“Escape from the black cloud
that surrounds you.
Then you will see your own light
as radiant as the full moon.”
We were still close to the autumnal equinox, which promised a little over 12 hours of moon time. This time of year, she chased the sun across the sky the way a dog chases its tail; never getting closer but not giving up, either. No longer did the sun submerge gracefully below the horizon at the leisurely pace of midsummer nights. With the moon hot on its tail, it set straight down and jealously sucked the daylight out of the sky in a hurry. An hour later, the rim of a huge and ponderous October moon would peek over the Eastern ridge behind our camp, and the night adventures would begin in earnest. We gathered a few ambling supplies and made our way down to the Wee Bear balcony, in the expectant manner of opera patrons finding our seats for the overture.
As the last vestiges of daylight dissolved into the purple mantle of the darkening skyline, a few early stars began to poke timidly through the folds of heaven’s blanket. They were soon joined by others, weaker still and twinkling with temerity, as if they knew on this night they would never have a chance to shine brightly. Pick out any faint star, and it faded off the retina and back on again, like a cheap flashlight with low batteries. They were mere extras on the stage, preening and fretting into position, waiting for the arrival of the Supreme Diva.
As if heralded by footlights, the reflected glow preceded the moonrise for a few minutes, growing and melting into in the cloudless sky and taking with it any unfortunate stars in the vicinity. Suddenly, the rim of the orb breached the ridge line and seemed to hesitate for an instant, like a gleaming silver rope lain across the tops of the trees. Then steadily it rose, inexorably thrusting its radiant globe into the sky. The familiar scarred patterns of craters and meteorites unveiled themselves in reverse, as if the mountain was a curtain being pulled down; under the stage. The theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey rang in my ears. The details of the moon’s surface stood in sharp relief in the clear mountain air, and it seemed to hatch and grow larger as it revealed itself, the way a glistening moth sheds its cocoon and swells with new life. As it broke free from the obscuring ridge line, it snapped into a cold, complete circle, and the crown of the ridge was frosted with moonglow.
Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colors from our sight,
Red is gray and yellow white,
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion.*
Turning to see the effects across the valley, I was startled to find that some unknown gods had crept up behind us while we weren’t looking, and replaced the massive Sawtooth mountain with an imposter. This cheap plaster copy, which before had been brooding, dark, and indifferent; awaiting the grand entrance of the Supreme Diva, now looked like a silent film actor smothered with too much makeup. All its great white facets and triangles were swathed in a chalky whiteness that subtly radiated borrowed light; neither flat nor glossy. Exposed in ghostly masquerade, it swooned and waltzed rhythmically with the shifting moonlight. I could read the writing on my granola bar wrapper from its secondary glow… but all the colors were gone! I grabbed the bag of gorp, and all the m & m’s had turned gray. “That is amazing,” said Al over my shoulder, seeming to read my thoughts as he helped himself to a handful of nuts and candy. We amused ourselves for several minutes, shining the flashlight on the candy, then turning it off to watch the colors disappear. It is this silent sameness of experience, this wordless communication, this absolute omniscience that makes communal mushroom trips such a life-affirming experience.
The moon had by then risen several degrees above the ridgeline, and was now casting its eerie glow far and wide across the massive white granite promontory where we sat, and the effect was intensely illusory. Every rock glowed with impossibly reflected light: born of the sun, millions of miles away on the other side of earth, glancing off the stark porcelain face of the moon another 138,000 miles behind us, beaming back down into this broad, magical valley, and seeming to reflect upward from the living granite all around us, as the exhausted photons slipped through our dilated pupils… finally coming to rest softly in our retinas.
Joe had brought a surprise for us all. As a Frisbee fanatic, he was never far from a flying disc, and he had been saving a special one for this occasion. When he pulled a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee from his bag, it was as if a wizard had conjured a mystical icon from another realm. We all oohed and ahhed in the mindless, awestruck manner of neophytes glimpsing the Ark of the Covenant. What sorcery was this? It was so surreal, so incongruous, so outrageous – and so perfect – that we all just stared dumbly, rapt before its dim phosphorescent roundness, forgetting completely what it was for. Suddenly, Joe snatched it up and flung it far out into the grayness, arcing forsakenly away from our adoration. “No!!!” we all screamed as one voice, reaching out desperately, quite unreasonably afraid of losing our Golden Calf. If we could have flown, every one of us surely would have leapt off the rock to gather it in before it got scratched, or lost. But clever Joe was more artful and skilled than that. He had timed the updraft perfectly, and cast the disc out in a level, floating hover that seemed to hang transfixed in the warm, rising currents of air, and then floated back magically to where we sat. Joe stepped deftly as it wobbled back, losing its spin, and caught it a few feet down slope.
