So, I joined Camp NanoWriMo. I thought it would fun to share with you all the first 1,600 words or so of the piece I’ve been working on:
1
It only takes fifteen seconds to change a person’s life. Veronica quickly learned this the night she was walking the dogs on March 13, 2013 when a v-shaped formation of golden orbs traveled through her front yard. She stopped in the middle of the street, holding onto each dog’s leash. Her mouth was agape as she tried to comprehend what she was looking at.
Were these birds? No, they weren’t birds. They were too golden, glowing, and flaring to be birds. Birds do not glow with light at 10:15pm.
Were they planes? No, they were not planes. Planes didn’t constantly shine with light. Nor did planes fly that close together in such close proximity. If they were planes that would six or seven of them were traveling next to each other with perfect distance, only feet apart. Plus, she didn’t hear a noise. The air was silent.
The silence was the most miraculous part. As she watched the golden orbs, flying in a v-formation, travel over her head and into the distance, she saw the triangle quickly disappear into the night, the orbs disappearing into the darkness of space the way the beginning credits of Star Wars disappear at the beginning of the movie.
And then they were gone.
2
After the incident, she immediately became a raging insomniac. After her husband had left her months before, it wasn’t easy to be alone, especially after seeing this.
Veronica had reported it to the National UFO Reporting Center. After a brief conversation with the man running the reporting center, Peter Davenport, she became even more scared about the current situation on earth.
“I can’t believe I got to see a UFO,” Veronica exclaimed over the phone to the man volunteering his time at the UFO reporting center, “I’ve always wanted to see a UFO, and I feel so excited to finally see one, you know?”
There was a silence between her voice and his over the radio. He murmured a bit, and then he responded, “This is actually quite a frightening time that we are living in.”
This isn’t what Veronica wanted to hear.
“They keep coming, and keep appearing. There has been some heightened UFO activity in the last 48 hours, and, just to let you know, I have received two photos of extraterrestrials.”
Veronica could feel her toes grasping onto the earth, trying to hold onto some sort of normalcy, “Really? Are you going to post these on the site?”
“Oh yes,” he replied, “but thank you for reporting your incident. We are very grateful to people like you who call in to let us know what you are seeing. For every person that calls in, saying they saw something like this, there is another 20,000 who have seen it was well. Thank you and have a good night.”
“Thank you,” she replied. She hung up the phone. She sat petrified in her seat. She could feel her heart vibrantly beating. Her body started to feel hot. She didn’t have anyone to call. She tried to call her family. No one was picking up. Phone calls had become missed. She called her friends, trying to get ahold of them. When they did pick up the phone, she couldn’t stop talking. She told them what she saw. She told them about what the man at the reporting center had said. She told them how scared she was.
Most of her friends just told her to calm down, drink a beer, and forget about it. If the aliens were coming down, most of them suggested, we better start getting drunk now.
Veronica agreed. Instead of worrying her friends, she simply decided to do what they said. She drank a beer, but it didn’t help. She felt the presence of something else that whole night, like they were always there, these aliens, watching her. As she tried to fall asleep, she could only keep her eyes open. She didn’t want to fall asleep. She had seen enough UFO television shows to know what happens next after a sighting: abductions.
She always had an interest in aliens and UFOs. She lived by an air force base too. Veronica knew what a helicopter looked like. She wasn’t the type to point out at a star in the night sky and be shocked that it was moving.
When she remembered looking at the UFO, it looked the way people described angels in the bible: fiery, golden orbs. She didn’t know how else to explain it.
Even though the incident left her petrified, she still wanted to watch the clock on the wall. She didn’t want to close her eyes. She didn’t want to be awakened by tiny “gray” aliens. She didn’t want to be experimented on. The fears went on and on.
The night continued on. She still couldn’t sleep. She tried to just pet her dogs, but something about sleep scared her even more. She had felt the presence of demons like this before. Sometimes, late at night, they would wake her. There had been many times, during her marriage, where she randomly woke in the middle of the night.
