Host: Tonight’s caller is from sunny California with a terrifying experience that involved missing time, a possible alien craft and unknown beings trying to get into his house, hello Mark!
We’re glad to have you with us tonight, take your time Mark, start from the top, you mentioned a move to California.
Thanks so much Nic, I’m a bit nervous. My wife Tracy and I moved to the hills of Southern California in late June 2022. I work as an AI regenerative engineer in Silicon Valley and Tracy is in banking. I’ve formerly worked for McDonald Douglas and Rocketdyne in engineering and R&D and I just say that to clarify I’ve worked with a lot of technology that people commonly mistake as aerial phenomena.
In my life I never cared for science fiction. I’ve never watched an episode of Star Trek. I fell asleep as a kid through the first Star Wars movie and refused to watch the other installments. I hated the one episode of X-Files I sat through at a friends house. My favorite book series is Tolkien’s, Lord of the Rings, but typically I’m’ reading trade publications. My life between work and traveling is always hectic.
We had a friend, we’ll call him Don, your audience will have heard of this person because they head up a social media company, but we go back 25 years and he wanted to get out and drive his Porsche up the winding roads of southern California so we invited him up. That evening the catering had dropped off Sushi, salad and a fruit tray. None of us drink or do any substances – so it was just Coke Zero and sparkling water. We’re not getting any younger so this wasn’t some late night crazy party. It was just friends getting together talking industry and planned to play some video games and watch the documentary about AI he had financed. After so many years the people you work with become family.
Tracy my wife loves to entertain but we’re so seldom home. In addition to her bank job on the weekends she teaches Yoga. She has so much energy she bounces up and down stairs and runs instead of walk half the time. She’s freckled with a big head of curly red hair which fits her energy, small woman with unmatched enthusiasm for life, she’s infectious, everyone loves Tracy. I mention this because she saw it first and she was bouncing up and down making a wild commotion.
Nic: I think we have your wife on the other line to tell her part of it…
HELLO NIC!
Nic: Hello Tracy, could you turn down your mic a hair? Yes, thank you…so please tell us your part, I understand you had eaten dinner.
Yes, Nic, we had finished dinner and I was showing our guest around because we had our house built the previous year and it was his first visit. It’s not large but it has a great view of the city below, it’s kinda a square stucco built partially into the hill in a small neighborhood. I was in the second floor living room by my desk and saw light coming through the aluminum blinds – but it was red light. The aluminum blinds are on a timer and had closed for the day but the light was just getting through the gaps. I just scrunched them apart, you know, to look out where the red glow was coming from.
I thought…I don’t know what I thought, I was speechless. I damaged the blind pretty good by yanking it further apart. I was jumping up and down, I grabbed Don by the arm and pulled him over….”WHAT IS IT” I kept asking him but he just stared but his jaw was on the floor. You know, at first really I just thought it was the sun, or an effect of the sun. I was yelling for Mark and jumping up and down thinking it was a spectacular optical refraction. I heard him coming up stairs..but….yeah…then…
It was a little too large, and it was red like a setting sun but didn’t give off enough light and …and it was in the east. Oh, how large? Um’ so if the normal sun is a quarter, this was a little larger than a golf ball. It was crimson, like a brick fire red and there did look like a glow around it.
I thought it was just an effect, I was jumping up and down thinking, wow – what are we seeing. I then thought about my phone downstairs and the binoculars –but it moved. Like it was a spider on a strand of web it began to drop down. Don gasped…I don’t remember what I did, honey, did I yelp or scream? Okay, he doesn’t remember exactly – but I was shocked, it felt like my stomach dropped to my feet, I just, I can’t explain it but I had such an overwhelming dread. That was really part of it, like a shockwave emanating outwards, washing over us – this dread. Don was paralyzed, I could tell it hit him and he just couldn’t move. Maybe because we were near the window we took the brunt of it. Mark had been downstairs in the basement area, it’s partially cut into the hill and very well insulated by bedrock.
Mark: God, I heard this commotion and I thought at first they were playing a joke on me or maybe a spider had gotten into the house. I don’t know I saw a red light splashing down the stairs. I hurried up the stairs and I saw a red light out the window, but I didn’t get it, I didn’t know what I was looking at. Tracy was screaming incoherently, “it’s moving, it’s moving.” Don was standing there not blinking, he didn’t look well – and so I went to the window and I saw a red sphere, and for me it was the size of a dinner place and I felt as if it was moving directly towards my neighborhood. It just kept getting closer. Tracy was screaming and trying to get me and Don away from the windows to downstairs I think, but I was trying to process what I was seeing and maybe Don was also, I’m not sure. That’s when it blinked out.
