This story of alien spacemen in the desert takes place approximately in 1961 when I was about 14 or 15 years old. It would have been during the cooler months, so it was probably either a Christmas or Easter break. My mother, father and I had decided to spend another week at the Turtle Mountains looking for gold, Indian artifaces, and just nosing around in the desert. As was normally the case, we got up at about 2:00 am to get a nice early start on the trip, which would get us into the camping spot in plenty of time to set up camp before dark. On these trips I usually slept in the car until we were about in Bakersfield, in time for breakfast.
The trip was uneventful, but beautiful as always. I especially liked the part of the desert from Mojave to Needles, passing through old railroad stops in alphabetical order – Amboy, Bagdad, Cadiz, Dagget, Essecs, etc. At about 3:00 pm we pulled off the highway onto the desert track (it wasn’t really a road, it was just a track where you could tell vehicles used from time to time) toward Mopa Peaks and “our” campsite.
When we got to the beginning of the wash up the canyon to Two Palm Springs, we were stopped by a cable strung across the road. There was a white painted sign hanging in the middle cable. The sign said, “Keep out, Government Project in Progress.” The first thing that struck us was that the lettering was stenciled in black, but the paint had run down the sign so that it was really amateurish, not at all like a real government project. If the government does anything right, it is that they make good looking signs. Because of that, we decided that whatever was going on it was related to any government project. In some ways that made it even more perplexing – after all this is government owned, BLM land and nobody has the right to post keep out signs.
My dad decided that the best thing to do was to wait for a bit before going past the blocked off road, and set up camp for the night at the “rock wall.” (When we first started going to the Turtles it was just a campfire with a couple of short rock walls set up to provide a wind break. Over the years we added a few rocks on each trip, and the wall started to get much bigger. Apparently others did the same, and it eventually began to look like the remains of an old cabin. The BLM still claims that it is a cabin, but it really just a wind break.)
We set up camp and in a short time heard a vehicle slowly making its way down the sandy wash to the sign. My father and I walked over to the sign to intercept them and find out what was going on, and to find out if we could gain access to the places that we had come to explore. Once at the gate we only had to wait a few minutes until a jeep with three men in it drove to our location. The driver got out to open the cable gate and stopped to talk to us. The two others stayed in the covered jeep. I don’t recall exactly what they were wearing, but they were all dressed appropriately for being in the desert.
After exchanging hellos with the driver, we told him that we had arrived a couple of hours ago and were camping over by the rock wall. The driver said that he knew that because they had seen us when they flew over earlier in the day. This was a surprise since we had seen no aircraft, and there was really no place that seemed likely to afford a landing place for an aircraft. We asked what they were doing flying around in that area, and he said that they had been working on their spacecraft and were test flying it following some repairs. I asked why they were there and they said that they were scientists and had been performing a survey of the planet when they developed trouble with their vehicle and were forced to land it to fix the problem. I asked why they had picked this location to work on their spacecraft, and the answer was that “they had flown over much of the area and this spot appeared to be the least contaminated with humans that they could find.” This was a most unusual conversation to say the least.
Once it was clear that this conversation was headed in rather unusual directions, I started to pay a bit more attention to these guys. One of the odd features of the guy sitting in the back seat of the jeep was that he had quite large (very large) ears. I think this was before the time of Dr. Spock, but there had been movies with spacemen having large ears. I thought it was kind of comical that these guys who claimed to be spacemen should have such big ears. I then noticed a much more intriguing thing, which was that while I was talking – they weren’t. I could “hear” and understand what they were saying, but it was as thoughts, not as sounds! This was most unsettling to say the least.
The conversation continued for some time. One of our concerns was to be able to get to the spring to get water because we didn’t bring enough to last the week that we hoped to be there. They showed great revulsion at this idea, saying that there were lots of little wiggly things in the water and that the water was therefore not fit to drink. We tried to explain that since there were things living in the water, that meant that it WAS fit to drink, otherwise the water would not have any life in it. They weren’t convinced at the logic of this. We asked if we could go to the spring to get water, but they said that we were not allowed to enter the valley, and agreed to bring us water when they came back from town.
The conversation when back and forth in this odd mode for awhile until they finally said good bye and drove away. As they were driving away, my father (who is normally a most level headed guy), turned to me and asked if I noticed that they weren’t talking, but rather were just exchanging thoughts with us. Now THAT really freaked me out. I had kind of decided that I was just making the thought communication thing up because it was such an odd conversation. However, to have my father bring up the topic meant that if nothing else it wasn’t just my imagination running wild, if so his was running wild in the same way. We went back to camp and by the time we got there we talked a million words a minute telling my mother about what had just happened.
We spent the night there, but they never came back so we didn’t get our extra water. The next morning my curiosity got the better of me and I hiked up the back of a hill which I hoped would give me a view of their space vehicle. However, I couldn’t see anything of interest from that vantage point because of the twists and turns in the valley.
We decided to go to town (Videl Junction) to get breakfast and some water. The town has a California Agriculture inspection station, a small motel, a restaurant, a tiny service station and a few houses. I suppose the total population of town is about 50 people. We went to the restaurant for breakfast. We ordered out meals and when they were served, my father told the waitress that we were camping near Mopa Peaks and did she have any idea about what was going on out there (about 30 miles from town). She didn’t answer, but rather finished serving us and then left. In fact, everyone left the restaurant. The other customers got up and left, the waitress left and so did the cook and helper. We were left by ourselves in the restaurant. When we finished there was nobody there to take our money, so my dad just left what seemed about right on the table. We went outside to get water and some gasoline, but there was nobody in town to help us. The service station was open, but empty. We went across the street to the inspection station and it was empty. We thought that maybe someone might be at the motel, but that was empty also. Everyone had abandoned the place after we asked that question. We finally got some water from a tap at the service station and went back to our camp spot.
We didn’t hear anything more from these self proclaimed spacemen, but didn’t go to our favorite spots because the cable and sign were still across the road. The whole thing was weird enough that we didn’t want to push our luck.
We returned the following year to see if they left any signs of their activities, but could find nothing. That was the end of the story for about forty years until last year when my father and I got to talking about that day. He said that the most unusual part of the whole thing was that they were there in a big, fancy, black car that couldn’t possibly drive in the part of the desert that we were in. He just couldn’t figure out how they got there. Not only that, but he couldn’t figure out why there were in the desert wearing suits and ties!
This was really weird because I saw folks in a jeep and cloths that made good sense in the area. My father saw something entirely different. Over the years I have often wondered if they were really spacemen, how did they get the cloths and jeep. Now I realize that they didn’t get anything, they merely had us put them into cloths and a vehicle that we knew about. They didn’t have to be able to speak English, or have these vehicles, they only had to get us to think about these things and they happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment