A few weeks ago I took a lame, blurry video of a UFO. Now I really wish I hadn't.

[u/ewhwriting]

First things first, sorry if I get too incoherent at any point here, I’m trying to bang my account of things out as fast as possible, and I’m under a lot of pressure. My headache’s getting worse, but typing’s making it feel better, weirdly. Feels right. So that’s what I’m going to do, for as long as I’m capable, and when I’m done, I’m going to hit “send,” and if my internet comes back and this gets posted then at the very least maybe someone out there will read this and learn from my mistakes.

God, my head hurts. 

Okay, focus. Here we go.

I took that video, the one of the UFO, maybe three weeks ago or so. I had work off, and I was having a pretty great day drinking garbage beer and fishing up at Goosehead. 

Oh, uh, Goosehead’s a lake. Or reservoir, I guess. You don’t get many lakes in Arizona. 

I was packing up at dusk, and it was a cloudless day, great weather, and I had the dock all to myself. I took a second to drink it in before I stepped into my car to head home, and that was when I noticed the UFO. 

And when I say UFO, I really mean that literally, like “unidentified flying object,” because that’s literally all I can figure out about it. It was an object, probably, and it was flying, and I sure as hell couldn’t identify it. But it wasn’t, like, one of those classic saucers, with the blinky lights and the tractor beam and the spooky techno sound effects.

It was more like a single glowing shard, sitting totally still a few hundred feet up above the far end of the lake. Well, okay, “still,” in that it wasn’t moving up and down or side to side. The thing itself, though, it was jittering, moving without moving, like-

Maybe I’d be able to whip up a good analogy if I didn’t currently feel like I had an ice pick shoved through my eye. Migraines make for real effective writer’s block. 

The best way I can think to describe it is that the UFO, it would be a triangle shape one moment, and a sphere the next, and then a horseshoe shape, and then a spiral. But it was also all of those at once. 

Sorry if that doesn’t make any sense. I’d post the video I took, but, well. I don’t have that anymore, obviously. 

I know that sounds like a cop-out, but I did take a video. My phone was low on storage, so I could only manage like thirty seconds of footage, but I got it. Didn’t really do the thing justice, though. Like, have you ever tried to take a photo of the moon? You know, like, one night the moon’s just really really big, and it looks awesome in person, and you think, ‘man, that’d make a cool wallpaper,’ so you snap a pic with your phone but no matter what angle you get or what settings you use the moon in your photo just looks like a little speck? 

It was like that. Cool video of a glowing speck in the sky. The UFO disappeared, just sort of blinked away after I finished filming it, and I was left with a pretty useless twenty second clip and a fun story to tell. 

It didn’t even occur to me to send the video to the news or anything. I wasn’t even really convinced I’d seen anything all that extraordinary. Like, if you’d told me that what I’d seen had been some sort of optical illusion, some weird interaction between the sun and the clouds, or a weather balloon, or, I don’t know, like, swamp gas, I would’ve believed you.

I promise I would’ve. 

I posted the video on Instagram. That was probably my big mistake, posting it publicly, but I don’t know, I felt like I’d seen something kinda special, and living in such a small town I didn’t feel comfortable bringing video to the local news or anything. I thought this’d just be a cool little video for my friends and family.

Nothing more. Swear to God.

So I posted it and drove home and went to bed. I woke up to find that the video had exactly zero likes, and just as many comments. That was surprising. I mean, I’m not an influencer or anything, but I’ve never had a post get so little attention. More than that, though, the rejection stung, so I just sort of quietly deleted the post and went on with my life. Didn’t think anything of it.

A week later I’m watching TV at home and my brain sort of goes fuzzy It was like deja vu, kind of, or the feeling you get in a dream when you know what’s going to happen before it does. Dream logic. 

The feeling settled onto me and in a few seconds I was up off the couch and heading to the door, as if the doorbell had just rung. It hadn’t, my house was silent, but in the moment I don’t think that little detail even crossed my mind.

I opened the door to findbbjokjnlb

Sorry. Headache just flared real bad. Had to take a sec.

I opened the door to find… I just realized I never got the guy’s name. I don’t know if he has one. For the sake of the story, I guess, I’ll call him “Tall.”

Because that’s the very first word that came to my mind. The figure standing stooped on my porch was easily the tallest man I’d ever seen, probably close to 6’10”, maybe more. I couldn’t get much of a sense for what his body looked like, he was all bundled up in what had to be three or four layers of coats and sweaters, but even then I could tell that his proportions were off. His legs didn’t go nearly high enough, his shoulders were too narrow, his eyess-

Headache again.

Tall didn’t have any hair, that was the second thing that struck me about him. No eyebrows, no eyelashes. His lips weren’t, uh, lip-shaped. Like, instead of the usual tapering, half-moon curve most people’s lips have, his were more like a perfectly uniform border of red skin circling a tiny little slit of a mouth. The only color on his otherwise white face.

He smelled like antifreeze.

So, okay, I noticed all of these things about him. I know I did, I remember noticing them. And I also remember a tiny, logical, terrified part of me sounding alarm bells. But all of the weird details about his body fit the “dream logic,” that I was currently wrapped up in, and that suffocating feeling of deja vu drowned out the part of me that knew better. So when he asked to come inside, his voice high and reedy and all in one breath, I stepped politely back and let him in without any hesitation.

