My UFO Encounter, 8/15/24 - 12:28am

Despite my lifelong interest in UFOs, I was resigned to likely never seeing one. Last month I finally did see one though, and it wasn't what I expected. Something really is up there.

*NOT AN ACTUAL PICTURE OF WHAT I SAW - I JUST NEEDED A THUMBNAIL LOL

Date of sighting: Thursday, 8/15/24
Time: 12:28am
Location: Orange County, NY
Duration: 2 seconds or less

It was just after midnight on 8/15/24, and we had a lot of rain the previous week, so I was making up for lost time, since I didn’t get to stargaze during that period. I went over to this walking path I use almost daily; it’s not a path in the woods or anything, it’s one that is on the edge of town, but snakes through a suburban neighborhood at certain parts. The path is perfect for lazy stargazing, because I don’t have to travel very far to get there, and even though it doesn’t provide the best view of the sky, the fact that it’s on the outskirts of town minimizes the light pollution I’d see otherwise, so I get a pretty good view of the stars there.

I’m walking down the path, and a bend is up ahead. On the left of me are rows of mid-sized homes on a slight incline, basically the middle of suburbia. Behind the rows of houses is a tree line, which from my perspective juts upward above the houses, and obscures a part of the sky. Just above the tree line is where the reddish-colored haze of light pollution begins, but it is very minimal.

Directly above me is a clear look at the sky - bright, but crystal clear.

On my right, another row of houses just like on the left, with some trees behind them too. This is irrelevant though, since everything occurs straight ahead, above, and to the left of me.

As I came out of the bend and the path straightened off, I resumed looking up at the sky. Despite having a fairly limited patch of sky to work with, the patch was big enough, especially in combination with the path, which was not brightly illuminated. It was crystal clear out, there was zero cloud coverage, definitely some humidity but there wasn’t a visible soupy-haze hanging in the air either. The bright moon did drown out some of the stars I’d ordinarily be able to see with ease, but it was still clear enough to look.

The Perseid meteor showers were around that time. I am very familiar with meteors. I’ve seen many, and see them regularly. I’m aware of how they travel, their general speed, their sometimes multi-colored fiery displays, etc. Same goes for most things in the sky and space, such as airplanes and satellites. I’ve seen Starlink. I’ve seen the I.S.S. I’ve seen satellites that are not the I.S.S. I’ve seen things that look like satellites but are actually junk that came off a Chinese rocket after its booster phase. I use flight radars to verify the air traffic above me while I’m looking. I’m not a trained observer, but I use all the tools at my disposal to try and identify unknown things in the sky, and am good at it.

Anyway, I’m coming out of the bend in the path now and am walking straight ahead. I’ve got my headphones on, head craned up at the sky, eyes glued to the stars. After a few moments I glance down at my phone for a second to change the song I was listening to when I suddenly noticed a flash in the sky at about the 11 O’Clock position from my perspective, in my peripheral vision.

Typically, when this happens, it immediately draws my gaze, and is almost always a plane that just became visible from behind clouds (or just close enough for me to see), a fast-moving lightning bug, or even a shooting star if I’m able to look at the origin of the flash fast enough to catch the tail-end of it before it burns up.

In the micro-second it took for me to shift my eyes from my phone up to the sky to see what the flash was, I remember subconsciously assuming it was a plane that just became unobscured by light cloud cover, or maybe the light pollution or something; or, maybe the plane had just its position in such a way that made the lights become more pronounced very suddenly, which happens a lot.

I fix my gaze at where the flash was, and that’s when I saw it.

I saw three white, but sorta cream-colored balls of light in a perfect Isosceles Triangle in front and above me, headed almost directly for me, just off to my left a little. It was moving fast. I could see all of it. Or all of…them?

My first thought was “holy shit, I’m seeing a classic black triangle UFO, I can’t believe it!” and I remember my adrenaline spiking here, I felt it. The excitement. I didn’t see a red light in the center of it though. I was frozen in place; this thing stopped me dead in my tracks. This was way out of the ordinary.

