I was listening to an audiobook as is customary at the end of my day. It was a book about weird unexplained mysteries. There were tales of planes and people disappearing. And then there were also tales of UFO sightings that, as the author said, were hard to debunk given the numbers of people reporting the sightings. My eyes were slowly closing only to shoot wide open once they got to the story about “The Phoenix Lights” from 1997.

The story discussed hundreds of people reporting strange sightings beginning in Henderson, Nevada and stretching all the way down through Arizona. Unlike one of the most famous and well-documented UFO sighting cases such as the one in 1969 in the Great Barrington area of Massachusetts where people reported similar sightings/events, these sightings varied. It was then that my mind flashed back to one particular night in 1997 and I thought to myself, holy shit! Did I really witness a UFO back then???

For an atheist, I could really thank God that I’ve been keeping journals since 1987. I jumped up and checked my 1997 journal file and read what I documented of the strange lights I saw that night to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Of the hundreds and hundreds of sightings reported, they varied in that some people said they saw crafts flying about of various shapes and sizes. One was supposedly bright orange and as big as a football field.

Now do let me say that I’ve always believed that there was other intelligent life out there. If the cosmos stretches into infinity and we can exist, why can’t others exist? However, I never thought we could visit each other because I thought we were simply too far apart. Understanding the laws of physics as we do, I didn’t think anyone could reach us or we could reach them because it would take millions and millions of years to get to one another.

But this book definitely makes me wonder!

It was July 21, 1997, a few months before I quit smoking. I went out back for a smoke just after midnight and as soon as I looked up into the sky it registered in my mind that what I was seeing was all wrong. I’d never seen anything remotely like it before. There were these four lights spaced a little wider than the house. They circled around and then met in the center of the circle. It sort of reminded me of looking at headlights shining through thick fog. The lights were above the clouds and what struck me as odd was that there was no light source. Nothing was beaming upward from the ground, nor was anything streaming downward. I never saw any craft of any kind, just these lights that seemed to defy logic and that I simply could not explain. I never saw the lights appear or disappear. They were there when I stepped outside and they were still there when I went back into the house.

I was completely mystified and called 911. I told the woman who answered that it wasn’t an emergency and explained what I saw. She said she could see it, too (so it was wider than it appeared to be or more than one circle of lights) and that she’d been getting lots of calls about it, didn’t know what it was, and was waiting for a response from the Air Force.

But here’s the catch. The so-called explanation for the sightings, which many people were frustrated with, was that the military was dropping flares. I know what I saw that night, though. Nobody was “dropping” anything. I’ll never know for sure if it was something out of this world or not, but it definitely didn’t seem to be anything that made sense in this world. Funny too, because I’ve heard people complain before that the military, Air Force, and the government try to cover up anything related to UFOs, and if that’s true, I wonder why. Are they afraid people would panic? Do they feel it makes them look stupid if they say, “Yeah, it happened,” but we can’t explain it either?

If it really was aliens, did the lights centering in the circle have anything to do with me? Could they have seen me and decided I wasn’t worth abducting and studying?

Remembering this experience and reading this book has opened my mind to other possibilities. I would laugh at the idea of psychics if I wasn’t one myself. I would probably laugh at anyone who reported seeing a UFO, even if they were as sane as ever. But now I’m learning that I can never be too sure of anything. Maybe there really is a God, even though He can’t be a very nice guy if there is when you consider all the catastrophes in the world. And maybe there is an afterlife, even though it makes no sense scientifically and I sure hope there isn’t since one life is enough. LOL