An Alien Encounter
Prefacing Note: The following extraordinary story, absolutely as true as my memory serves me, which is quite well, has never been documented before, and through the years only brief details of this strange encounter have been discussed among family and intimate friends – including my immediate family members, all of whom were there (as well as the family dog, who was terrified)
. The story should have been told publicly long ago, but there is always the reticence – for fear of ridicule or worse – that inhibits the ego and keeps one silent about such things. – lap/alw (At right is the old dirt road as it looks today at the crossroads where the encounter occurred. The alien craft approached from the upper right of the photo while we were driving in the direction of the view. I first stopped the car near the point where I took this picture.)
The incident took place shortly past midnight on a summer night in the early 1970's. We were on our way home from a drive-in movie in Riverton, Wyoming. Working for a large Uranium mining company, our home was among the company-management housing residences at the remote Lucky Mc Camp in the Gas Hills of central Wyoming some 45 miles east-southeast of Riverton. The state secondary highway in those days was paved for only the first 32 miles – company maintained dirt the last 13. At night the lonely dirt road across the barren, rolling, sagebrush-spotted countryside held a silent, sometimes disquieting, emptiness that I was often eerily aware of when I traveled that road, especially when I was alone. But this particular evening, with the kids (my young son and two younger daughters) and our dog asleep in the back seat, my wife dozing next to me in the front, I was placidly comfortable, content and unconcerned with our surroundings, driving rapidly but smoothly along the well-kept dirt road, anxious to get home, get our kids to bed, and get some much-needed sleep myself.
Seven miles or so up the dirt road there was a crossroad that went off to some remote ranches to the southwest and to an archaeologically significant historical site called Castle Gardens a few miles to the northeast. The crossroad eventually connected with US highway 20-26 at Moneta some 25 miles away. About two miles from the crossroads to the northwest, along the road we traveled toward those crossroads, is a high ridge where the road came through a gap.
As I topped the ridge, I saw, far off to the south of us, a pulsing light that changed colors, alternating from red, to amber, to green, to white, back to red. The color change was soft, subtle, and gradual, like a slow fading in and out of the colors – not like the abrupt change of, say, a traffic light; nor were the colors as vivid or harsh as, for instance, the flashing lights of a law enforcement patrol car. I could tell that the object was large, flying not far off the ground for from the ridge I was looking down at it, but in the darkness of the night I had no familiar landmarks to judge its distance or true size. But I knew instantly that it was not a conventional craft of any kind. I remember my first reaction was of curiosity and wonder – nothing else. There was no apprehensive fear, no abject concern, no sense of urgency. As I drove along I could tell that the object and I were approaching each other. I was fascinated, even excited, but entirely unafraid.
Reaching over to my wife I shook her shoulder, rousing her out of her doze, and pointed out the object to her; even in the gray darkness of the car I saw her eyes widen in amazement and disbelief. She calmly asked me what it was, and I calmly said I didn't know. Together we watched it as we rode along for perhaps a mile and a half while the kids and the dog still slumbered peacefully in the rear seat. By then I could tell that the object was indeed a flying craft, moving slowly in our direction no more than 50 or 60 feet off the ground. Somehow I knew we were going to meet at the crossroads. It got there before we did, and a quarter mile or so away I saw it stop, hovering low just off to the sides of the two roads, not more than a hundred feet from the intersection. I slowed the car to a few miles an hour, approaching the craft cautiously.
About a hundred yards from the junction, I could tell that the craft was no more than 20 or 30 feet off the ground, that it was not as large as I'd first thought – perhaps 30 or 40 feet in diameter. It was oval, but not round, shaped more like a dirigible or a football than a saucer, and it had a translucent, diaphanous, appearance – as though I could see into it. But I couldn't see anything inside it, nor could I see windows or portholes. There was no sound that I could hear, and as I approached within 100 feet or so of the junction I rolled my window down, listening for a sound. There was none – absolutely none – though we could not have been more than 200 feet away from the hovering craft.
But as soon as I'd rolled down the window despite my wife's vehement objections, our dog began to wail as if in painful misery, waking up the kids, cowering on the floorboard in the backseat howling unmercifully, veritably screaming, putting instant fear into the children as they simultaneously heard the dog's cries and saw the colorful but ominous pulsing craft floating in front of us. I stopped the car about 50 feet from the crossroads and we all stared at the craft, questioning one another incomprehensibly, chaotically, since everyone was talking or yelling at the same time, trying to be heard over the howls of our dog as well as each other. Later, reflecting on the incident, considering the dog's seemingly painful wails, I wondered if the craft did emit sound at a very high frequency that was beyond our human hearing range but not the dog's.
