Description

With every post being about the pods at the moment, this will probably get drowned out and not read, but I've finally brought myself to sit and write this, so here we go.

I apologize in advance as I feel this might get long, but this was a very personal and ultimately transformative experience for me and I want to tell the whole story, but if you just want to read about the encounter itself, then please skip the next couple paragraphs.

Location of my Encounter (https://preview.redd.it/gwsz301uzft81.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto…)

Also, if you're here for an alien abduction or entity encounter, then you will be disappointed. I did however 100% see a UFO as up-close and crystal clear as being four cars row back at a drive-in theater (except that it was still mostly daylight) and I will forever swear on my life and the lives of everyone I care about to the veracity of that experience, but I will get to that in a minute.

Intro:

As the title suggests, my story is as much about the power and culture of shame around this topic as it is the experience. I had my encounter in the summer (July or Aug) of 2000, and I never mentioned a word of it to anyone until this past New Year's when I told my girlfriend of five years on a beach in Thailand. It's been something that I've been holding onto for so long and needed to tell someone, and I only had the courage to finally tell her because of the rabbit hole I started going down a month earlier here on reddit, though I've been watching the drip-feed in the media from the sidelines for the last few years, but hadn't fully made the jump. I didn't even say a word that night to my friends that I was on my was to visit when the encounter happened because I didn't want to sound crazy.

When I told my girlfriend, at first she was looking at me like I was crazy (she's exponentially more skeptical about cool shit than I am) and was asking me to "please stop" and questioning why I was telling her, but after I finished telling her, her mood changed and she didn't know how to react. She said that "if anyone else told me, I'd think they were crazy, but you have no reason to lie to me."

Before I get to the story, it's important to understand who I was at the time. I was 19, with undiagnosed ADHD that was ruining my life and recently got me kicked out of my first university (a blessing in the end), passionately atheist and never raised with religion, and when it came to the idea of UFOs and aliens, I'd say I was somewhere between skeptic and agnostic. Sure, they might be out there, but it wasn't something I ever gave much thought to and I never cared about science fiction, which is all to say that I absolutely wasn't someone who was obsessed with UFOs and dreamed of seeing one. I found the idea more terrifying than anything.

Experience:

It's the summer of 2000 and I'm on my way to Vegas to visit friends for the weekend. I was living in San Diego at the time, but rather than take the 15 the whole way, I wanted to break up the drive, so I instead went from SD to Twentynine Palms to have lunch at my favorite pizza place from when I was younger (I had the misfortune of having to live there for six years as a Marine brat), and then from there I took the back way to Vegas, which takes you through Amboy and also the Mojave National Preserve, which is where my encounter took place, as marked in the attached pic.

I don't remember exactly what time it was, but definitely sometime between 5pm - 630pm; the sun was starting to set but it was still more daylight than not, but still dark enough that the lights from the craft were brighter than they would have been 20 minutes earlier.

I'm speeding along at 70+mph and suddenly my car fills with swirling blue & red lights that are bouncing off every mirror, so I assume that I'm about to be pulled over for speeding. But when I look in my rear-view mirror, there's no cop car or anyone behind me, so I look to my side window thinking the cop is passing me on my side, but again, nothing; but the lights haven't stopped. Confused as shit at this point, I look behind me to confirm whether my eyes are deceiving me, but again nothing, but the lights are still going.

When I turn my head back around with my eyes on the road is when I see it off to the left (around the spot marked with the explosion sticker on the pic), hovering maybe 20 - 30ft off the ground with lights swirling all around it. One of the main things that stuck out during the experience and has always stayed with me was that the craft didn't look steady. It seemed to be rocking back and forth to one side as if it couldn't keep its balance. As I said earlier, I was at a distance of about four or five car rows back from the screen at a drive-in theater. The left lane and a bit of desert were all that was between us, but to be clear, this wasn't me seeing a light or something in the sky that might be a UFO, this was a fucking UFO up-close and in front of my eyes, full stop.

Now, I'm not a ufologist and don't have the vocabulary to properly describe craft and their parts, so please forgive me if the following description sounds like something from a child. It was a saucer shaped craft (but a thick one if that makes sense), with a wide panel wrapped around the side, with lights either in the panel or on the edges (that part I don't remember clearly), and then there were the top and bottom parts in the middle, and each of those seemed to be about the same size. All in all, I'd say the saucer was as wide as a semi-truck trailer is long, and then from top to bottom of the middle parts, about as tall as a one story house.