It was coming closer, and as it passed sort of over my head, I began to think that it wasn’t a solid object at all. I couldn’t see any structure to it. These were three orbs, three white/cream-colored balls of light in a perfect triangle that are fucking flying so fast above me, they appear and move more like a spotlight does when the circular light reflects off the bottom of a cloud deck. Except what I was seeing were clearly real physical objects that I can see depth to as it passed above me, even though they moved as if they were just reflections from a spot light. There was something about the quality and way it glided across the sky that stood out as radically different than any other object in the sky that I had ever seen before. It seemed weightless, but clearly physical, and maneuvering perfectly. Smoothly. Together.

I don’t know what altitude they were at, but I can tell you that each of the three orbs was a bit smaller than a dime held at arm’s length. And they were getting closer. And because they were so low, and because the trajectory of the path they were on, I knew they’d be flying above me at such an angle that I could see both the front and the rear and the side of them as they pass, if there is such a thing.

It took less than a second for the realization to set in, that what I was seeing was no plane, nor a classic black triangle I’m so familiar with from UFO history. Any sense of familiarity was gone at this point as this incredible set of objects glided silently above me.

Immediately after realizing that it wasn’t a plane, I remembered to check to see if I could hear anything. I ripped my headphones off my head without taking my eyes off the thing and listened. It was silent. No noise was coming from it. Not a sound other than the comfy end of summer night bugs could be heard.

Then, the next instant, I thought about recording it for a brief second, but knew I didn’t have long given how fast it was moving. My iPhone storage was also full, and I would have been unable to take a recording anyway. My phone was operational immediately after the sighting, and I noticed no disruptions to its functionality or the lights/electricity around me.

Keep in mind, this entire sighting lasted only two seconds. I am able to recall all of this because I am not really recalling it at all - I wrote all of these details literally after the sighting concluded at 12:28am. I know how faulty memory can be.

At this point, knowing I could do nothing but watch the show and try to remember as much as possible, I just stood there motionlessly, looking up at this thing as it silently glided over me. The orbs were in perfect formation. Perfect. They were kind of turning, actually. The whole formation was. As if it wasn’t on a perfect trajectory, but a slightly curved one, and the apex of that little curve is directly above me. It’s hard for me to explain, but from my specific vantage point, the perspective granted me a view of them pulling not really a tight turn by any means, but definitely not completely straight either.

I realized it wasn’t a structured craft so I spent the remaining seconds studying each orb individually, since they were seemingly separate crafts.

Trying to articulate the following is very frustrating to me, because I simply cannot find a way to describe how strange those lights were. They were not like any lights I have ever seen before anywhere, ever, at all. The quality inherent to them was different. Think of all the styles of lights and bulbs and lighting equipment you’ve seen over the years, from streetlights to college dorm room LED strips. No matter how different any of those styles of lights are from one another, they still retain a shared quality amongst each other. There is no situation where you look at a light and wonder “what the fuck is that?” Right? You know it’s a light, it’s just you don’t know where it’s coming from, what it’s fixed to, what building it’s on, etc. You’re not confused about what it is.

What I was looking at were clearly three glowing lights, but they just…were not like those normal, everyday lights we see. These lights weren’t like any lights I have ever seen before. They appeared simultaneously flame-like, but diffuse and contained. There was no blinking, flashing, nor any movement in the center of the lights. There was no flickering. It did not change color. However, I will say that they were just rich in a way I cannot articulate or communicate. They were unnatural, cartoonish, akin to a rendering in Blender or a product of some CGI program. There was something about them that was just... totally different and unnatural. Those are the two points that I really want to drive home to you guys: it was both the way it moved as well as the inherent essence/nature of the lights that was unnatural. It wasn’t what it did, it’s what it was that was so unnatural. I don’t mean “unnatural” as in “synthetic” or “manmade” or “artificial” - I mean it seemed like a light that ordinarily isn’t on the visible spectrum or something.