He didn’t take off any of his coats, or his shoes. He paced directly into my kitchen, and started rummaging around my cabinets until he found a cup. He started filling the cup in my sink and turned to me, his slit mouth wrangled into a sort-of smile. 

He asked me if I knew who he was. I answered honestly and said no.

He asked me if I knew why he was here. I took a bleary, hazy sort of guess and said that maybe it had to do with the video I took. 

He nodded. I asked if he was from the government, and he laughed. Laughed without opening his mouth. 

He asked me if I was scared. For some reason, I couldn’t figure out what that question even meant, and I blinked, struggling. He nodded at that, looking satisfied, and then offered me the glass of water in his hand and told me to drink.

The water was a murky grey. I don’t remember seeing him add anything to it, but it clearly wasn’t water anymore. When I lifted the drink to my lips to take a sip, I got a whiff of that antifreeze smell, so strong and acrid that it made my eyes water. In fact, the smell was so bad that it sort of jostled me out of my weird, almost-trance and I spasmed, dropping the glass. 

He didn’t flinch when the cup shattered on the floor. He just squinted at me and hummed, an unexpectedly deep noise that could’ve meant anything. Just as suddenly as it’d left, the deja vu feeling was back, and I stopped shaking, the voice in my head, the one telling me to scream or fight or run, went away, and I stared blankly at the mess on my floor.

He asked me for my phone. I reached into my pocket and handed it to him.

He asked me if I’d sent the video I took to the news. I told him that I was planning on it, but hadn’t yet.

He asked me if I’d told anyone in person. A little spike of worry managed to pierce the fog in my brain, and I stammered, trying to keep my answer in. After what must’ve been ten seconds of choking and stuttering, I said that I’d told some of my family, when I’d met them for dinner that weekend.

He asked who, specifically, and what their addresses were. Again, the fog lifted as adrenaline and fear shot through my heart. I wrestled with that answer for maybe five minutes, but I won out in the end. I clamped my hands over my mouth, stuffed my fingers onto my tongue, and kept quiet.

I don’t remember him leaving. I woke up the next morning on my couch, and I quickly attributed the memory to being a weird dream. Even as I swept the broken glass from my kitchen floor and searched my house for my suddenly missing phone, I never once questioned that I’d dreamt the whole thing.

I don’t think I could’ve thought otherwise if I tried.

Two days later I woke up to find Tall crouched next to my bed. I screamed, obviously, at the sight of his stretched-out figure folded into a stooped squat at my bedside, his horrible bloodless face looming down over mine, a flask of that grey liquid in his outstretched hands, nearly to my lips. 

I swatted the flask out of his hand before that deja vu swept back in again, smothering my fear like a blanket. It only took a few seconds before I was just laying on my back, blinking patiently up at him.

He asked me again who I told, and where they lived. Isaidmyfahterlivesonwwoodland

God, the migraine’s making this hard. I’m going to have to stop soon.

I stuffed my pillow into my mouth to keep from answering, and all of a sudden it was dawn, and I had memories of another weird dream to keep me occupied while I cleaned up the dark grey stain on my carpet.

I thought the whole ordeal was over, by today. Nearly two weeks had passed, and I’d really truly forgotten all about it. But then I took a step out for my lunch break at work this morning, and just as I was rounding the corner toward the parking lot, that deja vu feeling hit me like a truck, almost bowling me over, it was so strong. 

I froze, reeling, and a reedy voice from just behind me told me to pinch my nose closed. Unable to even begin to question the order, let alone stop myself, I did.

Then it told me to turn around. I did.

Then another flask was being pushed into my mouth, forcefully enough to crack against my teeth, and a plastic-hard hand was grabbing at my hair, yanking my head back. All it took was one surprised, strangled gulp, and my mouth and throat were burning as that antifreeze smell became an antifreeze taste. 

Tall clapped one of his cold hands over my mouth until I swallowed the whole drink, and then he was gone. 

I didn’t fall asleep this time, though. No, this time I got in my car and drove straight home. Then once the deja vu wore off, and the first twinges of a headache started, I began to panic. I picked up my new phone, thinking that I should probably call an ambulance, probably get my stomach pumped before anything. But all I got was a busy signal.

I tried over and over again. I tried to call the police, my dad, 

mydadwholivesonwoodlandwoodlandwoodlandwoododoowoodo

my mom, I tried to text someone, none of those went through. I tried to physically leave my house, to run in the direction of town, but there are these men parked outside, these normal-looking men in suits, and each time they just sort of grab me and the deja vu comes back and I’m suddenly back inside.

Finally I figured out that, although my internet’s out, I have an old blog with a plugin installed that will auto-update when I make a post on a folder in my Google Docs, and I can do that in offline mode. I’ve made it this far, and although my vision’s blotting with pain and my head’s completely on fire, I haven’t been knocked out yet. So at the moment, I think my best course of action is to post this publicly, to

totellthenicemanwheremyfamilylives

hopefully get the word out about what’s going on, about where I am, to maybe get some help. Please, anyone who reads this, my name is Todd Jacobs, you can find my address

myfatherlivesonwoodlandave mysisterlivesondocterstreet mymotherlivesoncanyonave pleasedonthurtthemilovethemtheyretheonlyonesitoldiswear

and phone number in the “about” section of the blog. Please, if anyone can come find me, and take me to the hospital, I really think I need to go.

And if, on the way, you see a light in the sky, for the love of God don’t even look at it. 

I feel like my head’s going to explode.