As I'm driving by and witnessing this, I'm in a complete state of shock. I don't remember if I even attempted to slow down or I just hit the gas, but all I could think and kept repeating to myself was "WTF is happening!? Why am I seeing this? No, no, no, no, no. WTF!? WTF!?" and wanting the moment to pass as quickly as possible.

Passing by and staring at it while I was in shock, I thought I was witnessing one of two things:

1. A secret military project that went off-course and I absolutely should not be seeing this and if I don't get away as quickly as possible, I'm going to be visited by people who will ruin my life and paint me as crazy or who knows what else depending on what I saw.
2. An actual alien UFO (I had no idea of the woo side at the time), in which case I need to get away from as quickly as possible because I was alone in the middle of the desert and could have easily been abducted and disappeared, and then they'd put me back and then I'd get visited by people trying to paint me as crazy and traumatize me twice.

So no, I did not try to stop and make contact with it. I kept staring at it as long as I could and then through the rear view mirror until I was out of distance, but no fucking way was I going to get myself any further involved in the situation, and in light of all the cancer and burns people get, it's a decision I can look back on and say was a good call.

Anyway, as I continued driving, but still fully in shock as I could still see the lights in my rear view mirrors and bouncing around my car, I came across one of those yellow diamond signs with nothing but a ?, which I later learned means visitor center, but had no idea at the time and was in such a state of shock I thought it was there to reinforce the experience I just went through, as if that was a common occurrence and someone put the sign there as a marker. Of course that sounds ridiculous, but I was a stupid 19 year old kid, BUT it was that same sign that recently let me find the exact location on Google Maps.

I wouldn't say that I was scared by the experience, but more shocked as it radically shifts your idea of what reality is. Imagine that you suddenly came across a live dragon - it's so far out of your expectations that the only reaction can be shock as the experience is changing the way you view the world. You'd think that after the experience I would have immediately jumped down the UFO rabbit hole, but no; if anything, I tried to repress it and never think about it, until the DOD videos started coming out and I started going down the rabbit hole and now the experience is something that I think about every day. Not that I never thought of it before then and suddenly remembered a UFO experience after the DOD videos; of course I never forgot the experience, but since it's something I couldn't talk to without sounding crazy, I thought it best to stuff it as far down as possible.

Looking back at it, there were two things that really stood out, one being the unsteadiness of the craft (which is why at the time part of me wanted to believe it was military; I thought aliens would be better than that), and the other being the lights. For me, the craziest part about the lights was that for at least the beginning of the experience, they seemed to be almost detached from the craft itself. When I thought I was being pulled over, there were about 20 seconds of lights before I ever saw the craft, and there was no way the craft was there earlier and I didn't see it. There were lights, then the craft appeared out of nowhere where it hadn't been seconds earlier, though I did not see the actual moment it appeared.

As the experience was over 20 years ago and I was in shock at the time, there are a few details that I don't remember exactly. Was the craft smooth or was there writing/carving on it? I'd be lying if I said one or the other. I feel like the middle panel (or its edges) were spinning around, but I can't say with 100% certainty, though the the effect was definitely swirling lights.

Epilogue:

(The following includes some speculation, so if you don't agree with it - I don't even know that I do - please do not let it take away from the experience story itself)

I never made the connection until recently when I was looking back on my life at that time, but after I returned that weekend, I didn't return to Vegas for the next ten years, even though many of my closest friends lived there during that time. The latter few years were because I was living abroad, but when I wasn't, I was in Southern California but never thought once of going back. I can't definitively tie it to the UFO experience, but I can't point to anything else either. I still haven't driven back through that way and have only used the 15 in the few times I've been there, though now with that google map point, I plan on going when I'm back in the U.S. this summer.

If you were to ask my parents about my future at the time of my experience, I don't think they'd have been hopeful. I'd always been a gifted child, but undiagnosed ADHD is no joke and can make even a good life a constant struggle. Anyway, after that weekend I took a completely different path than the one I'd been on until then: went to a pretty great school, ended up learning Chinese, studied abroad in Hong Kong, then worked in Japan yada yada yada; this is all to say that it was a completely different path than anyone who knew me would have expected me to take. Would that have happened if I stayed living with those friends it Vegas? Absolutely not. Was it because of my experience? Probably not, but it's definitely a clear marker in the timeline of my life and the change in path I took.

Apologies on this being so long. I'm sure the comments will make me regret posting this, but I hope at least a few of you can see that this is a true story and I have nothing to gain from sharing it.

Thank you.

Edit: changed Prologue to Epilogue