Framed photographs of colorful,
splotchlike orbs taken at night in the field covered the walls of the
guesthouse living room, and one, a blur of spectral colors, which had been
described to me definitively by my admitting host as a faery, it in particular
caught my attention – it even had defined “wings” and something resembling a
skirt or tail, hanging in the night air above a small cluster of people, who all
looked up toward it. It reminded me distantly of the Marian apparitions
photographed around the Coptic Church in Cairo, between 1968 and 1971. As the
evening wore on, there gathered in the guesthouse perhaps half a dozen of us
altogether who were not with the ranch itself, but there to encounter what
might be encountered. I was a little surprised to find myself relatively at
ease with this small and unfamiliar group, as conversation came untroubled and informal
comfort seemed the order of things. After a time, the same woman who’d first
admitted me and shown me to my room put her head in the door again in to
announce to us that James had received acknowledgement that they were here now… that it was time to
come to the field if we wanted to see them. A wave of anticipation rushed over us
as we hurriedly gathered up our jackets and cameras, following after.
It was a short walk through darkness and
beyond the main building to the field, where James and the others were waiting.
As I walked out amongst the scattered deck chairs in the chill, open air, I
started to notice colorful blotches of light popping in the peripheries of my
vision, greens and reds. They wiggled and disappeared as quickly as they’d
arrived. It seemed an interior, perceptual thing, though very physical, and not
quite like anything I’d experienced before, so I said out loud, yet still
mostly to myself, “What are these colors I’m seeing in the corners of my eyes?”
James replied, surprising me that he’d even heard my soft voice, “Those are the
beings that live out here.” We looked up.
It was some moments before anything
started to happen, but then one of us said something to the effect of, “Oh,
there’s one…” Above us, in the sky, one of the many dots moved laterally
against the darkness. A satellite? James pointed a laser at it, for the benefit
of anyone who’d not caught it yet. In the wake of anticipation, I wondered if
this could auger something more to come. I’d heard stories from my new friend
back at the house of spectacular behaviors of lighted objects that had
convinced her to come to live at the ranch. But of what I saw now, this in
itself it didn’t seem like much. Then a second dot of light was noticed, moving
in a different direction. The laser beam called this one out as well, and
infrared goggles started being passed around. In time, more and more of these
dots appeared, moving always in continuous lines. “Let me see if I can get them
to power up,” James said, confidently, following one with his pointer, flashing
the beam on and off. Sure enough, as though reluctant to perform, yet badgered
into it by the laserbeam, the dot did flash back at us. People cheered. This
was repeated a few times, by a few different dots – as several of them appeared
over the hour and a half that we were out there in the field, under the
clearing in the skies.
When the infrared binoculars were passed
over to me, I took a swing with them around the green-lit star field. Nothing.
Even as more dots were sighted, cheered on by the others, and I tried chasing
after them, I just couldn’t seem to catch up with anything. When I said as
much, somebody – I couldn’t tell who in the darkness – suggested that I train the
binoculars toward one particular spot and wait, so I tried this tack, holding
steady, looking directly to an area chosen at random, and waited. I began to
get a sinking feeling, a sadness altogether too familiar, as if even in this
feakazoid behavior, I just wasn’t somehow good enough to get it, a lonely child
again who would never quite fit in. As I sank into this old despair, through
the goggles, in the center of a dark patch, there was a sudden, bright flare-up
and just-as-quick disappearance. My animator’s time-sense calculated: at 24
frames per second of film, it would have been over with in 3; one eighth of a
second. Nobody else commented, as no one seemed to see it but me. But I had
very definitely seen it, at just exactly the moment that I’d given up and felt
most entirely alone.
When James called it good, deciding that this
performance was over for the night and we should go in, one of the staff
tallied that we’d seen 22 such little moving dots of light in the 90 minutes
that we’d been watching. I’d heard in James’s interviews about the “Heavens
Above” satellite-tracking software they employed to check what hardware was
actually accounted for in the sky at a given time, but hadn’t seen or heard any
numbers for that time span that evening, but even given the mostly unexceptional
nature of what we did see, moving-spot-wise (and not accounting for my more
subjective experiences) the numbers seem, at the very least, a little weird.
That’s a lot of satellites, some of
which seemed happy to blip at us more or less on command. Yet it was all so
distant, diminished, unspectacular, and to the skeptic, unconvincing – while to
those inclined toward belief, it seemed yet more ready proof. One visitor, a
young man who’d come in a group with two others, was visibly annoyed at the willingness
of the rest to accept this as in any way significant. He’d seen a few
satellites and nothing more. I couldn’t exactly blame him for feeling this way,
but I’d had the experience of something reaching me – and only me – at the
moment when I needed it the most. And I’d had the feathery little blob-colors
touching me, as I could almost more feel than see them, brushing quickly,
playfully up against the flanks of my soul, as I’d first stepped out into the
field. But it was so subtle and subjective, so easy to dismiss, and in that
sense, exactly like most of the experiences I’ve had of this sort.
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