We sat there at a standstill for a long time, neither us nor the craft moving an inch, while my wife and I got the kids calmed down some and the dog's howling eventually lessened to whines and moans for reasons I don't to this day understand except to surmise that the craft somehow changed the frequency of its sound if, indeed, there was one. But for us people, at least, there was nothing but the sound of our car's engine, our voices, and the dog's whines.
The "long time" turned into 15 or 20 minutes, I suppose, and after some debate with my wife and son I decided I would simply drive past the craft as fast as I could and head on down the road toward home. Up to that point I'd had a strong urge to get out of the car and walk toward the craft to try to see who was inside it or even to make contact, for I still had no fear, and never did have later on either, of the object, but that idea was greeted with a chorus of "no's" from the rest of the family, and I'm sure I was relieved that they'd talked me out the thought so "compellingly".
When I put the car in gear preparing to move rapidly forward through the intersection and on past the craft, which remained hovering 20 or 30 feet in the air, about 50 feet on the other side of the junction, maybe 20 feet off to the side of the road to our right, it suddenly, quickly, moved directly over the road in front of us and descended to no more than 10 feet above us, maybe less, as I remember thinking there was no way I could drive under it. Its movement, as if to intentionally block us, startled me, and frightened my wife and the kids. Now there was no more than 30 feet between us and I felt that I could sense the presence of living beings, human or otherwise, inside that craft, although I still could not see through those diaphanous colored lights. Yet I "felt" that I could – as if it were no longer my eyes that were doing the "seeing", but rather another, unfamiliar or unknown, sense.
So we sat there in our car in a standoff, watching them watch us, and I realized it would be futile to try to back away or turn around, or turn onto the crossroad, and run, or otherwise try to elude them. Though I was not concerned, particularly, I sensed that my wife and children were frightened, if not scared stiff. For the first time, I remember, I began to wonder what they wanted from us – why they had stopped us like this. But still I was unafraid, somehow knowing that none of us would be harmed.
How long we waited there in that non-confrontational standoff, I have no recollection of, nor am I sure that I ever knew, for in my own mind, at least, there was a long silent period where none of us talked and the dog remained quiet while we simply waited, aware there was nothing else we could do. Maybe it was five minutes, or an hour, or two hours . . . there was simply no way to know. Later on, after I'd churned the incident over and over in my mind for days on end, I realized that all of us had become unaware of time, as if thinking about time or even looking at a watch or a clock had no significance, and that whatever the clock read when we finally got home that night meant nothing, and to this day I cannot recall what the time was when we actually arrived at the house. It should have been an important factor to consider at the time, considering the event, but for some never-to-be-known reason time was the farthest thing from my mind.
But then, after an indeterminate time at that junction, the craft began to move slowly northeast along the crossroad toward Castle Gardens, fairly inching its way along. My window was still down as the craft silently passed no more than 20 feet away and 10 feet above us, and then it began to gain a little speed and our dog began to whimper and whine again, but did not howl. For several hundred yards it drifted slowly, gaining a little altitude and speed, and we watched it, mesmerized, without even considering getting the hell on down the road ourselves. No one said a word; we simply watched it glide along for a mile or so toward the horizon of a nearby ridge to the east, and then we saw a small burst of white light and saw it accelerate at a rate beyond my own comprehension. In a second or two it was a small ball of light the size of a full moon, then Venus, and then it was lost among the stars as if it were a star itself.
The aftereffects of this otherworldly encounter seem, on the surface, to have been nil, although I soon noticed a distinct personality change in my older daughter that I chalked up to interaction with her schoolmates since she was, as I recall, just out of the first grade – maybe the second. As for myself, it was shortly after the incident that my right ear began to ring constantly, which it still does to this day, and I frequently felt nauseous and unbalanced physically from vertigo often accompanied by a low-grade fever. Two or three years later I completely lost my sense of balance and spent two weeks or more in the Lander, Wyoming, hospital with a high fever, unable to walk without leaning against a wall, while a team of doctors, neurologists and neurosurgeons, probed and studied me, trying in vain to figure out what was wrong with me. They finally told me I must have "Madison Avenue" syndrome, a neurological problem caused from excessive drinking, which I dismissed summarily, since I was not a heavy drinker, still played city intramural basketball very well, and innately sensed there was something wrong in my right inner ear, which I'd repeatedly informed them about. I accused the doctors of being "religious fanatics" and went on crawling or groping my way along the hospital room wall to get to the bathroom and back.
