Unidentified Flying Object

In the spring of 2003, a group of friends and I decided we would go on a camping trip.  We packed 2 vehicles in with buddies, gear and enough food that could feed an army of stoned high school boys.  And being the intelligent college kids that we were, we left San Diego just in time to hit LA traffic 20 minutes out  of S.D.

Great. 

Only 4 hours to get to LA and then another 4 hours to our destination.

But not to worry. We were well equipped with a lifestyle supply of assenine humor, munchies, and every 80’s pop singer’s greatest hits…. Can you say Wilson Phillips, “Hold on?” (The mere mention of that song and I get lost into a vortex of Wilson Phillips.  Singing it outloud in my head as my eyes start to glaze over and my slack jaw murmurs every other word… :gasp!: I’ve revealed too much)

Anyhow, as we crept up the 5 frwy in L.A. traffic that moved slower than a fat kid moving toward the veggie tray, we were starting to near Anaheim, the proud home of Disneyland.  Sitting in the backseat driver’s side, I noticed this interesting plume of smoke billowing out behind what looked like an acme missile. Kind of that classic cartoon missile shape.   The cloud behind it was this technicolored ribbon of bright hued oranges, to purples and blues. 

As I stared at it, I couldn’t quite understand what it was. The smoke didn’t seem to move or dissipate into the atmosphere at all. It seemed to be made of frosting, decorating the sky and frozen in time.

Perhaps it was a new ride at Disneyland?  A big missile seemed like an odd choice for the happiest place on earth.  I also don't recall ever being able to see any rides from the freeway.

As we continued to inch along the 5, I kept looking at this missile with this radiantly long plume, trailing behind it. It was mesmorizing in a way.  The smoke was an incredible array of sunset colors and the tail seemed like it was a long and fiery comet. And though it never seemed to travel or move, the object seemed to grow at an indistinguishable rate like those dinosaur toys that grow in water.  The longer we sat in the car, the bigger it got and the longer the tail grew, but the smoke remained a permanent fixture in the sky.

Eventually the object grew large enough that it didn’t seem logical for it to be a ride at Disneyland in the distance.  However,  I still could not figure out what it was. And what really started to perplex me, was that I also could not understand the distance it was to us, and even the shape.  I had at one point sworn that it was a Billboard perhaps. A 2 dimensional painting of a missile and a comet painted so real that it was a highly effective optical illusion, but not an actual object in the sky.   The other 2 people in the car also started to become very confused.  None of us could get a grasp on it’s actual size, relation in proximity to us, if it was a sculptural object or if it was a photograph.  And at this point we hadn’t even questioned if it was moving or not, because again it seemed to be completely still.

The object however, did not stop growing and we became increasingly disturbed by this.  We started calling the other car on our cell phones, highly alarmed. Wondering if they could explain what we were seeing, but they were as equally confused and frightened.  And the object, it just continued to grow.

The tension in the car went from inquisitive and confused to paniced and scared.  I remember screaming over and over again, “What is that thing?”  And like the most horrific zit on Prom day, the object did not stop growing.  I remember looking out of the backseat window and seeing that it had taken up almost all of the visual property  my window would allow.  

All I could see was silver.

At this point, we were in full swing manic mode.  Everybody in the car was screaming and pointing, grasping at some kind of understanding on what it could be.  I wish I could explain the surrealism of it and absurdity that it presented our feebile minds with.  How could something grow to that size without ever appearing to move?  Why can’t I understand where it actually is in relation to me and at what speed it is growing? 

When I looked out the other side of the car, I realized it wasn’t just our car’s own collective mental trip.  People were frightened to the core.  Panicing on their cell phones,  rubber necking out of their windows and getting into car crash after car crash.  It was like a scene from Independence day.  I must have seen at least 5 sepearate car crashes within the span of 2 minutes.  And no one even cared. They simply stayed on their phones and stepped out of their cars in the standstill highway, staring at the huge metal object in the sky.

At its peak, the object had grown so large in size that I could no longer see around it.  All I could see was a tiny sliver of blue sky on the horizon and the rest of the sky was covered by an object that was a brilliant and bright silver.  It was completely smooth like looking at the underbelly of a spoon from God.  

The sheer size of it made it impossible for me to comprehend what was happening, where it was in distance, and again, whether or not it was moving.  It is the most massive thing I have ever seen and truly unfathomable on all accounts. 