“Whoa-a-a!!!” We all exhaled with enraptured relief and approval. This totally unexpected act of magic, combining the ancient atmospheric alchemy with modern plastics, chemicals, and aerodynamics, had pried the lid off our reservations. Heretofore we had been content to sit quietly and observe the phenomenal effects of the full moon. Now, in one exuberant instant, we were transformed and scattered like fairies startled from their hiding places. In the queer ambiance of the moonlight, we danced from rock to ledge, tossing the green, glowing Frisbee around like sharing a dream. The faintly luminous disc whipped up a kind of whirring music as it cut this way and that through the milky night air. Some of the throws inaccurately rattled off the shimmering rocks, or got hung up in the grasping gray manzanita. Others were enchantingly precise, floating into our hands like a living, glowing bird coming back to its perch. Accuracy was not as important as art, and our lustrous muse led us back and forth across the soft, sallow granite terrain (Ouch! That’s not soft!). A barked shin was small price to pay for such oneness; a numinous spiritual unity with the goddess of Luna.
Eventually the borrowed luminescence in the Frisbee faded, the imaginary music slowed and changed tempo, and the dance came naturally to its end, and we gathered once again in God’s Parlor where we had left our stuff. Our bodies folded naturally into the gray crevices of softly glowing granite. The moon was now high in the sky, no longer magnified outrageously by atmospheric condensation. The timid little stars that had paled in significance with the rising of the omnipotent orb were making a comeback in its wake, stubbornly taking their usual spots in the firmament. Satellites hurried by on their unerring, secretive paths, oblivious to the cosmic choreography. The fainter stars still meekly yielded as the mighty moon marched across the sky; their far-flung photons greedily devoured after millions of light years in transit.
Pinprick holes in a colorless sky,
Let insipid figures of light pass by,
The mighty light of ten thousand suns,
Challenges infinity and is soon gone.*
It was well past midnight now, and yet the soft winds remained warm and electric on our skin. The magical disc was still being tossed about, but in more of a set pattern where we had established our viewing places. Our last bag of gorp, which had been wisely protected from chipmunks in my Tupperware armor, was rapidly devoured and the crumbs scattered with disdain for the furry little varmints to find later.
The diminutive transistor radio sputtered and crackled to life, harsh and tinny in the smooth air. “Turn that damn thing off, the score is still the same,” said Al sardonically, prompting giggles of remembrance from the Giants fans, and mumbled curses from Chris and Greg. “Seriously.”
“Seriously, no.” Greg retorted,
“Dodgers suck!” I offered unnecessarily.
Greg fiddled with the dial, the cheap transistors pulling in the amazingly pure and strong signals, which were boosted after sunset due to the loss of interference from solar radiation. The twang of country, effervescent Latino accordions, and dire evangelical preaching cut through the night, and then a clear, calm voice spoke magnanimously to all of us at once: “This is Art Bell with Coast to Coast AM from the Kingdom of Nye, bringing you greetings from our space brothers….” The night’s agenda had still more surprises in store.
Joe shined his flashlight through the translucent Frisbee. “Hey look, a flying saucer!” We all searched in vain for something to throw at him.
Art Bell was a popular talk show host, specializing in kooky guests whose wild claims about aliens and government conspiracies were handled evenly, respectfully, and with just the right amount of mystery. This night’s program was about our “space brothers,” who watched over us compassionately from their invisible spaceships, according to a hypnotic caller who preferred to remain anonymous. He claimed they were walking among us every day, watching and waiting. Art never screened or ridiculed his callers like many talk shows, and anything could happen.
I had always been a firm believer in extraterrestrial life, not just because I was an avid reader of science fiction, but mostly because of reasoning that if intelligent life could evolve biologically here on earth, it could also evolve elsewhere in our boundless universe. My friends were like-minded, and a lively discussion ensued about the possibility that aliens had actually created the mysterious “space pads” we had discovered the previous year on the southeastern rim of Little Bear Lake. At this mystic juncture, it would be appropriate to describe something about the psycho-hallucinogenic properties of psilocybin. The lines between fantasy and reality are not only blurred; quite often they are most unnecessary to one’s point of view. It is frequently hard to make out where “real” experience ends, and “imaginary” visions begin. On the other hand, who’s to say that there ever were any lines between our thoughts and our experiences? Anyway, our little group of fungophiles was primed and hyperaware for what came next.