Everything went black. The valley below, everything blacked out. Our backup batteries are solar powered and we have them wired into the UPS, that’s an uninterrupted power supply as we house several storage servers, so we should have never have gone down completely, that’s impossible. But there was a lag, I want to say about twenty seconds before the backup even attempted to engage. When it did engage everything started beeping and coming back on slowly. Tracy had a flashlight. My security system was setting off one alarm after another. I had three cameras showing that they had been taken completely offline. That should not be possible. The way the cameras are daisy chained into the system provides redundancy. One can go down but for three – it’s impossible but there we were. Then one of the cameras started to alarm that there was movement. I had been trying to restart the system at the time and as it rebooted I wasn’t sure if we had movement on the camera or not so I told Tracy -“I have to go check the cameras.” She lost it it was begging me not to go but I had to check the perimeter camera encase we had something outside.
She doesn’t know this part but I did take my handgun….
Tracy: You WHAT? YOU HAVE A GUN WHAT??!!!
So I went back downstairs and our front door was open. I stuck my head out. It was so dark and no sound, no sound at all. No stars. No street lights. Everything was dark. My neighbors also have solar but they were all dark. Whatever hit us knocked the electrical for a loop. My home is built into the hill, so I think maybe we had an EMP hit and my equipment was partially shielded. I was relieved it meant my servers would be okay.
I was so cold I couldn’t stop shaking, but I thought maybe I was in shock, my brain was trying to figure things out. Maybe the back of my brain was scared but part of me was so clear and focused. Maybe detached from the situation in a way I didn’t know it could be…there wasn’t anything out my front door so I came back in and shut the door and secured all the manual locks since the electrical ones were nonfunctioning.
I heard Tracy and I saw our side door, it was opening and a woman was stepping inside. She didn’t say anything. She was in a navy suit, heavy set hispanic woman, maybe a neighbor from down the road. Her eyes were just blank, she didn’t seem to know where she was. She moved robotically like maybe a sleep walker? I have never seen anyone sleep walk, but maybe something similar to that.
Tracy and I looked at each other and I gently took her shoulders and turned her around and she walked right back out the door again. I was getting ready to shut and lock it when I noticed the side road was filled with people and I thought they were children, it was just full of school kids like it was a trick-or-treat party. I closed and locked the door and honestly it wasn’t until the next day I realized it could not have been children, we have four or five kids on our street not a hundred. I don’t know what I saw, but possibly my brain wanted to see children and not …not something else. In retrospect I am not sure I should have put the woman outside with them, but, but what if that wasn’t a person…I just don’t know. I was thinking of Tracy at the time and trying to keep us safe.
With the doors locked up I went back up and Don was sitting in a chair, he looked rough, grey – and was fiddling with his pockets looking for some kind of tablets. And then the sky lit up again. We had the backup batteries working but I didn’t want to lift the blinds, maybe it’s a little crazy to be scared of what we would see I just peeked out.
The sky was lit up – but it wasn’t a sphere this time. It was a pink neon grid of lines and it looked like it went on for miles. Then in some of the squares images appeared. It looked like sampled television from all over the world. I recall one looked like a Japanese commercial for some sort of soap or cosmetic. It was very random. I was staring at it trying to figure out if it was projected from above or below or how we could be seeing this and then I was waking up.
I was in my bed like normal. The sun was coming through the window. It was a regular morning but I was in my clothes and I was facing the wrong direction. My head was at the foot of the bed. I heard Tracy but I couldn’t find her, she wasn’t in bed with me.
Tracy: I was under the bed. I was freaking out when I first woke up. We seemed to wake up at the same time.
I jumped up and went to go look for Don but he was already undoing the locks and making a run for his car. He didn’t look back even when I shouted for him, he got in and he peeled out in the Porsche. I’ve tried to contact him, tried to call, sent email but he won’t talk to me. I had an auto-reply from his work email that said he had left on vacation.
And that’s about it. Altogether the sighting was about twenty minutes.
Tracy: Tell him about getting sick.
Oh yeah the next day I had the worst headache and we both vomited a few times. Tracy had this red looking sunburn on her face. A lot of her freckles went away. She still has a few but almost all of them are gone.
Tracy: I had hundreds of freckles, but now I am almost freckle free even on my arms and cheeks.
I started having nightmares and had to take a leave of absence from work. We have put the house up on the market and are considering moving maybe into the Rocky Mountains or out of country. I haven’t had a full night of sleep since then and have had to start on anti-anxiety pills. I really don’t know what’s wrong with me, I can’t ever relax, but one day at a time right Nic?
Nic: Okay that is all the time we have for tonights show, take care of yourselves wherever you are, goodnight.
writer notes: loosely based on my favorite podcast, UFO Chronicles Podcast with Nik Hunter, so please go listen to Nik. Images generated via Gemini AI because I’m a lazy bastard.
