A Celestial "Avada Kedavra"⚡️
This happened after my great visit to Yosemite, but the occurrence of this event took precedence in my journaling, lest I forgot the exact details of it all. And looking back, it probably wasn’t all that big of a deal, but in the moment, and considering the circumstances, it was, like, THE BIGGEST deal.
So, Saturday, November 7th, 2015, we were in The Cleve in SoCal, on hitch in the backcountry. We had just finished dinner (unimportant, but it was so delicious I’m going to tell you what we had anyways: lentils, canned veggies, green beans, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, onions, garlic, tomatoes, and summer sausage, all in a stew. Anyways, I digress.), and I had to pee. Our “kitchen” was under a large, old oak tree, so I stepped out from under its canopy and looked up at something in the sky that had caught my eye. I thought out loud, half speculating to myself, half alerting the rest of the crew. What I saw was an unusually large, bright red light streaming across the night sky, at airplane-ish altitude. Oddly, it was trailing a very obvious, thick, white vapor that looked like a jet stream. That’s what I told the crew, because that is all I could make of it. I thought it strange that I could see the jet stream, because it was completely dark. My friend Hunter joined me and had the same exclamation. The red ball was traveling quickly, and then suddenly, it seemed to stop. When it stopped, it exploded into light and began spiraling toward the earth unnervingly, leaving corkscrews of white light behind. By this point, our exclamations had drawn the rest of the crew out. As if that explosion wasn’t strange enough, it was immediately followed by a perfect circle of light, like a giant firework detonating in slow motion. The light grew and grew until the whole sky above us was pale white. Simultaneously, a ball of light disappeared behind a near mountain and the sky began bleeding bright green.
Okay, pause. This all was taking place while we were roughly six miles deep into the Cleveland National Forest backcountry. Actually the middle of nowhere, in a valley, with not even the thought of cell reception. At this point, we had been camped there for six or so days, and the only thing keeping me remotely civilized was the fact that I had to interact like a real human with the eight other people on my crew. And now exploding lights in the sky? *Cue existential crisis*
So anyways, the green light spread horizontally a few inches above the horizon and lingered for 10 to 15 minutes as the white glow began to fade. As all of this was happening, I was frozen in part utter awe, part sheer terror and confusion (these sentiments are why I don’t have a photo for you… just go look it up). The thoughts in my head were all exuberantly vocalized by the crew in the ensuing moments. A comet! A meteor! There is a Marine base just over the mountain, maybe a missile? Aliens! Kate’s was my favorite - “You know how there was a meteor that ended the dinosaurs? What if this one hits Earth and we are all going to die too?!” Seconds later, we were all quiet as Bobby, our crew leader, called his dad on the satellite phone, and we heard and felt a low BOOM from somewhere distant. We assumed that was the sound delay from when “it” hit some level of the earth’s atmosphere and exploded into all those lights. Bobby’s dad Googled the event for us. News reports had already been run on “What was that mysterious light in the sky near L.A.?” After all had settled, we concluded it was most likely “space junk” - part of some equipment in space that fell into the atmosphere. Later, we found out we were wrong, and it was, in fact, an unarmed missile fired from a naval base off the coast. You know, casually.
So, there you have it. Bobby perfectly executed a joke - after the BOOM, he said, “Wait, is there a weird smell?” All eight of us took a big sniff and simultaneously realized our absurdity. We all went to our tents later, sufficiently mind-blown and decently frightened. Most, if not all of us, agreed that that was the coolest thing we’d ever seen.