Slightly easier to explain (though still quite difficult for me I think, I’ve tried and erased so much of this already) is the other strange quality to the lights that appeared slightly more familiar to me. Present in front of the lights/orbs, especially the bottom two, was what appeared to be some type of light wispy haze whipping by as they flew. However, the whispy haze/clouds/whatever was fairly transparent, meaning I could still see the lights/orbs perfectly fine behind the haze/wispy stuff. The wispy haze stuff was flicking across the lights/orbs the same way you’d expect to see them flicking by a large airliner as it flews through light cloud cover. You know what I mean by that?

If you’ve ever seen a passenger plane fly behind light cloud cover, you’ll recall that it becomes partially obscured and then unobscured as it flies through patches of clouds of varying thickness. At night, if the aircraft is low enough, you can see the clouds and haze whip by the lights of the aircraft as it flies fast through the sky. It sort of looked like that, as if there were some type of clouds or haze around these orbs, constantly in front of them, but not around them, or enveloping them.

As soon as the realization set in that this wasn’t a plane or even the classic black triangle UFO, my body and mind reacted in a way I did not expect it to. I was literally living something I have always wanted to experience, and hoped to experience. In the first split second, when I drew my eyes to the flash, I was composed and logical; I remember running down my mental checklist at lightning speed (e.g was it making sound? what time is it? how fast? how low? electrical disruptions? lost time? Animal disruptions?). I tried to soak in as many details with my naked eye as I could before I lost it.

But as it flew over me, and I saw the quality of those lights, and how fucking strange it moved across the sky, I was hit with a pretty visceral reaction to what I was witnessing. I felt suddenly flushed with adrenaline, like my entire body’s blood supply just got re-rerouted to where it needed to go in order to deal with a fight or flight scenario you were just confronted with suddenly and without warning, a really bad one. It was similar to that sudden sinking feeling people report feeling in their gut when getting bad news, or seeing something awful, or gross. My adrenaline spiked, and even as I type this now, I can feel my hands start to tremble a bit. It wasn’t really fear though. I don’t really know what I was feeling actually. But my point is that the thing was so obviously anomalous and other-worldly that the instantaneous recognition of that fact just frazzled my entire system in an instant. It was so outside the realm of familiarity that it shocked me, I guess. I understand now why even witnesses who have time to record these things almost never end up being able to avert their gaze long enough to grab the camera. It was truly incredible, and yet all I had seen up until this point were three lights/orbs flying in formation on a relatively straight path. As I said, at this point, it was its very nature that was so unusual.

It continued to glide across the sky, now going from the 11 to my 10 O’Clock position. I’m beginning to pivot on my heels a bit now to keep my eyes on it. I have to turn my body as it moves to my side. The altitude of it stays the same throughout. Same with speed. At this point in the sighting, it is now clear to me that this is much lower than I initially thought it was because I realize how quickly I have to turn my body to keep track of it. This wasn’t high at all. I remember feeling small and vulnerable at this point, now that what was happening was becoming clear to me.

As it continued gliding, it then reached a point nearly directly to my left, gliding from the 10 to the 9 O’Clock position, and is about to get lost behind the treeline of those houses I told you about at the beginning. I only had a few more moments before it would fly behind the trees and out of sight, or get lost in the light pollution.

This next part was really important, because it confirmed for certain that what I was seeing was not a single, structured craft. As it flew from the 12 O’Clock position to my 9 O’Clock position, and as I was pivoting on my heels and rotating my body to the left to compensate for it’s very fast movement, I could see that all three lights/orbs were performing some sort of turn in unison, which basically from my perspective enabled me to see one of the orbs pass in front of the other at the apex of this minor turn in trajectory. This allowed me to see the distance between the orbs, and the space in between them, for a split second.

