My Bizarre Not-So-Close Encounter At Area 51
This story is being told as accurately as I remember it. I’m a journalist, so I know fact from fiction, and how conjecture is different from reality. I’m going to try to stay as close to the truth as I can recall. PS: I was not on drugs.
Anyone who knows me is also aware that I’m a good storyteller. But, to tell you the truth, were I to have made this up, I would have created a better story.
Toward the end of this past August I faced my upcoming 60th birthday on September 1. For the good part of a decade I had planned a major party, saved money for it, and even rented a vintage pub to have a swinging ’60s dance. Friends and family planned to come from all over the world.
Of course, because of the pandemic, it didn’t happen.
On top of that, my partner of 24 years found a new relationship and ultimately is pushing me out of the home that I had lived at more than anywhere else in my life. I needed to escape for a bit. Disappear. Unplug. Distract.
On my bucket list was always visiting Area 51. I read enough stories and books to know that nothing much was out there, but I wanted to see it for myself.
OK, I’ll admit that I attended occasional meetings with fellow UFO and paranormal enthusiasts. A handful of close friends came along and we listened as we chuckled, but with open-minded skepticism. I knew what I was in for at Area 51. It’s a dusty desert with not much to see, but it has a legendary reputation and there were few things on my Bucket List that I could accomplish anymore these days.
The head of the UFO research group is a respected former commercial airlines pilot, and he told me words that always haunted me: “If you want to see something strange, all you have to do is look up in the skies, and keep looking. You’ll eventually see something that you simply can’t explain.”
While driving up the spine of California during my dramatic Disappearance, it was not lost to me the symbolism of the entire state around burning and raging with fires. The smoke was always in a distance, but enough to warn me of the ferocious firestorm brewing nearby. It served as an appropriate reflection of what was going on inside me.
And yet, I was eerily calm while driving north in my dusty blue Mustang convertible along State Route 375 (known as the Extraterrestrial Highway) and passing the sign of Rachel, Nevada where I knew I was close. I passed the roadside inn with the UFO mounted on a pole, and drove a bit further with nothingness on either side.
Then, I figured I should stop for gas, not because I was running low, but maybe to talk to someone to get my bearings. I pulled into a station with a wooden sign out front and went inside to pay for the pump.
A young guy with baggy overalls and a white T-shirt stood behind the counter and offered a “Howdy” as he rang up a guy in front of me buying a pack of cigarettes.
The other customer lingered in the store wearing a black mask around his mouth and nose, and I looked around for something else to buy. The wide variety of beef jerky seemed tempting but I was sure that if I asked if they had vegetarian jerky, I would have been run out of the store at gun point. (There is such a thing, but maybe only in California.)
I looked at some of the alcohol.
“Mad Dog 20/20, I didn’t think they made that crap anymore,” I laughed.
“Want some?”
“No, I used to get sick and puke on those all the time in high school, I don’t think I could bear the smell of it again,” I laughed again and shook my head.
The clerk put two bottles of MD 20/20 down in front of me.
“Well, I guess I’ll give them a try again, it is 2020 after all,” I sighed.
“You won’t regret it,” smiled the clerk with his tobacco-stained teeth. Somehow, I felt I would.
My voice lowered to a whisper and I leaned over, even though the clerk wasn’t wearing a mask and asked, “Is there a place near the gates of Area 51 where you can stay overnight and watch the stars?”
“You want to spend the night out there? No camping allowed you know,” said the young guy behind the counter. “They’ll run you off for sure.”
The guy lingering in the store, now had an unlit Marlboro between his lips, with his black mask under his chin, and joined in the conversation.
“I did it last night, stayed out there in my car, I know where you can go where they don’t seem to bother you,” he suggested.
The guy with the cigarette seemed unusually dressed up, wearing black slacks and white shirt tucked in, and a tie. It didn’t strike me as bizarre at the time, but he certainly didn’t look like he had just spent the night in his car.
He took out a pen and drew on the back of my gas receipt and told me to continue on the highway until I saw a black gate, and then turn right and look for a clump of trees and turn off the paved road down a dirt road and past a black mailbox. Drive that road for 7 miles, if you’ve gone 8 you’ve gone too far, and turn right at some big car-sized rocks. That’s a good spot to hunker down for the night.
