Mark Pilkington - Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs

Mark Pilkington has written for the Guardian, Fortean Times, Sight & Sound, the Wire, Frieze, the Anomalist and a host of other magazines and journals. His first book, Far Out: 101 Strange Tales from Sciences Outer Edge, was published in 2007. Mark also runs Strange Attractor Press, editing and publishing its occasional journal, organizing events and exhibitions and broadcasting on Resonance FM.

What in fucking hell was that? blurted Tim, his voice expressing more surprise than fear a not inappropriate response from someone who had just seen their first UFO.

It was a bright, sunny afternoon in mid-July, 1995. My friend Tim, my then-girlfriend Liz and I were pulled up with a flat tyre alongside Tenaya Lake on Tioga Pass Road, twenty-seven miles from the eastern boundary of Yosemite National Park. I was twenty-two years old, the same age as the car whose front wheel I was in the process of replacing, a battered, sky-blue 1973 Ford Galaxy 500 with a mattress in place of a back seat. The three of us were almost two months into a twelve-week detour around the United States and the car was on its last legs. The mechanics who had most recently looked at the wheezing two-tonne beast had tried to prevent us from driving any further. That was 200 miles ago and the reason, until Tim began yelling, why Id been lying underneath it clutching a spanner.

Tim loomed above me, fizzing with incredulity. What was that?

I have no idea, I replied, but I saw one just like it about half an hour ago, a few miles down the road.

I continued loosening wheel nuts as my mind whirled like a top. Whatever it was wed just seen was identical to the thing Id spotted further along the road perhaps twenty minutes earlier.

Wed blown a tyre on our way out of Yosemite. To find a new one, Liz and I had hitched a ride to the nearest town, Lee Vining, a small, one-time mining outpost alongside the calcified alien landscape of Mono Lake. Job done, we hopped into a passing twoseater convertible sports car. Liz, in the front, made awkward small talk with its slick-haired driver while I perched on the boot, clutching our reinvigorated wheel with my feet wedged awkwardly into the space behind the drivers seat.

Cool mountain air flowed over us as we re-entered Yosemite on the windy two-lane blacktop. We were rounding a densely wooded bend on the north side of the road when a glint of light among the trees caught my eye. There, perhaps ninety feet away along a straight firebreak path between tall rows of fir trees, lay something entirely unexpected, hovering, or appearing to hover, stationary, about three feet off the ground. It was a perfect, silvery reflective sphere, perhaps eight feet in diameter, like a large, polished Christmas tree ornament. It reminded me of one of the bells suspended over a verdant landscape in Ren Magrittes enigmatic La Voix des Airs: beautiful, serene, uncanny, wrong.

No sooner had I registered what I was looking at than it was gone, lost behind the trees as we sped along the ever-twisting road. Some seconds later we passed another firebreak, converging on the same point as the last one. The thing was still there: mercurial, immobile, strangely perfect. A brief flash, then it was lost among the trees before, finally, another bend, another path and, once again, that damned sphere. I said nothing as my mind rummaged for an explanation. Neither Liz nor the driver seemed to have seen anything unusual and, even if I had known what to say, speech was impossible over the roaring engine and rushing wind.

The sphere and the forest were soon behind us and we returned to our own vehicle, sandwiched between the twinkling lake and a steep-sided rocky hillside. I kept quiet about what Id seen as I jacked up the car, clambered underneath and began working on the wheel. And thats when Tim began yelling. All I could see were his ankles and feet, but both he and Liz were making excited noises.

Quick! Get a look at this! What is that?!

I think I knew what I was going to see when I lurched to my feet.

Glinting in the afternoon sunlight, it came gliding purposefully towards us over the lake, bobbing gently as if carried on some viscous current. Although it looked exactly like the sphere I had already seen, it couldnt have been the same one because it was approaching us from the opposite side of the lake, a third of a mile away. It flew right over our heads, perhaps fifty feet up, utterly silent, unhurried yet somehow determined, and slunk out of sight, following the gentle contours of the ridge behind us. The whole thing took less than a minute.

What was that? Liz spoke for us all. Emptiness filled the airwaves. Brains scrambled for answers. None came.

Back under the car I went, unfastening a few more nuts, hoping to keep a creeping surge of anxiety in check. No chance.

Holy shit! Here comes another one! yelled Tim.

Scrabbling back out, I was just in time to see another sphere, identical to the last, ambling over the lake towards us, following exactly the same path as its predecessor. Up it went, over the ridge, as calmly as if it passed by there every day.

I rushed into the car for a camera, but it was too late. The sphere was gone. No more followed.

A strange enough story and a true one, not unlike a thousand other UFO tales. This one is made a little stranger by the fact that I was somewhat interested in UFOs at the time. OK, Ill be honest, I was obsessed with UFOs at the time. Id been fascinated with the supernatural and the anomalous all my life I was reading H.G. Wells and Bram Stoker while most kids were still reading Enid Blyton but somehow, during the late 1980s, UFOs gradually became a primary concern for me.

In 1989, aged sixteen, I had my first sighting, in the south of Spain. A friend and I watched nine glowing orange balls roll along the horizon in a steep sine wave pattern. I remember that they flowed, one after the other, as if moving through thick fluid, connected by an invisible thread. Neither I nor my friend had been particularly astounded by the scene, and alien spacecraft didnt even register on our list of possibilities, but Ive often returned to the incident in my minds eye and wondered: what was it that we saw?