This incredibly brief moment really highlighted how freakishly perfect these orbs were in formation. The tightness of their turn, the smoothness of their glide. None ever deviated. They were not floating like a balloon, bobbing around. These were not balloons strung together. It’s like they were fixed to a specific quantum point in physical space, and gliding across that invisible track in the sky, in accordance with the programmed path of the others, equally smooth and unwavering. All three performing a perfect turn in the sky, no sound, as if they were reflections on a cloud deck, yet with depth, and whispy haze wipping across the brilliant, but very strange, lights.

It’s as if they were magnetically aligned with the others and tethered to each other so perfectly that they didn’t move at all. Even the individual fighters in the midst of the tightest of ‘V’ formations float around a little bit while holding the ‘V’ . Even autonomous drone swarms, at least the ones I’ve seen on Youtube, deviate a bit.

And then there’s just the way the whole thing glided across the sky. The way it actually moved across the sky didn’t resemble anything I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how to explain it or what even could explain the difference, but it flew differently then the way planes do. If you watch a fighter jet at top speed and a commercial airliner at top speed, there are differences of course - differences in appearance, differences in speed, one breaks the sound barrier, the other doesn’t….but they’re both objects flying through air and experiencing friction. The way this thing moved, it was like it was weightless. Reflective. Ethereal. And yet undoubtedly physical, and with depth between each other, moving with precision I have not seen in aviation.

I think that weird reaction I had when seeing it was the uncanny valley thing, or something similar. Like an immediate subconscious recognition of something unfamiliar to me and the entire genetic lineage of my species. It made me think about all the close encounter stories of landed or low flying crafts, and how all the dogs and cattle and horses flip the heck out when these things are in the vicinity. It’s like they’re reacting to a predator.

Anyway, the best way I can describe the movement of the lights/orbs was that it resembled a video game cutscene, like the CGI from it. It looked like it wasn’t real. It had that reflective quality to it, that is recognizable in the same way you see a spotlight moving on the cloud deck and know it isn’t affixed to an airplane. There was an inherent quality to it that just made it seem fake. I wish I could describe it better…I feel like I should be able to, but I know I can’t, and that’s just another thing that makes me feel so fucked with after this incident. Like, it’s a joke that I even saw something like this, and it’s also a joke not only because I literally can’t explain it for you fully or in a way that encapsulates the true nature of it, but because I’m even trying to at all.

Now, back to this little maneuver it’s doing, and the nanosecond of time I saw the one orb pass in front of the other as it turned and banked simultaneously, like a giant triangle in the sky being tilted by invisible fingers.

I tried my best to find a video that best captures the type of angle I was viewing this from, and what I mean by an orb passing in front of the other. Watch the below video of planes flying in formation, starting at 1:49. Note how they approach from nearly head-on, then fly past the camera, giving us a glimpse of the formation of planes from the side. That’s what I mean. I was able to see these things from the side for a split second (btw, I don’t know if the UFOs in the clip below are real, I just needed a good video of airplanes in formation captured from a perspective that was close to mine).

Eventually, their maneuver/turn is finishing off, and they’re sort of beginning to reorient themselves back to how they were before, but not quite out of it fully yet, and it’s beginning to fly away from me now. It was like they were re-adjusting while still in formation. Straightening back out.

But then, it didn’t really end up straightening back out. As it rotated and was seemingly about to resume its original position (while still gliding across the sky), it does something that stuns me.

Very suddenly, the orb I was mostly fixed on the whole time (the bottom right) suddenly began to violently vibrate in place as it stayed in formation and flew with the others. It was like a slightly loose lug nut being violently rattled, and it’s slightly bouncing in place as the other properly screwed-in lug nuts remain properly affixed. Envision some type of lug nut or screw slightly loose on a vehicle driving down a bumpy road, and you can see the nut slowly vibrating and swiveling as it loosens and spins due to the vibrations of the bumpy road. Make sense? That blew my mind when I saw it happening, and really startled me, because it’s like it was being shaken out of place, while staying in place, in formation, in the middle of some type of trajectory change.