After the two weeks or so I awoke one morning, my fever broken, my vertigo completely gone, my head clear and sharp, my pillow and sheets soaked with sweat and a thin runny clear liquid draining out of my right ear. The only problem was that my ear rang louder than ever – just as it constantly rings today. The doctors decided instantly that, no, it wasn't "Madison Avenue" syndrome after all – that it was a viral inner-ear infection, for some reason impossible to detect despite the probing, prodding, blood testing, X-rays, EEG's, EKG's, psychological evaluations, assessments of religious and spiritual shortcomings, and on and on, that they'd done in an effort to diagnose my problem. Perhaps it was some mutant kind of virus they surmised in order to placate me, no doubt fearful that I'd file some sort of malpractice lawsuit against them. I thought about it, but didn't, and went on with my life, the vertigo and fevers behind me now except for what is more or less an annual bout with a little fever and a bit of light-headedness that seems each year to be less egregious than the year before.
Just a couple of weeks ago I felt those old vague symptoms for two or three days, which brought to mind for the first time in a long time, for reasons I can't begin to speculate on, that close encounter with some kind of alien craft nigh on 40 years ago, which spurred me, finally, to write this essay about it today.
There must have been a reason for that mysterious incident, though maybe it was nothing more than a lark for those beings aboard the craft to have a laugh – a little lighthearted fun by showing off their magnificent technology to a small human family in a little white Ford Galaxy all alone on a desolate dirt road in the middle of nowhere in central Wyoming. But I find that as hard to believe as you may find this story. Just let me say that it would give me great peace of mind to someday know who those folks were in that incredible flying machine and what their purpose was in paying us such a memorable – partly at least – visit in the middle of the night those many years ago.
And, too, I've always been afraid to try to find out what it is that's in my right ear. What if there's nothing in there? Or if there is, where did it come from and what is its purpose? So far as I know, it's all innocuous except for the constant ringing, which gets consciously aggravating at times – like listening to someone snore when you're trying to go to sleep.
vvv
. The story should have been told publicly long ago, but there is always the reticence – for fear of ridicule or worse – that inhibits the ego and keeps one silent about such things. – lap/alw (At right is the old dirt road as it looks today at the crossroads where the encounter occurred. The alien craft approached from the upper right of the photo while we were driving in the direction of the view. I first stopped the car near the point where I took this picture.)
The incident took place shortly past midnight on a summer night in the early 1970's. We were on our way home from a drive-in movie in Riverton, Wyoming. Working for a large Uranium mining company, our home was among the company-management housing residences at the remote Lucky Mc Camp in the Gas Hills of central Wyoming some 45 miles east-southeast of Riverton. The state secondary highway in those days was paved for only the first 32 miles – company maintained dirt the last 13. At night the lonely dirt road across the barren, rolling, sagebrush-spotted countryside held a silent, sometimes disquieting, emptiness that I was often eerily aware of when I traveled that road, especially when I was alone. But this particular evening, with the kids (my young son and two younger daughters) and our dog asleep in the back seat, my wife dozing next to me in the front, I was placidly comfortable, content and unconcerned with our surroundings, driving rapidly but smoothly along the well-kept dirt road, anxious to get home, get our kids to bed, and get some much-needed sleep myself.
Seven miles or so up the dirt road there was a crossroad that went off to some remote ranches to the southwest and to an archaeologically significant historical site called Castle Gardens a few miles to the northeast. The crossroad eventually connected with US highway 20-26 at Moneta some 25 miles away. About two miles from the crossroads to the northwest, along the road we traveled toward those crossroads, is a high ridge where the road came through a gap.
As I topped the ridge, I saw, far off to the south of us, a pulsing light that changed colors, alternating from red, to amber, to green, to white, back to red. The color change was soft, subtle, and gradual, like a slow fading in and out of the colors – not like the abrupt change of, say, a traffic light; nor were the colors as vivid or harsh as, for instance, the flashing lights of a law enforcement patrol car. I could tell that the object was large, flying not far off the ground for from the ridge I was looking down at it, but in the darkness of the night I had no familiar landmarks to judge its distance or true size. But I knew instantly that it was not a conventional craft of any kind. I remember my first reaction was of curiosity and wonder – nothing else. There was no apprehensive fear, no abject concern, no sense of urgency. As I drove along I could tell that the object and I were approaching each other. I was fascinated, even excited, but entirely unafraid.
