Sarah Scoles - They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers

THEY ARE
ALREADY
HERE

UFO CULTURE AND WHY
WE SEE SAUCERS

SARAH SCOLES

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK LONDON

I know the CIA would say

what you hear is all hearsay.

I wish someone would tell me what was right

Blink 182, Aliens Exist

I

I ve only seen a UFO once. And only for a second: It quickly turned into an IFOan identified flying object. But the fleeting feeling that accompanied that fleeting unidentification stuck around for much longer.

It happened on August 21, 2017, about 20 miles outside of Jackson, Wyoming. Id been camping for two nights already with friends. As such, we were dirty and tired and often too cold or too hot. A creek rushed behind our tents, and we used it to filter water and cool the beer wed snagged from the nearby ski towns ostentatiously wood-beamed liquor store.

A hundred or so feet up the clearing, there was a guy in an RV who liked to shoot his gun at the mountainside. He didnt care that there was a total solar eclipse happening that day. In fact, he had driven up this rutted, rocky Forest Service road to get away from the phenomenon and from the swarm of wealthy tourists whod invaded his town to see the moon cross in front of the sun in a pretty place.

We did care, though. Which was why we left before dawn that morning, heading up Cow Creek Trail toward a high point called Cream Puff Peak, 6 miles away and at nearly 10,000 feet of elevation. We wanted to be alone and closer to the edge of Earths atmosphere so that we could feeleven though it was 7.5 billion times untruethat we were the only people on the whole planet, the only ones who could see this celestial event. It would be ours.

We never found Cream Puff Peak, though, the trail seeming to twine differently from its path on the map. Instead, we settled onto an unnamed promontory a few minutes before Earths only natural satellite started to slide in front of its only star. We ate cheese sticks and beef jerky and picked the chocolate out of trail mix, sticking our opaque eclipse glasses in front of our faces every so often to watch the suns transmogrification into something other, as it dimmed and dimmed and dimmed, the moon biting Pac-Man chunks from it.

The disappearance took a while. And, to be honest, it was boring at first. But then the air changed. It seemedalthough air does not have a colorto be yellower, like it was its own transition lens. It got colder. The colors of the pines, the subalpine grasses, and the sky itself seemed matte, although I hadnt thought of them as glossy before. The scene became perspectiveless, depthless, like a flat medieval painting where everything is right in front of you.

We each took out our jackets and shrugged them on. A few minutes later, we zipped them up. Our chatterabout how awesome jerky is, how Cream Puff was maybe that peak way across the valley (or maybe not), how far wed come, how alone we were out herehad quieted. We sat down on the edge of the outcropping and looked up and around, silent except for an occasional weird or wow, lost in our own internal experiences of the external universe.

Finally, the moment of totalitywhen the moon completely blocks the sunwas upon us. I wrapped the arms of my eclipse glasses around my ears and looked exactly where, normally, youre not supposed to. The last crescent of sunlight was disappearing, and just before the moon notched and locked itself inside the suns circle, a lens flare of light burst from the boundary. Its an event known as the diamond ring.

Whaaaaaaaaat? I said out loud. I yelled at my companions to put their glasses on. Its happening, I said.

The sky grew dark. A cold wind kicked up. The star that had risen and fallen every day of my life prior to that point wasnt there anymore. It had been replaced by something alienwhich had, in turn, transformed the landscape into that of an exoplanet. Earth became a place Id never lived but suddenly found myself, as if Id been sucked up in a tractor beam and plunked down light-years away on someone elses home.

The suns outer atmosphere, called the corona, which had existed right there the whole time but had remained invisible till now, wisped from the stars edges and licked at the center of the sky. Everything familiar felt deeply, deeply strange. During the few minutes of totality, its strangeness never became familiar.

I felt like I did on my first scuba dive, or that time in college when I did mushrooms and stood crying in front of a purple flowering bush because purple was such a beautiful and unlikely color: The world had always been this amazing and weird, right underneath regular reality. And I had only just realized it.

Thats not my UFO story, although it probably primed me. The UFO showed up later that evening. When we descended from not-Cream-Puff, we drank our creek beers and sat around the dark fire pit that we werent allowed to light up because Smokey said so. We relived the day (Remember how you just said, Whaaaaaaat?) before moving on to a discussion of what wed do in the event of not-quite-apocalyptic nuclear war, which at the time didnt seem over-the-top unlikely.

Finally, we stepped out from beneath our coniferous canopy to look up at the starsall those other suns, orbited by all those other planets, whereon some other schmucks might be shivering and discussing the ineloquence of one of their companions during the eclipse of their own star.

It was dark out there: dark-dark. And it was clear, the high, dry air of western Wyoming putting few molecular walls between us and the view. Here, too, we stayed pretty quiet, letting the stars light flow into our eyes while we each thought our own thoughts.

Theres a satellite, said my friend Tripp, a medical physicist who had recently declared that in the event of not-quite-apocalyptic nuclear war, he would go to the affected area and treat people. He pointed to a fast-moving dot tracing an arc between the stars.

Before any of us could respond, the dot grew brighter. Light started coming from its edge. Right as my brain registered that change, the brightness swept down. Then it became a beam, searching. In a second, it was pointed straight at us.

Whaaaaaaaat? we all said, involuntarily, in unison.

It knows were here, was my first involuntary thought. Terrestrial explanations then came quick: It was a Forest Service helicopter. It was the Jackson Hole polices rotorcraft. It was the military, checking on the throngs. It was some rich asshole on some rich asshole tour.

But I knewfrom the lights prior movement among the starsthat it was not a helicopter. And for the second or so when I was in its spotlight, there was a part of me (a part of me I didnt really want to acknowledge) that believed it was possible that maybe this was it. Those extraterrestrial UFOs Id longwith my skeptic-minded science brainsaid didnt exist? They were here now, and they knew I was here, and they wanted me to know that they knew that I was here.

What if this, I thought, is the moment right before everything changes?

Its a way I always feel when something in the world seems off, not unlike the way it did during the eclipse. When no one is out early on a Sunday morning, a part of me entertains the possibility that, five minutes from then, Ill find out 90 percent of everyone died overnight of a fast-working flu or a rapture. When my car wont start right away on a frigid winter morning, I wonder if Im about to realize that this is due to is a widespread EMP attack. When the