of deep orange to
red, perhaps amber. It was a wide, bent line, down at its edges, and the edges
had a sort of stylized feathering to them, while the top and bottom lines of
this shape was clean and distinct. These colors glowed, but not brightly. It
almost seemed wet. They were the only light visible in the sky.
I stood at
the window for a time and watched this thing, not especially astonished but
curious. Mildly curious. I remembered the purpose that had gotten me out of bed,
and so went into the bathroom, then came out afterwards into the kitchen area
for a glass of water. I should add that this, getting a glass of water in the
middle of the night, was something unusual for me at the time; it is something
I almost never did, and so to do this on this particular evening is
significant. It was as if something were directing me to do this, and for a
reason that became apparent later. When I went back to the window to look again
at this strange thing outside, it had changed, just in the time while I’d been
the bathroom. The large cloud/paint-splatter shape had been replaced or changed
into a discreet, much smaller shape, one that was geometrically regular and
clearly of intelligent design. This was an L- or boomerang-shape made of the
same dull orange-red light, consisting of two circles at one end, an angle of
the same width as the circles and rounded at the ends and outer corner, as
though drawn from the curve of these same circles but extended, and then
terminated by two more circles, also the same size. With my glass of water in
hand, I though to look at this shape more closely through the telescope, and so
trained it toward the light with my eye to the eyepiece. I saw through its lens
the same shape, enlarged, and noticed that it was moving, drifting very slowly
to the right, more or less the north, its lowest edge just beginning to
disappear behind the foothills of the mountains. Clearly, though much smaller
than its earlier incarnation, this thing was huge, conceivably a quarter-mile
or more to each of its “arms”, as the foothills behind which it was descending
were perhaps fifty miles away. Like the first shape, this one also appeared
completely flat – and not only because it was so distant. To it, the sky seemed
like a page of drafting paper, facing me, showing me its perfect geometry
without the distortion of perspective.
What is both
unusual and distinctly common of experiences like this, so I’ve read, is the
mildness of my response to it at the time. Though I was curious about this
thing that I was seeing, knowing it to be unusual, my response was tepid,
lacking any of the astonishment or fear or disbelief that might seem called for.
After watching this new shape for a minute or two, I set my half-finished glass
back on the kitchen counter and went back up to bed, where I fell immediately
asleep.
In the
morning I found the glass where I’d left it and knew that I’d been awake in the
night. I’d not been dreaming. I’d seen this object through a lens, and the lens
had magnified the image. What I’d seen had therefore had the properties of light,
and behaved consistently as light would. It was as if these small tests of the
reality of the thing had been determined beforehand and fed into me, so that I
would perform them and know that this had actually happened, and that I had
seen something that was actually there. But I’d not thought of this at the
time; I had only done what it occurred to me to do, though these actions at the
time had an odd significance, as though I were responding to suggestions of
deep meaning. It was only then that I began to think of how strange this whole
thing had been. I remember telling my parents and their friend over breakfast
that I’d seen something very odd, and described it to them. I don’t think my
parents had any reaction to this whatever, though I remember Stu looking at me,
her mouth hanging open, eyes wide and alarmed, though but for only a moment.
The subject was immediately dropped and I knew better than to make any further
mention of it.
