"my personal UFO experience"

by elizabeth you

some people call me paranoid. others call me delusional. they say i spend too much time listening to the voices in my head and not enough time in the 'real world'. i say to these people "the real world is boring! let me have ghosts and fairies and wishing wells!" so i will admit that my credibility is around a negative 15. i watch the x-files. i run a conspiracy website. but i'm not sure i believe in aliens and always thought that people who saw ufos were off their nut. this weekend changed my mind.

friday, july 21, 2001. 10pm EST. i'm outside smoking a cigarette (camels, nothing 'fancy') and letting the dogs outside one last time before bed. it's a clear night, a rarity for living so close to the ocean. there's a bright planet in the sky (mars?) I turn off the porch light for better viewing. in the near dark the stars are overwhelming. you can trace the bright band of the milky way across the sky. the constellations are so bright and crowded with stars you can't usually see that it is hard to recognize them.

i'm facing east when i see the brightest shooting star i've ever seen in my life. it's brighter than the planet glowing close by. it shoots impossibly fast down towards earth and vanishes after (a relative) inch. it doesn't fade away. it doesn't streak through the atmosphere. it just disappears.

i say to my self "self, that was the weirdest shooting star i've ever seen"

then just to the left of where it first appeared, it appeared again. bright bright yellow flash of light. this time it zoomed about the same distance, only up. not down, not sideways, up.

"self, i didn't know that shooting stars could travel upwards"

before Self could answer I saw it a third time. bright. yellow. fast. it appeared between the spaces i had seen it first and second, zipping Sideways back towards where it had first appeared. gone. quick.

too bright to be a planet or star. too erratic to be a satellite. too fast to be a plane. they don't have swamp gas up here. too high to be a bottle rocket.

i stayed outside watching the sky. feeling watched. searching for a meteorite or a satellite or an airplane...or something else. cold and tired i gave up after thirty minutes of nothing and went inside. i locked the doors and turned off the lights. i climbed the stairs, got undressed, and climbed into bed with my husband.

"honey, i think i just saw a UFO"

"that's nice dear."