Little Green Men

No one ever believed us about alien night, but they always wanted to hear the story. I’ve told the story so many times now over so many years, that sometimes I wonder myself. But I always call Luke and he confirms it. We were both there. It happened. Just as I remember.

It all happened just in the order that I had always told it: the ghostly fog on a clear night. Then the bright pulsing neon lights—green, then blue, then yellow, then red, and finally green again, a deep, penetrating neon green—filling the sky, pulsing in different durations and measures. An irresistible compulsion to search out the source. The flashing lights originating somewhere in an empty field on the east side of Branin Road just off to the right of Shamong Trail, accessible only by a narrow, unkempt dirt road. Our Teal Pontiac Grand Prix with gold rims bumping down the muddy road, over sticks toward the clearing. Being stopped by a felled tree and an unspeakable feeling of dread as the light was just a foul shot distance away. A narrow escape in reverse that left our hearts rattling in our chests. The stillness of the trees after—frozen as motionless as a polaroid picture—as still as the stars above. The inexplicable absence of anyone else in the world. Not even a car in a single driveway all the way home. Except for us, the world sitting empty—an uninhabited model on an architect’s workstation—which only we could explore. The inexplicable lost time. But I am getting ahead of myself.

It was a breezy July night. We were about to start our senior year of high school, and everything seemed to be ahead of us—our final sports seasons, prom, college for me and graduation for Luke—a time of endings and new beginnings. I was on the hard court every day, getting ready for varsity basketball try-outs and working on college applications every night. I felt that I had sacrificed too much of my youth not to get some kind of recognition that everything I had done was worth something. Whether it was on the ball court or by way of an acceptance letter made little difference to me at the time. Luke was planning a wedding and working on building up a portfolio for the videography business he had just started. He was possibly the first kid in our high school class to start a business—unless you count the dope pushers. Oh, and he was spending a good amount of time trying to talk Principal Steinmetz—who I called “Ted”—into letting him walk at graduation, despite 27 suspensions. Luke was trying to prove to everyone, but especially to himself, that he could make it in this world on his own, without help from anyone—without playing by anyone else’s rules, especially Principal Steinmetz.

The trees were in full bloom in the suburbs. Red oaks and sunset maples added a touch of color to the ubiquitous pines and oaks along the roadside. Turk’s cap lilies were in bloom adding a touch of oranges and reds to the undergrowth and roadside grasses.  It was a blustery night and a frolicking breeze danced through the leaves of the trees on the sides of the road, first blowing this way, then that. A light drizzle of summer rain fell from clear summer skies as we left the Marlton AMC Theater, making a tip-tap sound against the leaves and asphalt. It cleared up in minutes. It was a peaceful night. The temperature was in the mid 60s and the air smelled fresh like candles containing notes of pine, lilac, fresh mown grass, petrol exhaust and the bitter hint of herbicides and fertilizers wafting off the farmer’s fields. There was no warning that this was about to turn into one of the strangest nights of our lives.

Up until then, it was an ordinary Saturday evening in 1997. It was July 27th. The time was 10:13 pm. We were about five minutes from my house. We’d been catching a flic at the AMC. “Contact” of all things. Can you believe it?

* * *

“What is that light over by Branin field,” Luke asked.

“Maybe a transformer blew,” I offered, drifting back off into thought.

“No, John—look. It’s pulsing.”

As I looked more closely, I got chill and goosebumps appeared on my arms. The sky all around us was suddenly filled with a dense fog or vapor, obscuring the origin of the flashing lights. The pulses varied in tempo like a heartbeat, at first slow and calm, then rising in pace, and reaching a crescendo where the colors bled into one another in kaleidoscopic interference patterns. And then back to the slow pulses of a heart at rest.

“Let’s turn off and see where it’s coming from,” I said.

“It’s back there in the field,” Luke said pointing.

We turned off of Shamong Trail past the Evans-Cooper House, an old abandoned Victorian home that had been the main house to a dairy farm, with a huge red lighthouse in the dairy field, which was decaying with the decades, but still visible from a great distance—like a marker from the past that these fields contained unknown treasures and a warning that these curiosities were shrouded in danger.