“Look up in the skies and you’ll see something,” said the well-dressed guy, still not lighting up his smoke, and repeating the advice I had heard before.
“Did you see something last night?” I asked
“You always see something — ,” he answered with a dramatic pause. “You don’t always know what it is.”
I got in my blue Mustang with the top down and put the hand-drawn map next to my phone with Waze still on, and headed out in time to watch the sun setting behind the distant mountains in California. After passing the lone, odd black mailbox, I found the spot and I slid down the seat in the passenger’s side because it went back further than the driver’s side. I brought out my jacket, my comforter, and a bunch of trail mix packets and waited with the top down for the show.
I opened the first bottle of MD 20/20 and guzzled it and almost gagged. Yeah, it was as terrible as I remembered.
I nodded off, but woke up and checked my phone and saw it was 11:30 and pitch dark. I used my phone app to check out some of the stars, and confirmed the bright red one was in fact Mars, and spotted some full constellations.
It was a little after midnight, and well past my disappointed phase that I saw the first speeding light. It shot across the sky and I thought it was a comet, but then in came back across. Three other lights came out and formed a diamond shape in the sky and then steadily moved in formation across the sky and almost directly over me.
I took out my camera and snapped some still photos and then switched to video mode, and could very clearly see the perfect formation in the sky. Then, the lights seemed to dance. Each one seemed to go in circles, and I tried to see if they were actually crafts of some sort that were spinning or twirling.
It occurred to me right away that this must be some sort of drone show that was going on to cause thrills for amateur UFO enthusiasts like me so we could post it on YouTube and generate some excitement of a sighting.
It all seemed too orchestrated, and I looked around to see if any other parked cars were in the area, and even flashed my lights a few times to see if anyone else in the dark would flash back. No one did.
And so, I recorded the light show on my phone, and eventually got a bit bored with it. I hoped that even if they were drones they may get a bit closer to me, so I could get a better picture of what they were, but they just looked like lights in the sky doing a bit of a dance. If it were to music, it could have been to something like “Bohemian Rhapsody” — a slow-moving interlude mixed with some wild movements and a frenetic section of craziness. They made no noise. No swooshing. No whirring.
Eventually I turned my phone off and watched about half an hour more until all four of them simply streaked across the sky and disappeared.
My stomach started gurgling and churning, and I figured it was the toxic combination of trail mix, and Mad Dog 20/20, and my anxiety that caused it. The pain grew on my side, and I hoped that I didn’t have to go take a squat out there in the desert, but luckily I didn’t.
I half expected government troops to swoop in to escort me away, or a helicopter to shine lights down or something like that, but nothing. Just quiet. Just calm.
I kept the top down and hunkered in a bit more, pulling another jacket over me because it was getting cold. I held my phone in one hand and my car keys in the other hand so i wouldn’t lose them. I slept rather soundly.
Scraping along the side of the car woke me up. I had to get my bearings a bit, and looked at my phone and saw it was 3:47 a.m. I heard the scraping again on the back of the car, like a scratching and turned to look, and the scratching went around to the other side.
Before I could get out to see what it was, my car started up. The lights inside the car, the ignition, the dashboard, the headlights and the horn all turned on at the same time. It was the emergency horn, so it was frenetic and loud. I was still in the passenger side of the car, and I looked down in my hands.
I had my phone in one hand and my car keys in the other hand.
Now, I do have a car that clicks the car doors and trunk open with a button on the keychain, but the car doesn’t start with a button. This old Mustang requires you stick the key in the ignition and turn it in order to start, like cars are supposed to start.
And here it was, starting on its own. I even heard the gas pedal rev a few times. The car honked once, and I scrambled out and stared at it from about 10 feet away. I was afraid to go around it because I thought it may start driving by itself, so I sneaked around the back.
I carefully opened the driver’s side door, got into the car and put the ignition key in and turned the car off. I turned the headlights off.
I reached for my phone and it had no charge. Zero. Nothing. Then, more surprisingly, I saw that my gas tank was near empty. I had just filled it up. On the floor was an empty MD 20/20.
I looked to see if someone had siphoned gas out of the car, but found no drops of gas anywhere, not even any smell, and the gas tank lid was on solid.