We were all idly watching the sky, which seemed a natural thing to do given the topic of conversation. The usual planes and satellites occasionally drifted through our field of vision, which included the more intrepid stars boldly returning after the passage of the full moon. It was Greg who saw them first, with his abnormally sharp eyesight. “Look at those satellites!”
He pointed, and one by one, we all located a perfect triangle of three bright dots bisecting the northern sky in an absolute straight line. “That’s just another plane!” Al snorted dismissively.
“No, planes have blinking signal lights,” retorted Greg. He was right. These lights were eerily steady, and did not belong to a plane.
“Well, it’s a satellite, then,”
“Three satellites, in formation?”
“Why not? Maybe they were deployed together, or…” Al’s know-it-all voice gulped to a halt, as the three pinpoint lights stopped. Just stopped – hovering right above us!
“Um, satellites don’t…” I started to say, and then all of us gasped as the three lights suddenly sped away from each other, impossibly fast, until they disappeared like shooting stars!
“Holy shit!”
“Did you see that?!”
“Whoa!”
“What the hell was that?!”
“Those were UFOs!!!”
“Where’d they go?!”
“They’re gone… Where’s my camera?!”
“It’s dark, stupid!”
“No way, that did NOT just happen!”
The energy level in our little group was explosively revitalized. At first, we couldn’t agree on what we had just seen, but there was no doubt we had participated in a significant phenomenon of some sort. Either we had joined together in a kind of mass hallucination, or we had seen three unidentified flying objects behaving very strangely. After searching the sky in vain, hoping for an instant replay or color commentator to explain what we had seen, we refocused our attention on each other. We cross examined our separate experiences to arrive at a consensual report. We all agreed that we had seen three lights traveling in a perfectly spaced triangle across the sky at a constant speed, and in an absolutely straight line, in the manner of an aircraft or satellite. Four of us said we had seen the travelling lights stop still for three to five seconds, then speed away from each other rapidly and disappear at the periphery of the night sky. Joe said he had looked away and then back again too late, but thought he had seen one of them disappearing over the ridge line. Our eventual agreement brought no satisfactory explanation. Nervous, searching glances were cast upwards in every direction, straining to discover the secrets between the faint stars.
It was true that we had taken mushrooms about eight hours before, and afterwards, we never seriously considered the event to be more than a momentary flash of unexplained phenomena. Nothing else happened to confirm what we had seen, and it was impossible (or irrelevant) to sleep afterwards. The energy in my spine was buzzing like a high voltage power line the rest of the night. Art Bell continued to field calls about our visiting “space brothers” into the wee hours of the morning, and we chattered excitedly about what we had seen, often getting up and pacing about, tossing pale white rocks at the setting moon reflected in the water, as it crawled behind the northwestern rim over towards Big Bear Lake. It was certainly more entertaining to believe we had witnessed a perfectly timed squadron of UFOs on maneuvers than to think we had all been duped by a low-budget radio host somewhere in the Nevada desert!
How much of our life experience is a manifestation of our thoughts? We had all certainly been thinking of flying saucers, and extraterrestrials, and such. Did we all just see what we wanted to see, or in our zeal to have a communal experience, simply agree that we had seen what the others said they had seen? Or did the aliens make an appearance just to fuck with our heads, because they knew we were thinking about them? Five people are a lot to have a synchronous hallucination; even when psilocybin is involved. Some folks say that we attract what we think about, or that we “see it when we believe it.” If that’s true, it does not negate the experience of the spectacular; rather, it validates the phenomenon in a whole new way. If we could all see lights in the sky because we wanted to, then of what other visions might we be capable? A dream? A family? An entire lifetime?
Night time, to some a brief interlude,
To others the fear of solitude.
Brave Helios wake up your steeds,
Bring the warmth the countryside needs.*
The sky was getting noticeably pale when our conversation wound down to individual thoughts of comfort. Food and warm sleeping bags were back at camp. We hadn’t noticed a drop in temperature, but suddenly we were freezing — the core fires of our bodies had turned to cold ashes, exposed flesh shivered in the predawn chill, and teeth began chattering uncontrollably. As the sun splashed golden on the spire of Altamira, we trudged back up the short path to camp, wolfed down an uncomfortable breakfast, and went to sleep in our separate tents, with a lingering, deafening roar in our ears from the infinite spaces between the galaxies.
*Lyrics by Justin Heyward of the Moody Blues, “The Day Begins,” from Days of Future Passed, 1967
“The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren’t any space aliens. We can’t be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we’re not all there is. If so, we’re in big trouble.”
— Ellen DeGeneres