I Saw Something in the Sky

I hate to even admit it in print, but the truth is, yes, I have.
I saw something in the sky and I still don't know what the hell it was.
Although I write horror fiction, I'm not someone who has an overwhelming interest in the paranormal. Yes, I've watched MONSTERQUEST and some of the UFO documentaries that are on Discovery etc. I admit to being a big fan of THE X-FILES. But I don't read UFO books or subscribe to newsletters or even visit any of the paranormal websites. To me, that stuff has always basically been fodder, grist for the writer's mill. I look at it as I look at just about everything: hey, that tidbit might work for a story or you know, if I twisted that around a tad it might make a pretty scary/weird/disturbing little tale. I've written science-fiction horror stories. Quite a few in fact. My novels HIVE and DEAD SEA are both sf/horror and have extraterrestrials in them...and not nice, cuddly ones either. I wrote quite a few stories of this type for Greg Gifune's now defunct BURNING SKY magazine. But I never wrote any of this actually believing in what I was writing. It was just a kick: make the impossible possible and have some fun and scares along the way.
So to me accounts of alien abduction/visitation/UFO sightings etc. are never something I spent a great deal of time thinking about. But I kept an open mind: maybe they happen and maybe they don't. You sleep better at night that way.
The thing that really interested me about these eyewitness accounts is not so much what they saw but what kind of person they are and how they deal with it. I mean, if you saw something, you REALLY saw something incredible...it would really suck to have everybody laughing at you behind your back. Most disheartening.
Which, in a very roundabout manner, brings us to the very point of this blog entry: I SAW SOMETHING IN THE SKY.
It happened about six, seven years ago. I was working the three to eleven shift. It was summer. Hot as hell. I went out and sat in lawn chair out in the yard at around one in the morning. The sky was very black and the stars were very bright. I was watching them. Just sort of daydreaming, I suppose. That's when I saw it: a jet-black triangular shaped object up in the sky. It was drifting up there, making no sound whatsoever. It had lights at each point. It was so black and so silent that if it had stopped dead up there it would have perfectly camouflaged itself to the night sky, the lights would have looked exactly like stars. It wasn't up very high. I'm guessing 200 feet, not much more. The entire sighting lasted maybe ten seconds. There. Then gone. And like I said: dead silent. No engines. No nothing.
When I first glimpsed it, I thought: a kite. What's a gigantic kite doing drifting in the sky? And then, as realization hit that it was a freaking triangle, a BIG triangle with lights on it...well, I just sat there in absolute awe. Stunned. Thirty seconds after it passed I was still sitting there. Then it hit me: the heebie jeebies. My flesh started to crawl and I ran inside, perfectly freaked out. WHAT DID I JUST SEE? WHAT IN THE HELL DID I JUST SEE?
To this day I do not know. It was a UFO, all right, in the proper definition of the term: Unidentified Flying Object. Did I see an alien craft? Did I see an experimental secret aircraft? Maybe some robotic unmanned drone? I don't know. I only know it was damn weird and writing this again makes my arms and back break out in goosebumps.



I guess this puts me in the position of those people I saw on TV: I saw something that no one would possibly believe. But I saw it. Goddamn yes, I did. And I wonder how many of you might have seen the same thing.