The pain in my side hit me again, and this time when I reached down toward my side, I felt a bulge poking out of my stomach. It didn’t hurt to the touch, but it was a solid, odd bulge. I pulled up my shirt and looked down at this sausage-like bulge wriggling out below my waist line and it seemed horrifying. I looked around for help, or even someone to tell, and decided screaming wasn’t going to do much good.
I got back into the car, and pressed the bulge, and it seemed to subside. I never had a hernia before, but I thought it may be that, or maybe the Mad Dog exacerbated something in my intestines.
I tried to get to sleep, but I couldn’t. I stared at my car dashboard in the driver’s seat until the sun came up. I hoped I had enough gas to go. Somewhere. Anywhere. Not here.
I opened the second bottle of MD 20/20 and drank it, very slowly, but completely.
The sun came up quickly, and already felt hot. I took a breath, and started the car, and found my way back to the main road.
I stopped at the gas station, and the young guy with the overalls was still there, and I got to know his name was “Kelly.” I told him what happened, and he said a number of people tell him stories like that all the time. Almost every day. Something weird.
“And the lights, yeah, the lights are strange,” he said. “I’d seen them.”
I showed him segments of the light show after my phone charged back up to 12 percent, and he seemed unexcited.
“I don’t really look much up in the sky, I think it’s better not to,” Kelly said.
Kelly followed me out to my car and could see I was a bit unnerved. He saw how I put the map I got from the customer the day before on the middle part of my car with my phone, and my wallet and a suitcase was on top of my comforter.
“You gonna keep your wallet right there in your open convertible?” Kelly said, handing me a cup of coffee. “I think you’ll need this, it’s black, we ain’t got nothing to put in anyway.”
I thought it was an odd thing to point out about my wallet, but I handed him $20 out of it, and thanked him and threw it back on the comforter. He told me a short cut to get to the main road that would take me to the freeway that gets me back to California.
I took the shortcut Kelly suggested. About two miles down the road, I saw a horrifying sight on the left hand side, which sloped down into a grassy gulley. Down an embankment a girl of about 8 or 10 in a red dress was screaming bloody murder and crying. She held her arms out, wrists up and they were covered in blood as if she slit her arms.
I stopped the car but didn’t get out right away and shouted across the road.
“What happened! Are you all right?”
She just screamed and said “Help me, come and help me.”
She had long stringy straight brown hair and freckles and stopped crying pretty fast after I got out of the car.
As I approached her, I wondered if I could pick her up, or if I should even touch her at all. I hesitated halfway toward her. She collapsed on the side of the road and screamed more.
I ran over to her and held up her head and smelled something sickly sweet coming from her arms and her breath. Her arms looked red as if she had smeared Red Hots candy all over her wrists. The orangish-red seeemed too bright.
I hated myself thinking: “This is not what it looks like in the movies.”
“You need to help me, you need to help.” She repeated over and over and then I noticed that when I looked into her eyes she wasn’t looking at me, but over my shoulder.
I looked around and saw a young blond guy stooped over and rummaging through my car. The young teen looked a bit older than the girl, and he threw things around in my car when he saw me look over at him.
“Hey!” I shouted and I left the girl to run back to my car.
The guy grabbed my suitcase and a bag of trail mix, and ran across the street with my wallet in hand. The suitcase opened (the latch was never very good) and my boxers and jeans fell out and he looked down at the mess and dropped it.
The youth kept walking backward looking at me as he defiantly opened up my wallet, took out the cash out, looked at me, smiled, and dropped the wallet. He skittered into the sparse trees on the side of the road, and I looked back and the girl was gone, but I could hear her laughing.
I tried to follow where they went, or look for a house they may have run to somewhere in the trees, but I couldn’t find anything, nor could I figure out where they may have hidden out there in the desert. I picked up my stuff, now blowing around the road.
I drove back to Kelly’s gas station.
I told him the story, and he seemed as unexcited as when I showed him the lights in the sky. My phone was dead again, and he said he would call the local sheriff’s deputy.
“He’s my friend, Chuck Greystoke, he’ll help you,” Kelly said.
I waited for about 20 minutes and a slick deputy with mirrored sunglasses drove up and asked me what happened. He handed me his card “Charles Greystoke” and it all looked very official.