We pulled up by the rugged dirt road on the outskirts of Branin Field and Luke turned right down it. The Grand Prix bumped along the rough trail, sticks crunching under the tires and creaking struts, tree branches scratching against the windshield and the sides of the car. We could scarcely see a few feet in front of us. We almost ran smack into a rickety wooden fence some former owner had placed to prevent cars from trespassing on his property.

“What should we do,” I said, my heart in my throat, “do we get out and go on foot?”

“Not a chance!” Luke said, and turned the wheel around the fence, narrowly passing by, nearly scratching the racecar teal paint on the passenger side of the car.

We continued like this a few minutes and then something like a terrestrial midnight descended—a ceasing of the lunar transit—the blackened sun standing still in the sky and giving no light to the hidden moon. If there was ever a time that I felt like I needed for time to stop and let me catch my breath, this was it. And I don’t mean the alien night adventure—I mean life itself. I felt like I was trapped in an endless series of tasks, contests, and gradings. Life had to be more than a hunting ground for recognition and accolades. Besides, what if you didn’t measure up? Meanwhile, I thought that Luke could use a breather as well. The weight of independence was a tall order for a young man. If you placed all your stock in your own ingenuity and resourcefulness, what kind of crisis would you be in for if things didn’t go as planned—and do things ever go as planned?

Luke slammed his foot down on the brake and we skidded before stopping. There was a downed tree just in front of us on the path. We sat there a moment in terror before discussing what to do next. Neither one of us said the word “aliens” out loud, but we were both thinking it. Hell, even a neanderthal who’d never heard of interstellar travel would have been thinking it.

“Look up there – it’s right there, John!” The phasing flash of the lights had settled into an otherworldly neon green tone. We had been arguing about whether this could be a blown transformer or some kind of gas leak, but that could not possibly explain the different colors or the bright central orb the colors emanated from. Now, just at the edge of the field and suddenly prevented from going further without stepping out on foot, we could see that there was something in the field, something solid and tangible, something giving off this otherworldly light show. Something enormous. An object. Much larger than the size of a house or even an auditorium. Its shape was obscured by the thick fog, which seemed thickest by the central point where the light originated.

“We could go out there… walk out into the field—”

“Are you crazy! Look at that. We have no idea what’s out there.”

“But how can we go back now?”

We were transfixed. Scared. Now, when I say we were “scared” I’m not talking about that low grade fear in the last quarter of a basketball game when you are down ten points or the kind of fear you get when you are about to get back your grade on a final—or even the fear that grips you in the middle of a fist fight when you first get hit and feel some blood on your lip and recognize that you are in real danger—I am talking about something totally different—an existential dread. On the one hand, I wanted more than anything in the world to know what was in that field. On the other hand, my mind was burning with a command—GET THE HELL OUT OF THERE—which was flashing in big bright bold neon letters—if it were possible—brighter than the light growing in intensity before our eyes.

The green light was growing brighter and the tempo increasing like a broken metronome clicking back-and-forth so fast the needle was about to break off. The light was almost constant and beating with a strange hum. ZZZZZZZZZSSSSSSHHHHHHHHEEEEEEE. The air itself was electrified with a static energy, raising the hair on our arms. I imagined the leaves on the path hovering from the magnetic buzz (but I did not actually see that happen). And now the light was growing so bright it had begun to dispel the fog. The air smelled of wet matches, sulfur, and strong burning copper—like the way warm wires smelled in shop class when a strong current was run through them and little detritus on the surface of the wires would flame out in puffs of pink phosphorus smoke. I could taste a bitter acrid bite in my mouth and my sinuses were clearing salty liquid down my throat like they’d been doused with nasal spray or like I was on Sudafed. My head felt light and dizzy, and I could feel the hum inside my head, as if it was searching my brain for the code to translate the sound into thoughts I could understand. Through the remaining whisps of fog in the clearing we could see a beam of light penetrating forward and covering our car in the odd neon green glow and what I thought looked like a human form walking directly toward us. Luke saw it too.