Suddenly, it did the most incredible thing. As the one orb continues to vibrate, it gets more intense and more intense as if it’s vibrating to the point that it’s about to become detached and shook loose from the invisible quantum dot it was fixed to.

I found another video to demonstrate the sort of movement it was making. Look at the nut spin upward and then off the threaded fastener in the video below. Ignore how it spins, and instead look at how it wobbles in the split seconds before it comes fully off the fastener. You’ll notice it wobbles more and more the closer it gets to the top. That’s exactly what I was seeing, or at least the closest thing I can think of to compare it to:

And then, the exact moment it fully “shook loose”, it initiated a spiraling maneuver - all three orbs simultaneously. Each orb began circling around an invisible center, perfectly. As it glided over me, the orbs were spiraling around and around and around. The lights were not perfect circles now; they left a tail in their wake, sort of like a comet, or the vapor trail of a meteor if that makes sense, but just as luminous as the light itself. The speed of the spiraling motion seemed to remain constant, but the orbs seemed to be getting sucked in to the center slowly, with each rotation becoming tighter and tighter.

I know I’ll catch some flak for using this video to describe to you how this looked, but it literally looked like the Orbs from the (likely fake) MH 370 UFO video. Look how the orbs begin to spiral around the plane. Envision that, but they’re glowing bright white, and are leaving a trail like a comet in their wake:

Three orbs are spiraling across the fucking sky around an invisible center like a fucking sci fi movie directly above me at this point. I can’t believe it. It was literally like the above video, but if the orbs each had their own comet-like tails behind them, and the plane wasn’t there, and the orbs were gradually converging into the center where the plane originally was in the video. The way the spiral happened was otherworldly, and so perfect in its precision that it looked like an animation you’d see in a videogame loading screen where there are animated/CGI graphics of celestial bodies orbiting around a sun. Smooth and perfect. No deviations. Like the path each orb was on was plotted with precision.

The bodies orbiting around the larger celestial bodies like Saturn are smooth as can be, and yet immediately recognizable as artificially smooth - simulated. This looks closer to how it moves then if I were to watch a plane similarly flying in circles.

The way they converged into the center was was as if someone pulled the drain plug to the aether, and the orbs were being sucked down into it, circling the ethereal, invisible drain and being pulled closer into the center as they spiral around and around and around more and more quickly, still gliding in a relatively straight path. Literally think of the specks of dirt in a gross bath tub and how they swirl and spiral around and around until it gets to the center and sucked down the drain. It looked like that. But with scientific precision as if it was a projected image, or simulated.

Sort of like this, except instead of that goofy looking single object in the .gif, envision three singular orbs spinning around the surface slowly being sucked down into the center (the drain):

Or envision them spinning around the below, but without the appearance of being “sucked” - rather, these orbs appeared to tactfully approach the center rather than get pulled or sucked into it:

And then— I promise you I’m telling the truth—each of the three lights, spiraling around the center, finally converged into the center. The moment the lights converged in the center, they all blinked out of existence right before my eyes. Right in front of me. It was there, then it wasn’t. It was there, then it fucking spiraled into the center of some cosmic vortex like a cartoon and literally disappeared in front of me.

I was shocked, stunned into silence. I can’t stop thinking about it and replaying it over and over in my head. I’m happy I was lucky enough to see it, but at the same time, I feel strangely unsettled. It’s weird to just be left standing there in the middle of the night, surrounded by people asleep in their homes, while this is going on just above their heads. It’s strange that I had to go to bed after that and wake up the next day as if I hadn’t seen something like that. Most strange maybe is that all of this just became more real to me than it ever was before. Things feel a little different now, knowing with full confidence that someone or something is in possession of whatever the fuck that was. I felt so small, and it felt so powerful, and yet gentle. And I felt like it put on a spectacle just to mess with me. I know that sounds weird, and I guess I don’t actually believe that—it just feels like that, because it was all so perfect.