“Hey Charlie, it looks like this guy got scammed and robbed on the side of the road,” Kelly said. The officer looked at me with some skepticism and asked what I was doing in those parts.
“As if I have to ask,” Officer Greystoke said with a smirk, immediately linking me with the crazies he must see all the time in the vicinity of Area 51.
I told him that I think I had about $180 in cash in the wallet, but I did recover my Driver’s License and looks like all my credit cards were still in there.
I felt a little disoriented. It may have been the heat, it may have been the whole ordeal. It may have been my Multiple Sclerosis which acts up in the heat, and I haven’t been taking my medications for it. I told the officer about my medical condition.
“Follow me to the office,” Officer Greystoke said. “I’ll take care of you.”
Without thinking, I thanked Kelly and followed the cop car far outside of Rachel to this dusty mini-mall with a few closed shops, a bar. His office had a sign that read “Jail” outside that looked like it was printed on a copy machine.
“This is the jail?” I asked as I walked in, and saw the lone cell with bars with a desk just outside of it.
It looked like a movie set of an old Wild West jail, except for the old copy machine next to the desk.
“Yeah, don’t get to use it much,” Officer Greystoke said.
I asked him if I could charge my phone up, and I asked him if there was a bank machine where I could get some cash, or even a hotel to stay in overnight.
“Nah, not much around here,” Officer Greystoke said. “Look, I know what you are going through, my uncle had MS, and I know you can be a bit disoriented and confused. Cool off here for a while.”
I didn’t seem confused or disoriented. At least until he mentioned it.
“Had you been drinking out there last night?”
“No, not a drop, just water,” and then I remembered, “Well, I had some Mad Dog 20/20.”
“Really? Do folk still drink that stuff?”
“Look, Charlie — “
“Hey, don’t ever call me Charlie, I don’t like being called Charlie.”
“But your friend Kelly called you Charlie, didn’t he? Or Chuck,” I couldn’t exactly recall, but it was both.
“Don’t ever call me Chuck neither,” the officer grumbled.
“Officer Greystoke, then, what do you suggest I do all day here?” I asked.
“All day? It’s nearly dinner time, I’m going to get you some food from next door, and you can stay in the jail cell for the night,” Officer Greystoke said. “I won’t close the cell door so you don’t have to use the squat toilet, you can use the bathroom down the hall.”
I shook my head and looked at my phone and it said 3:47 p.m. and I couldn’t imagine where the time went. Hours seemed to have slipped past while driving between the gas station and the mini-mall jail.
The officer brought me back a tuna sandwich and fries and a sweet lemonade while he took the report from me about the road scam. He became a bit friendly.
“Look, my uncle had a bad case of MS, and I saw him get worse and worse and took care of him as he got a bit confused about things,” the officer said. “He would lose track of time, too, and stutter like you are, and see things.”
“Stutter? I’m stuttering?” I didn’t think I was.
“You were when I first talked to you at Kelly’s place, you seemed a bit confused,” the officer said. “I thought you might have been on something, but I saw in your eyes that you weren’t doing any drugs, and that you were simply a bit disoriented.”
I didn’t dispute him, I didn’t argue. I couldn’t believe it was so late already, though, and somehow I lost half a day.
“I saw the emergency numbers in your wallet, and I tried calling a few of them on your behalf,” he said.
I remember making laminated cards when the family went to Europe last summer and it had our cell phone numbers on them to help track each other down in emergencies. I kept a card in my wallet.
“Did you reach anyone?” I asked.
“No, a few wrong numbers and no answers, but I didn’t leave a message, didn’t want to worry anyone too much,” he said.
I sat down on the lounge chair near his desk and finished the rest of the lemonade. I showed Officer Greystoke my footage of the lights the night before on my phone.
“They do all sorts of special training flights around here,” the officer said.
“But there was no sound, it didn’t sound like jets or anything,” I said.
“You’re not saying those are alien UFOs or something like that?” the officer said.
“No, I don’t know what they were, just lights I guess,” I said. “Hey, can I take a picture of me being in jail like this. People would get a kick out of seeing me in here.”
“No, no, no,” Officer Greystoke said. “No selfies. No posting anything on anything like that. We don’t have Internet out here anyways. I’ll have to check in your phone and belongings here for the night anyway.”