Reaching over to my wife I shook her shoulder, rousing her out of her doze, and pointed out the object to her; even in the gray darkness of the car I saw her eyes widen in amazement and disbelief. She calmly asked me what it was, and I calmly said I didn't know. Together we watched it as we rode along for perhaps a mile and a half while the kids and the dog still slumbered peacefully in the rear seat. By then I could tell that the object was indeed a flying craft, moving slowly in our direction no more than 50 or 60 feet off the ground. Somehow I knew we were going to meet at the crossroads. It got there before we did, and a quarter mile or so away I saw it stop, hovering low just off to the sides of the two roads, not more than a hundred feet from the intersection. I slowed the car to a few miles an hour, approaching the craft cautiously.
About a hundred yards from the junction, I could tell that the craft was no more than 20 or 30 feet off the ground, that it was not as large as I'd first thought – perhaps 30 or 40 feet in diameter. It was oval, but not round, shaped more like a dirigible or a football than a saucer, and it had a translucent, diaphanous, appearance – as though I could see into it. But I couldn't see anything inside it, nor could I see windows or portholes. There was no sound that I could hear, and as I approached within 100 feet or so of the junction I rolled my window down, listening for a sound. There was none – absolutely none – though we could not have been more than 200 feet away from the hovering craft.
But as soon as I'd rolled down the window despite my wife's vehement objections, our dog began to wail as if in painful misery, waking up the kids, cowering on the floorboard in the backseat howling unmercifully, veritably screaming, putting instant fear into the children as they simultaneously heard the dog's cries and saw the colorful but ominous pulsing craft floating in front of us. I stopped the car about 50 feet from the crossroads and we all stared at the craft, questioning one another incomprehensibly, chaotically, since everyone was talking or yelling at the same time, trying to be heard over the howls of our dog as well as each other. Later, reflecting on the incident, considering the dog's seemingly painful wails, I wondered if the craft did emit sound at a very high frequency that was beyond our human hearing range but not the dog's.
We sat there at a standstill for a long time, neither us nor the craft moving an inch, while my wife and I got the kids calmed down some and the dog's howling eventually lessened to whines and moans for reasons I don't to this day understand except to surmise that the craft somehow changed the frequency of its sound if, indeed, there was one. But for us people, at least, there was nothing but the sound of our car's engine, our voices, and the dog's whines.
The "long time" turned into 15 or 20 minutes, I suppose, and after some debate with my wife and son I decided I would simply drive past the craft as fast as I could and head on down the road toward home. Up to that point I'd had a strong urge to get out of the car and walk toward the craft to try to see who was inside it or even to make contact, for I still had no fear, and never did have later on either, of the object, but that idea was greeted with a chorus of "no's" from the rest of the family, and I'm sure I was relieved that they'd talked me out the thought so "compellingly".
When I put the car in gear preparing to move rapidly forward through the intersection and on past the craft, which remained hovering 20 or 30 feet in the air, about 50 feet on the other side of the junction, maybe 20 feet off to the side of the road to our right, it suddenly, quickly, moved directly over the road in front of us and descended to no more than 10 feet above us, maybe less, as I remember thinking there was no way I could drive under it. Its movement, as if to intentionally block us, startled me, and frightened my wife and the kids. Now there was no more than 30 feet between us and I felt that I could sense the presence of living beings, human or otherwise, inside that craft, although I still could not see through those diaphanous colored lights. Yet I "felt" that I could – as if it were no longer my eyes that were doing the "seeing", but rather another, unfamiliar or unknown, sense.
So we sat there in our car in a standoff, watching them watch us, and I realized it would be futile to try to back away or turn around, or turn onto the crossroad, and run, or otherwise try to elude them. Though I was not concerned, particularly, I sensed that my wife and children were frightened, if not scared stiff. For the first time, I remember, I began to wonder what they wanted from us – why they had stopped us like this. But still I was unafraid, somehow knowing that none of us would be harmed.