The reason I say that is because: have you ever been to an airshow before? If you have, you know how they fly the planes past the lined-up crowd, but they wait until they’re right in front of the crowd to pull off the crazy maneuvers, right? That’s what this felt like. It felt like this thing was flying at the perfect angle for me to see it all, from start to finish, and initiated that crazy spiraling maneuver in a part of the sky where it could be seen perfectly by me. Obviously I don’t want to come across as if I’m saying that this was purposeful or anything like that; I just couldn’t help but notice the perfect angle and timing of it all. I saw the entire show, from start to finish, because it began above me, and it ended above me.

Anyway, I started to walk back to my car and was scrambling to note everything about the encounter down into my phone’s notepad. I stopped to write all the details I have put in this paper, which is why I know for a fact it happened at 12:28am. I know how poor memory can become, and how bad it is to start with. More importantly, I know how it can be changed over time. I’m proud to say that this is a longform version expanding on the experiences I know with absolute certainty to be true and accurate, because all of it stems from the literal seconds following the sighting itself where I furiously wrote it all down before I even got back to my car, when it was still fresh.

As I continue walking back to the car, I keep playing the event over and over again in my head. Soaking it in, or trying to. I was exhilerated, freaked out, still trembling a bit. In the midst of this, I was struck with a realization about the sighting, or rather, how it began.

Think back to how I was first drawn to it. I was scanning the sky, and there was nothing up there. No planes, no nothing. No clouds. Then, my attention is drawn to the craft(s) above me after I see a flash, similar in luminosity (a bit brighter) than a plane’s navigation lights. I remember thinking back and wondering “how the fuck did it get to that part of the sky so fast, when just a moment ago the sky was completely empty?”

In other words, I didn’t realize it at first, but I think the thing blinked into existence almost directly above me, probably in the same way it blinked out of existence a few seconds later.

If you recall, all of this began with that sudden flash in my peripheral vision, and me turning to look at it. In that brief moment, I subconsciously assumed that it was a plane becoming unobscured from cloud cover or light pollution - suddenly becoming visible to me from my perspective. But seconds earlier, I had scanned the sky and saw zero planes anywhere - any plane that was in the sky was far, far away, and would have taken many seconds before it was close enough to be almost above me like this thing was.

So, how was it just suddenly there?

I continued to think on that, and then realized: there was no clouds, remember? It was clear that night. There was no light pollution directly above me. There’s no way I would have missed this bright series of fucking orbs approaching from a distance. And then the real kicker: the orbs were not blinking or flickering or changing in luminosity at all, and yet I was originally drawn to their presence after I saw a bright FLASH. Yet the object I saw did not flash at all.

I got the weird sinking feeling in my stomach again. “Did this fucking thing blink into and out of existence right above me?”

I know it sounds crazy, I cannot believe I am writing this right now. But I know what I saw. This wasn’t a meteor, or a satellite crashing, or even a missile launch. We don’t see those here anyway, but I’m familiar with them - they even spiral, too. But not like this. This was a spiral pattern of technological design, plotted with scientific precision. Not a meteor breaking up or splitting above me. Not a satellite. Not a re-entry. It was so obviously anomalous that I cannot stress it enough.

Then there was that strange wispy, hazy cloud like stuff that was flicking across the light of the orbs as it flew, almost as if it was flying above or through some light haze and was illuminating it. I remember that this haze-like effect was only (or mostly) visible to me when I was viewing the three orbs from the side, like I showed above in that video of the planes. I did not see that haze when the lights were further away.

Even stranger though, the misty stuff followed it from that point forward the whole way, in front of the two bottom orbs. It was only visible in front of the lights; it wasn’t enveloping the lights entirely. But there was a lot of it. It almost looked like little scratches in the glass bulb encompassing a bright light; there’s the blinding white hot center of it, and a black tear across parts of it, but moving like mist whipping passed a moving vehicle. Like a wall of hanging fog disrupted by a motorcycle that just drove through it at 60mph, but if you couldn’t see the fog until he disturbed it by driving through it, and then its only visible in front of the motorcycle’s lights.