After several moments of screaming and demanding to know what it was, my mind eventually found a calm and a peace.  I was going to die.  There was no other option.  There was no physical way that we could drive away from the situation.  It was so massive that I wasn’t sure anyone in the United States would be able to escape the possible reprecussions of what was about to happen.  I had a few imagined moments of a sudden explosion, and my last images being of me and my friends flying through the air in slow motion as the world burned beneath us.  And then I realized that I would rather not suffer in pain and just embrace what would happen next.

And then to my surprise, when there was hardly any sky left to be witnessed, I blinked.

I blinked and there was a flash of light and the entire metal object seemed to just pop like a bubble. Vanished.  Completely plucked from the sky.  At that moment all of time stood completely still.  Here it comes, I thought to myself.   This is the moment before everything gets blown to smithereans. And I just sat there, calmly, waiting for it. Waiting to hear the thunderous boom and to have my body atomized into the atmosphere…

But it never came.

Nothing. Ever came.

No boom, no explosion, not even a gust of wind happened. Nothing.  I couldn’t believe it.  I simply could. Not. Believe. It.  How do you get rid of an object so unfathomably large, in a splice of a second without some crazy vaccum effect, or at least a loud noise? A butterfly could have farted and it would have had a bigger impact.  Nothing.  

At first I was certain that it was something of the chemical warfare variety.  Anthrax or Napalm or something that might take a few minutes for it to kick into effect. But again there was nothing.

Was it all a dream?  Had I imagined all of this?  But when I looked back  into the sky, the long, technicolored plume of smoke still remained. As buoyant, and pristine as ever. It was as if someone had plasticeaned the smoke and it was hung by a string in the sky. 

The people standing on the freeway were equally as stunned. No one could believe what had happened and strangely, there wasn’t much conversation around it either. People hoped back into their cars and we all continued to inch up the 5 freeway that Friday afternoon as if all was normal again.

I immediately started to call several of my friends and family and demanding that they turn on the news and see if anything was being reported about the event that just occurred.  Nothing. There was nothing on the news.

An hour had gone by and finally we heard a few reports on the radio.  The news had tried to pass it off as a missile launch testing that was well publicized before it occurred.  There were families on the news stating that they knew there would be a missile launch test and had all  brought out launch chairs and gathered as a family to watch. They had been anticipating it all week.  Some went so far as to say that they had created a family picnic outside so they would be sure not to miss it.

This was the first time that I had realized the elaborate and blatant lies that the news had been feeding us. 

A missile launch test over the 5 freeway in Anaheim on a Friday at 5pm?  You couldn’t find a desert to do this in the wee hours of the night?  The Mojave was suddenly occupied with every ruler of every country that afternoon, so you decided to test over Los Angeles during traffic hour?

And what was even more disturbing was that I had friends believe the news account versus my first hand experience. A first hand experience that I shared with 2 others in my car, and 3 other friends in the car behind us.  Not to mention the several hundred people that got into a car accident at the same time that will need to explain to their insurance companies that they saw a huge metal disc that filled the entire sky.

To this day, I can’t be certain that I know what I saw that day and how it disappeared so effortlessly.   Like the simple pop of a bubble and boom / flash it’s vanished.  I have my theories and ideas about it. If you’re interested, you can ask me about it some time.  Something along the lines of living in a holographic universe…if that's your topic. 

What I find almost disturbing however, is that this last year, I had a 10 year reunion with the same friends that were on that trip.  I asked them to recount the details as they saw it, just to make sure I had not inflated the story over the years and that I remembered it all correctly.  This is probably THE most significant thing I have ever witnessed with my own eyes and it is really important to me that I have all the details right.  The 2 in my car remembered it EXACTLY as I did. I did not have to fill in the blanks for them, they told me their story, just as I described here.  What I found interesting however is that the other car did not remember the incident very well at all until we reminded them of how it just vanished.  At that point it came back to them, and they smiled it off. 

HOW could you have EVER forgotten about that?  It was almost as though it was too much for the human mind to comprehend, so it didn’t.  It got placed in a box labeled, “unexplainable” and placed on a dusty shelf in the back of their brains.  It makes me wonder how often this happens to all of us. 

All I know, is that, that must have been what happened to the Native Americans when the Europeans ships first came upon their land. There are stories that they weren’t even capable of seeing the ships until they were nearly on land because their brains had never fathomed that reality before, so it just did not compute.

Regardless, I am grateful that things did not end in tragedy and suffering. And if it is indeed holographic technology, I can't wait to get my hands on it too. I'd sure as hell create something way cooler than a silver disk in the sky.