Her husband would tell her to sleep, and she said she couldn’t. Her husband would demand that she put away her childish obsession with monsters and go back to bed. But Veronica, at age 35, just couldn’t. These beings would wake her up in the middle of the night, whether they be spirits or demons or her own wild imagination, something woke her up in the middle of the night. Veronica, as frightened as she was, would just wake up. She would tell her husband he couldn’t fall asleep, she was too scared.
“There is something in here,” she would repeat over and over again, “there is someone or something in here.”
But there was never anything to the visible eye in their room. Her obsession and irrational fear of invisible monsters worried her husband. He always assumed she would grow out of this irrational fear, but she never did. He assumed she would grow out of a lot of things that she never did. This was probably one of the many reasons he left.
3
The next morning at work, Veronica did a Google search on what she saw. No else seemed to be seeing what she was seeing. But as she clicked away, her jaw dropped. Yesterday, during the time of her sighting, had been the 16th anniversary of the Phoenix lights, the most largely accounted UFO sighting in history, with over 10,000 videos and documentations of the incident.
The senator of the state had called a press conference after the incident. He told everyone he had found the perpetrator from the UFO incident. When he called out the perpetrated criminal, a man dressed up as an alien gray came out, with his hands cuffed behind his back. The press room filled with laughter. The senator laughed too.
“You all take yourselves way to seriously,” the senator laughed.
Months later, that same senator came out to express that he too had seen the Phoenix Lights. He, too, eventually said that he did not know what he had seen in the skies that night.
Veronica pulled up the videos from the phoenix lights. The craft was similar to what she had seen, a string of six or seven lights in a v-formation. It was the same similar thing they had seen in Phoenix, 16 years prior.
Shortly before the incident of the Phoenix Lights in 1997, a group called Heaven’s Gate had all committed suicide, claiming that aliens had made room for them on the comet Hal-Bop.
When she tried to explain to her coworkers what she had seen, no one wanted to believe her. Their responses were all one of the same, “It was just a drone. That’s all. It wasn’t a UFO.”
When she tried to call her parents and explain what she had seen they said, “Now, that can’t be, Veronica. The Bible doesn’t say there are aliens.”
While her friends supported her, there was still so many people out there who didn’t want to believe she saw something strange. It was as if just bringing up the fact that she had seen a UFO was enough for people to try to argue her and tell her, she was mistaken.
She didn’t try to argue with them. It was too painful, embarrassing, crazy to argue. They all reached the same conclusions in their conversations, “All we know about what we know is that this UFO is an unidentified flying object.” And for most people, this was all they were willing to agree on.
At first, this frustrated Veronica, but when she thought about it, this made sense. She had been questioning her own sanity since the incident. Did she really see what she had seen? Was it truly a UFO? Or something else? Was her divorce derailing her own thoughts? Had this divorce really made her reach this level?
As she took a deep breath, she kept scanning the internet for possible sightings of what she had seen too. There had to be proof out there somewhere that others had also seen what she had seen. She couldn’t be the only one.
In all of her clicks she pressed into her mouse, each strange keyword she popped into Google, another image coming up of a UFO, or an alien gray, a tiny part of her wished they would come down.
In all the chaos that the incident had caused her, there was a strange sense of peace she felt when the v-formation traveled over her head. Of all the fear human beings had, these beings could care less about what she was doing. They simply traveled over her head and into the night sky, off to infinity and beyond. They didn’t stop to say hi, or dissect her, or anything. They were merely just rolling through. Yet, an experience this revolutionary in a human being’s life isn’t something they can easily forget.
As much as she wanted to pass off the event as some natural phenomenon, water vapors forming into this strange shape she saw, she knew she couldn’t. What she saw was real, she swore by it. She was the only one, besides her dogs, who could vouch for this.
I might just make it into a short story, but so far I am having fun with this idea.
Have a great weekend all! Enjoy!!!