This is a very common characteristic of UFO sightings, especially the close encounters. Look anywhere across the most famous cases, and you’ll see many eyewitness reports referencing weird rippling air pockets around the craft, sometimes even bending and disrupting light that touches it. One witness to the famous Phoenix Lights mass sighting in March 1997 said the air right beneath the underbelly of the gigantic mile-wide, V-shaped craft looked like it was rippling like the air near a gasoline nozzle. Another described it as looking similar to how the air looks an inch above the hot pavement in the summer, all wavey. I don’t know if that’s what I was seeing, but I wanted to mention it. It didn’t look specifically like that, but I recognized the similarities right away. It really looked like this thing was travelling with a very light pocket of fog around each of the individual orbs. It was just hard to see except when it was in front of the lights.

The worst and weirdest part about it was how not real it looked. I had that “uncanny valley” feeling where it wasn’t moving differently or faster than manmade objects, but the very way in which it moved in that ordinary path (ordinary until it FUCKING BARREL ROLLED AND SPIRALLED INTO OBLIVION AT LEAST!!!) just seemed like it wasn’t real. It felt similar to how you can watch a hyper-realistic Unreal Engine demo that is nearly indistinguishable from reality, but when you see how the cars move or the NPCs move, you can immediately tell that there’s just something off about it. I don’t know about you, but I’m seeing this play out in live time with AI and deepfakes. Some people already have a sense for it. It was like that. I was looking at this somewhat odd but basic orb-like light in the sky, plain, white, not blinking - and yet I knew immediately that it just wasn’t from our neighborhood.

It was like, envision you take a human Man that has never heard of a mountain lion or bobcat before, has no conception of it as a predator, and you dropped him off on a mountain to go meet one. Seemingly baked in to our genetics is the instinctual reaction to fucking shutter when we lay eyes on one. Maybe I’m totally full of it here, but you hear these stories all the time - people who have the hair on the back of their necks raise after getting the creeps from someone who they sat next to on the bus, only to find out later that person went on to commit some horrific crime, whatever. Moments of freakishly accurate and insightful intuitions that come about unprompted in the face of some unusual scenario.

Except my reaction wasn’t pure fear. It was more like being frozen in awe and shock. It was so ridiculously absurd in how it unfolded, from start to finish, that it was almost like it was playing a joke on me. It’s like it fit every sci fi trope of interstellar travel you can imagine. I mean, the fact it flashed into existence above me? and just disappeared? Beautiful, clear, starry sky, and this thing is suddenly there, glides on by before suddenly spiraling and spiraling then converging into the center blinking out of existence, in the perfect part of the sky where I could see it all…

Also, I don’t want this post to ultimately be seen as me promoting particular belief on the subject. I know what I saw and it’s so clearly beyond anything I could even really understand, that’s it. My mind remains open.

That’s really all I can say about it. Nothing I say or do will ever do it justice. Even if I drew it for you, it wouldn’t capture the whole thing. It would capture one aspect of its appearance. Even if I had the whole thing drawn up and animated, it would capture multiple aspects, but it would still be unable to capture the weird way it inherently appeared. Its very presence was immediately recognizable as “not normal,” like something outside of daily reality.

Currently reflecting on all this, it’s all kind of…sobering, unsettling—I don’t know. Now, all of this isn’t theoretical anymore. I know something is up there, and we are at the whim of it. I suppose one upside is that I no longer have the creeping doubt about it anymore—the negative ruminations where I wonder if I’m wasting my time on things that don’t matter, wasting my life on some gigantic psyop cooked up by the usual suspects. All of that is gone now because I know that whatever it is I saw, it was beyond anything I could even comprehend.

Yet I hope it comes around again.