Month: November 2013

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…

My second significant UFO encounter occurred in the mid-seventies. My buddy Dave and I decided to take a break from our Bay Area city jobs and go camping up near the place we went to High School (Paradise, CA). He lived in Sacramento and I lived in Oakland so we merged into one vehicle and drove up to a small lake called Lotts.

Neither one of us had been there before, it just seemed like a good place to unwind, so we drove up early, left our vehicle out on the main road, and hiked into the area. The thing that struck me most as we approached the lake was that the large rock formation that hugged the west side of it was almost solid quartz. I know about quartz, I grew up with a gold-mining grandfather and I’d seen my share. This formation was huge!

We set up camp in a grassy area next to a trail that led to the lake (just below the red X). We explored the area until nightfall and then retired to our sleeping bags. We were still awake and chatting softly when we heard the sound. Our feet were pointed towards the lake and from that direction on our right came a whooshing sound. There were no lights, just the sound of some aerial vehicle flying slowly. It sounded like a helicopter with no engine and it stopped at the point marked below.

I should note that Dave and I were adventurous souls and to this day I don’t know why we didn’t jump up in the dark and go check it out, but we didn’t. We just calmly talked about the fact that we could hear the sound of machinery, doing something there for about fifteen minutes, before flying off in the direction it came. Then we went to sleep.

The next morning we walked down there and discovered a large circular flattened section of grass that wasn’t there before, with fresh digging at the base of the rock formation. They were mining quartz in the dead of night, in the middle of nowhere!

My friend K-Dawg turned me on to a local UFO enthusiast today and it gave me an idea for a series of blog posts. During my decades of existence on this planet I’ve had a few UFO encounters and a couple of paranormal experiences, so I might as well share them.

My first, and most dramatic UFO incident, occurred when I was about seven or eight. I was living with my family in a tiny little town (about 30 houses) on the side of a Sierra Nevada mountain, west of Reno Nevada. One day my older brother and I decided to camp out on the top of the mountain and try out our cool new jungle hammocks, so with dog in tow we hiked up and set camp.

We each picked out two adjoining trees to string the hammocks, which were pretty cool with mosquito netting and sun flaps. Our spots were about fifty feet from each other in a small open area of the forest with a campfire between us.

I have no specific memories of what we did before going to sleep but all hell broke loose around midnight. I woke up to our dog barking and the campsite bathed in light. I looked over at my brothers hammock and it was empty and the dog next to it howling. I looked up past my hammock flaps to see where the light was coming from and saw a giant round orb glowing brightly, and hovering over the trees above me.

All of a sudden I felt something below me brushing against my back through the canvas of my hammock. I looked down and watched a mountain lion casually walk under me. That was the last thing I remember.

My brother was never the same after that night and I genuinely believe he was abducted. It could have easily been me instead and my brother would be writing this blog post about his little brother who’s life was spent spiraling into paranoid schizophrenia from which he never recovered.