“At least let me take a selfie with you,” I said.
I took one with the young officer and me, looking rather like a scraggly hillbilly.
The officer took my phone, my wallet, and my car keys and put them in a small safe located under his desk that he locked in with his gun. I felt safe.
We talked long hours into the night. He told me crazy stories by people who said they were abducted, and fake sightings that people created. He talked about activists wanting to storm Area 51 and the secret military base there, but no one got anywhere to see anything.
I asked him what he thought, and he seemed noncommittal and mysterious about it, but I could tell he knew more than he was saying. I asked him about the most unusual thing that happened, about my car starting up and the lights going on, and he shook his head and laughed.
“Things like that happen all the time,” he said. “I don’t know, it’s called an electronic vector or something nasty like that. Sometimes I get here and my coffee is made for me already.”
“What about my gas tank emptying out?”
“Probably the kids siphoned it while you were asleep.”
“I didn’t see any spilled gas,” I said.
“They are good at it.”
“What about the scratching?”
“Could’ve been them, or an animal, a hungry coyote.”
“What about the lights?”
“Don’t look in the skies if you want your questions answered, there will only be more questions.”
“What about the bulge in my side?”
“At least it didn’t explode out of your body like that thing did in that movie.”
We laughed. And, we laughed into the night until I got tired, and he stayed in another part of the station while I curled up in the bed in the jail cell. It was more comfortable than the car, but the blanket was scratchy and I didn’t trust the sheets.
The next morning, I was greeted with a cup of coffee and some biscuits and jam.
“I want to thank you for your hospitality Officer Charles,” I said. “Is there any way for me to pay you for all this, I really appreciate it, you went out of your way.”
“Well, maybe you could pay a bit,” he said, holding the police report he took of my incident.
“Yes, what?”
“You could pay $180 in the cash that you lost yesterday to the kids,” the officer said. “Look, I know those kids, and they are trying to keep being evicted from their grandfather’s house.”
“You know who they are?”
“Yeah, they don’t do this often, only when they really need to, and things are a bit desperate these days, what with the virus and all.”
“So you knew who they were all the time?”
“We could forget this whole thing, and call it even and it would save me a lot of paperwork.”
I nodded. He ripped up the police report.
A bit stunned in the morning sun, I got in my convertible and Officer Charles Greystoke handed me my keys, phone and wallet. I put the top up and waved to him as I peeled out of the mini-mall parking lot, waving a thanks and wanting to get out of there quickly.
I picked up speed on the road, and looked down to see my phone losing power again. I picked it up and out flew the gas receipt with the map and Officer Greystoke’s card, out of the car and into the desert.
I waved them good-bye.
But I felt a twinge in my side, and the pain came back.
The next time I stopped to take a photo was when I watched the sun rise over El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. It moved me to tears. I never saw anything so spectacular.
I pulled out my phone to take a selfie of the incredible moment.
I looked back on the phone to see how they looked, and then noticed that all the photos from the past two days, including the selfie with the officer, and all the video footage and photos of the lights were gone. Deleted. Not there.
The past two days of my photos in Area 51 disappeared.
Angry at first at Officer Greystoke, I knew that he didn’t have my phone password, and I also wondered if something could wipe out my photos why wasn’t everything erased? Only those two days were gone.
I look back at those two days and try to figure things out. I asked my mechanic about the car starting up on its own, and he says it can’t. I looked up roadside car scams involving two youths in Nevada on the Internet and found nothing. I even tried looking up Kelly’s gas station on Google maps, and Officer Greystoke, but can find nothing.
I am having a hernia operation, and they are taking out some malignant polyps from my colon next month. I hope that the pain will go away after that.
My phone has never been the same, always charged at 100 percent, then going down to 7 percent for no reason, even with a new battery.
I’ll never have all the questions answered. I’ll never figure everything out, or understand it all, but I have to keep plodding through it all.
I’m realizing, that as the wildfires get squelched around me, and questions continue to linger, it is more healthy to simply look ahead and see what is there for me down the road.
Top down, open air, open-minded, with a smile and intense curiosity, I continue down the road to see where it takes me, and what stories I can tell.
Will I be looking back up into the skies? Of course, absolutely. But not any time soon.
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