How long we waited there in that non-confrontational standoff, I have no recollection of, nor am I sure that I ever knew, for in my own mind, at least, there was a long silent period where none of us talked and the dog remained quiet while we simply waited, aware there was nothing else we could do. Maybe it was five minutes, or an hour, or two hours . . . there was simply no way to know. Later on, after I'd churned the incident over and over in my mind for days on end, I realized that all of us had become unaware of time, as if thinking about time or even looking at a watch or a clock had no significance, and that whatever the clock read when we finally got home that night meant nothing, and to this day I cannot recall what the time was when we actually arrived at the house. It should have been an important factor to consider at the time, considering the event, but for some never-to-be-known reason time was the farthest thing from my mind.
But then, after an indeterminate time at that junction, the craft began to move slowly northeast along the crossroad toward Castle Gardens, fairly inching its way along. My window was still down as the craft silently passed no more than 20 feet away and 10 feet above us, and then it began to gain a little speed and our dog began to whimper and whine again, but did not howl. For several hundred yards it drifted slowly, gaining a little altitude and speed, and we watched it, mesmerized, without even considering getting the hell on down the road ourselves. No one said a word; we simply watched it glide along for a mile or so toward the horizon of a nearby ridge to the east, and then we saw a small burst of white light and saw it accelerate at a rate beyond my own comprehension. In a second or two it was a small ball of light the size of a full moon, then Venus, and then it was lost among the stars as if it were a star itself.
The aftereffects of this otherworldly encounter seem, on the surface, to have been nil, although I soon noticed a distinct personality change in my older daughter that I chalked up to interaction with her schoolmates since she was, as I recall, just out of the first grade – maybe the second. As for myself, it was shortly after the incident that my right ear began to ring constantly, which it still does to this day, and I frequently felt nauseous and unbalanced physically from vertigo often accompanied by a low-grade fever. Two or three years later I completely lost my sense of balance and spent two weeks or more in the Lander, Wyoming, hospital with a high fever, unable to walk without leaning against a wall, while a team of doctors, neurologists and neurosurgeons, probed and studied me, trying in vain to figure out what was wrong with me. They finally told me I must have "Madison Avenue" syndrome, a neurological problem caused from excessive drinking, which I dismissed summarily, since I was not a heavy drinker, still played city intramural basketball very well, and innately sensed there was something wrong in my right inner ear, which I'd repeatedly informed them about. I accused the doctors of being "religious fanatics" and went on crawling or groping my way along the hospital room wall to get to the bathroom and back.
After the two weeks or so I awoke one morning, my fever broken, my vertigo completely gone, my head clear and sharp, my pillow and sheets soaked with sweat and a thin runny clear liquid draining out of my right ear. The only problem was that my ear rang louder than ever – just as it constantly rings today. The doctors decided instantly that, no, it wasn't "Madison Avenue" syndrome after all – that it was a viral inner-ear infection, for some reason impossible to detect despite the probing, prodding, blood testing, X-rays, EEG's, EKG's, psychological evaluations, assessments of religious and spiritual shortcomings, and on and on, that they'd done in an effort to diagnose my problem. Perhaps it was some mutant kind of virus they surmised in order to placate me, no doubt fearful that I'd file some sort of malpractice lawsuit against them. I thought about it, but didn't, and went on with my life, the vertigo and fevers behind me now except for what is more or less an annual bout with a little fever and a bit of light-headedness that seems each year to be less egregious than the year before.
Just a couple of weeks ago I felt those old vague symptoms for two or three days, which brought to mind for the first time in a long time, for reasons I can't begin to speculate on, that close encounter with some kind of alien craft nigh on 40 years ago, which spurred me, finally, to write this essay about it today.
There must have been a reason for that mysterious incident, though maybe it was nothing more than a lark for those beings aboard the craft to have a laugh – a little lighthearted fun by showing off their magnificent technology to a small human family in a little white Ford Galaxy all alone on a desolate dirt road in the middle of nowhere in central Wyoming. But I find that as hard to believe as you may find this story. Just let me say that it would give me great peace of mind to someday know who those folks were in that incredible flying machine and what their purpose was in paying us such a memorable – partly at least – visit in the middle of the night those many years ago.
And, too, I've always been afraid to try to find out what it is that's in my right ear. What if there's nothing in there? Or if there is, where did it come from and what is its purpose? So far as I know, it's all innocuous except for the constant ringing, which gets consciously aggravating at times – like listening to someone snore when you're trying to go to sleep.
vvv
Copyright (2009) by Albert Lloyd Williams
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