Without further discussion, Luke threw the Grand Prix in reverse and put his arm around my seat, looking back, navigating along the bumpy trail back out to Branin Road. I was sure we would crash into a tree and be overtaken by whatever was in that clearing. But Luke was an expert driver—I’d never seen anything like it. The car lurched and leaped as he stepped on the accelerator and gave the engine all the gas. The tires squealed as they caught a patch of wet leaves and groaned as they settled and spun out of a divot. The engine roared with the weight of full acceleration around the rickety fence, and the wheels squealed as the tires finally hit asphalt and we spun out backwards into the right lane and pulled a violent U-turn, the Michelin track tires burning rubber as we sped away.

* * *

This is when things got weird. As we drove on in silence past landmarks we’d driven past a thousand times, I became aware of something strange.

“Luke, do you see the leaves on the trees—they’re frozen in place. It’s like we are in a painting.”

“What do you mean? Oh my God! You’re right. There’s absolutely no wind.”

And as I looked down the driveways of the homes and restaurants on the sides of the road, things got even weirder.

“Have you seen another car anywhere on the road since we left the clearing?”

“Not a one.”

“Have you seen any cars,” I asked, pointing at the lot of the Dunkin Donuts and the lot of the McDonalds, which always had cars parked in them even in the middle of the night.

“No.”

“And look down those driveways,” I said pointing at carless drives of suburban homes, lighted and seemingly abandoned. There was no one else in the world except us. There was no movement. The world stood perfectly still.

We stopped talking as terror seized us and spoke so loudly in our thoughts there was no room for a dialogue.

* * *

As we pulled up to the curb of my house in silence, we readied ourselves for a quick debriefing before calling it a night—one that we’d never forget.

That was when Luke turned the radio back on and started playing with the dials on the console.

“Something’s wrong,” Luke said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s 2:13 am, John. This thing must be broken.”

“When did we leave the theater?”

“It was like half past ten. I know how your parents are and the movie went over, so I knew you’d be late, and I was paying attention to the time.”

“So you’re saying we’ve been driving home for four hours? That’s impossible!”

“Yeah, no shit. It is like a ten-minute drive, fifteen tops.”

“I’m going to be in so much trouble.”

“We lost four hours, John! That should be the least of your worries.” 

And that was when terror gave way to actual dread. I saw my parents opening the door to our house. They’d clearly been waiting up for me for hours. But I had no idea what had happened. Why had we lost four hours?

“Johnnie,” my Mom yelled—no, screamed—from the porch, where my father stood next to her with folded arms and a tired, angry look on his brow.

“Got to go,” I said as I ran into the house.

* * *

My parents had the police out looking for me and I was grounded. I went over the story at least five times, but they weren’t buying it and just kept asking what we had really been up to. Did you take drugs? Tell us where you really were? Stop with the lying? It’s a perfectly clear night, there is no fog, no strange lights—where were you? But I only had one answer. And it wasn’t the one they wanted to hear.

In the weeks following alien night, I started getting strange nose bleeds. And headaches. It was around this time that I turned my attention to studying law and Luke turned his attention to studying the scriptures, and eventually enrolled in seminary.

We would discuss alien night from time to time, and it became like a lighthouse in the fog for us. No matter how far out to sea we found ourselves, we could always return to port and find our way back to the safety of two boys, just starting out in the world—all possibility and wonder laid out before them like the seemingly endless pine forests of our small town in the Pine Barrens.

* * *

Driving past the road where we had seen the flashing lights, twenty years-ago now, Luke and I listened to the radio report about the Congressional hearings. “The witness has confirmed that the U.S. Government has recovered ‘nonhuman biologics’ from crash sites around the country.” The two of us looked at each other wondering what that meant.

Luke was now a professional filmmaker, and I was a lawyer. The years after the sighting had passed in the blink of an eye, as if the strange frozen time we experienced that night had extended across decades.

Looking down the dirt path into Branin field, it seemed as if we could reach back in time and see ourselves as we were then.

“Do you think it was aliens,” I asked.

“Who can say.”