Carmel Valley

In the late seventies I was a computer consultant working out of Carmel Valley, CA. and often needed a place to live for weeks at a time. My good friend Beryl had a gift for finding beautiful expensive homes on the sides of mountains, turning them into rental properties for singles, and I was a good customer.

One particular house she found was in a remote canyon quite a ways out of town. It was built right into the side of the mountain and there was only one neighbor: a giant satellite dish at the bottom of the canyon with a few support buildings surrounding it.

One evening it was just the two of us there, hanging out on the deck and admiring the stars and the lights from the dish below. All of a sudden, in a scene right out of Close Encounters, a vehicle appeared about a quarter mile high in the sky, directly over the dish. It had bright throbbing red, green and blue lights and it was visually stunning.

Our first thought was to the people in the support buildings below, did they know it was there, was it a threat? So, we called them! Beryl had already researched their number since they were her only neighbors. Their response was weird to say the least. They thanked us for calling, said they would check it out, and hung up!

Shortly after we called, it disappeared. I don’t recall it leaving as we were in and out of the house making more phone calls to friends, and suddenly it was just gone.

The next day a man showed up at the house. Beryl was running an ad in the local paper for roommates and this guy said he was looking for a room to rent. We sat around the kitchen drinking coffee for a while and he said he’d like to live there, and paid a months rent in advance.

Over the next month he dropped in a few times to say hi, never spent the night, and eventually disappeared like the ship in the night sky. We eventually determined he was a government agent of some sort, sent up to the house to see if our witnessing whatever was going on there that night, was a threat to their operation.

Whatever that operation was…