That time I saw a UFO.
Today I come here to tell you how my life completely changed at 9 years old after an event that had only one witness: me.
I remember few things in my life with the complete and utter clarity of that day.
I think it is normal not to remember our childhood perfectly. To some extent, it makes sense that we forget so many things, but at the same time we have some very vivid core memories, since our brains are still in the crucial stages of development. This is one of those memories.
The year was 2008. I was eight or nine when this happened, and, as always, my companion was my dad.
(Or maybe I should say I was his?)
That day we were heading towards the capital of the country, Caracas, for reasons that today I cannot remember. If anyone who reads knows the area, they know that the trip from Valencia to Caracas is of approximately an hour and a half to two hours, and that one of the main places to cross is the Puente de la Cabrera, which connects the state of Carabobo with its neighbor, the state of Aragua.
We had been on the road for a short time and were just minutes away from the tunnel when something caught my attention.
I was in the back seat of the car. My memory of that day is so vivid that I remember that it was a Mitsubishi Lancer, a 98 model in bright golden with the most comfortable seats on the planet. I used to fit perfectly there, enough to lie down with a pillow and blanket my dad had strategically brought so that I could sleep and not get carsick from the trip.
But I couldn't sleep yet. I was looking up at the sky through the slightly purple tinted windshield. The sky was so clear that it occurred to me to tell my dad that we could run away to the beach, but soon the idea left my mind, because I saw the moon.
Since I’ve been able to remember I have been fascinated by the moon. It's my favorite thing in the universe, which is funny because I happen to be a Cancer and that sign is ruled by the moon. At that time it was around noon, however, so seeing it seemed the most curious thing to me. It was not the first time that I had managed to see the moon in the daytime, however, so in my mind it was not strange but unusual and wonderful.
But this was no moon. I remember that the first indication was that there were no craters: I knew that the moon was not smooth, that it was not perfect, so I frowned, confused.
The next thing I saw was that perfectly circular white object (I assume, since it actually looked more like a lilac color from the shade of the windshield) rotated on its own axis about three times, almost like gathering momentum, before disappearing in what I now know was eastbound, lost in infinity, never to be seen again.
Logically, the first thing I did was panic. I jumped out of the seat and got between the driver and passenger seats and began to desperately ask "Dad, did you see that? Did you see how the moon moved? Did you see?"
But my dad was driving; he couldn't see those things. He began to ask me what I had seen and I told him the same thing that I am telling you, but my dad has always been famous for his skepticism, so he laughed. He told me I watched a lot of TV, that it had been an optical illusion produced by the curvature of the windshield, that the moon could certainly be seen during the day on some occasions and that aliens did not exist.
I continued talking about the event for a few more minutes, but soon I realized that it had been too fantastic to happen in the middle of nowhere in Venezuela, a country that for me was the world but that for the world was (and continues to be) insignificant. I told myself that I was going to forget with the next night of sleep, that it had been nothing, that it was enough.
But I never forgot. From that moment on I became obsessed with every documentary series that had to do with extraterrestrial life. I learned the programming schedules and stayed up late at night, waiting to hear the stories of people who had seen things like the one I had seen, with the wish that one day someone would talk about a UFO that looked like the moon, and being able to tell everyone that what had happened had been true.
Years passed. People's skepticism grew, but so did the sightings. The Phoenix Lights come to mind, a series of sightings in Arizona, United States, so gigantic that thousands of people in various states reported and that, to this day, continues to be unexplained.
There are hundreds of incredibly well-documented cases to date of sightings similar to the Phoenix Lights, where an almost irrefutable number of people in large cities corroborate the appearance of objects in the sky that no one has managed to explain.
On June 25, 2021, something unprecedented happened: the United States Department of Defense published a report of more than 140 UFOs to which an official explanation could not be attributed, thus accepting their existence.
The news flew under everyone's radar, but not under mine: I did read the report where personnel from the Department of Defense of the most important country in the world could not understand the operation of extremely peculiar aircrafts, which challenged the laws of physics and admitting that they didn't seem to use technology that humans have access to.
I did remember the 9-year-old Laura who saw something that came from out of this world, questioning her own sanity, ignoring her own memories. That little girl was now looking at me with her round face, bright eyes and a smile, because she never lied.
The nights that followed the publication of that report were nights when I slept peacefully, knowing that the uncertainty I have always had never came from a simple conspiracy theory, and that at the end of the day, we are certainly not alone.
See you next time,
Laura.