My first encounter ever with something .. odd .. was when I was camping. I was a total UFO freak at the time, I’m sure many of you went through that phase. Where nothing was cooler than Aliens and OMG LIGHTS IN THE SKY! My Dad and I were camping at this place called the Curn (Kurn?) River in Cali, it’s a good drive east of Bakersfield I think. Anyway there’s some good places to camp there because its to far away for all the idiot collage students to come get drunk, and the only people there are fishermen pretty much. So I’d spend my days fishing, and usually we’d meet some cool camper who we’d make friends with for the trip.

On this trip, it was a guy named Jeff. Jeff came from LA, owned an SUV before they were all the rage, and was a hellova nice guy. I remember he liked Bevis and Butthead and since he was over 40 that made him like the coolest guy alive in my book at the time. So I always had a lot to talk to about with Jeff, since he liked UFO’s too and would tell me stories about how Indians used to make cave paintings about them and stuff.

Anyway one night we were sitting up late roasting marshmellows or something around a camp fire. My dad had gone to bed early, as he always does, so we were talking about paranormal stuff again. Not ghosts, but UFO’s. So the mood late at night around a fire out in the woods was already kinda creepy. Then it just showed up.

I was the first to spot it I think, it came from around behind my tent. A little, white orb, a tad bit smaller than a volley ball, but kinda fuzzyish and almost with a sort of a difuse glow to it. I thought it was a squirel at first, then realized due to the fact that it was floating about 6 inches off the ground that it probably wasn’t.

“Jeff” I said.
“Yea Undaine?”
“What the hell is that?”

Jeff looked up to see the same thing coming towards us. The grass around us was long, and it was brushing the tops of it, but we could see that it DEFINATLY did not touch the ground. It was heading towards our fire, and consequently, us.

“Uh … I … uh … we should move”

We did. The orb thing passed only a few feet from us in the full glow of the fire. It had no real defined edges, which is why I call it kinda fuzzy and glowing. But it moved very fluently, and made kinda an arc around the fire, and proceeded to take a left up a hill and towards a bush. While it was doing this, we must have been saying “What is that?” “I don’t know” a good 300 times.

We stood there after it went up the hill and into a large (but mostly see through) bush for a few seconds, then, like morons, decided that we had to go find it. We ran around the bush, and onto a road behind it, looking all over..

I don’t remember the rest of the night.

This is strange, because I remember everything else perfectly as if it just happened. I woke up in the tent next to my dad at sun up. It freaks the fuck out of me to this day. Jeff went home the next morning, and we never heard from him again, but he did confirm the story with me before he left in front of my Dad, so at least he knows I’m not bat shit insane.