As I was lying in bed at about six in the morning, having woken up from a strange dream I couldn’t remember, for no particular reason I recalled that time when I was fourteen or so, in 1999, when I saw a UFO. Over the years, I’ve wondered if I hallucinated it, but it didn’t: I was sitting on the backseat of my parents’ car, with my younger sister on the other side. She was too young to remember it meaningfully, if at all. About three minutes away from home, we looked at the San Marcial shrine, which is located on top of the mountain of the same name in Irún, and we saw this:

Well, I must clarify that wasn’t exactly that what we saw. I fed ChatGPT an image of the San Marcial shrine, and told it to generate an image set at dusk in which a UFO made out of three three-dimensional glowing orbs, orange-green in color, set in an equilateral triangle, was hovering about 5-6 times the height of the shrine above the building itself. The UFO was smaller, about the size of the shrine from our perspective. Also, there weren’t lines connecting the orbs, but I couldn’t get ChatGPT to remove those.

My mother simultaneously didn’t believe in but also was afraid of UFOs; even though I kept telling her to look, she only glanced at it then refused to look at it more. My father, even though he was driving, did stare at it; I think he was interested in UFOs in his youth. He didn’t stop the car, which he should have. Soon enough, we lost it behind some houses.

The strangest thing happened a bit later. It dawns on me from time to time how truly strange it was. After my father parked, I was eager to round the corner of the apartment building to see if I could get a look of the San Marcial shrine again. I knew I would have to hurry possibly to the next street over. However, as I was about to open the car door, I knew I had to look up at a certain spot of the sky from the window. I knew it as if I had been told. And at exactly the spot where I looked up, there it was: same triangular disposition of glowing orbs, hovering in the narrow spot of sky that the window allowed me to see.

I only saw it for a second, if even that. I said, “It’s right above us now!”, then I opened the door, stumbled to the sidewalk, and looked up, but the lights were gone. I hadn’t imagined them, though: a young couple was stunned beyond belief, staring at the empty sky, looking for something that wasn’t there anymore.

For the next couple of days, I hoped to see some reference to it in the papers, but no luck. Over the years, I’ve brought it up in family reunions. My sister was too young. My mother, if she remembers it, refuses to acknowledge it; she’s the kind to sweep any strangeness under the rug. My father, well… he is close to incapable of communicating properly about anything, so even if he remembered it, I wouldn’t get to know.

There isn’t much else to say about this episode. The UFO was clearly there, and it didn’t look 2D, like in the photographs: those were three-dimensional glowing orbs. Never in my life, before or later, have I seen a sight as unreal, clearly otherworldly, as that one. It didn’t change my thinking, as I already assumed that intelligent non-humans existed somewhere, but what I have mainly returned to over the years is that precise moment in which I knew I had to look up at a specific point, and at that very same point is where I saw the UFO. Was I told to do so? And why would that thing move to hover exactly above the area of our car, even though there were plenty of cars and people in the surrounding neighborhoods?

Of course, my imagination has run wilder at times. Were the occupants of that thing, if any, involved with me in the past, without my knowledge? Did I get some crucial memories erased? I felt that would explain many things, for starters how out of place I’ve felt my entire life. But if non-humans were involved in any way in me existing in this world, boy, they did a terrible job at it.

I don’t expect we’ll be told the truth about our visitors in my lifetime. I’m sure many people do know, but they won’t allow it to be told. In a way, I don’t believe we do deserve to know, as a species, at least at this point. Maybe we’re under cosmic quarantine until we get our shit together, and the moment we establish a solid presence in space, the cosmic neighborhood will come to introduce themselves and say, “Took you long enough.” I’m sorry, we’ll have to answer; we were caught in Abrahamic delusions.

That’s all for today.