It’s
a little creepy when real life begins to reflect your writing. Especially when
you’re a science fiction writer.
I
don’t mean in the realm of technology, like when the news hits that scientists
are actually working on the concept of a matter/antimatter space drive
that could send a probe to Alpha Centauri in a mere 40 years. I mean more like “evidence”
of something that looks a whole lot like alien abduction going back hundreds of
years at a place right in your new backyard.
I
wrote a short story last spring for a yet-to-be-published Spacefreighters
Lounge anthology. In it I described aliens harvesting humans out of a rural county in West
Virginia with the help of local collaborators. They regularly “took delivery”
of their victims in an old hayfield on a remote mountain ridge. The evidence of
their presence was the blinding light of their dematerialization beam, which
must have looked like sheet lightning from a distance, or maybe something
stranger from the base of the mountain.
Since it was a short story I never really investigated how folks would have interpreted
those lights. I focused on the disappearances of a number of ne’er-do-wells,
party girls and other less desirable members of the community and a deputy sheriff
who was the only one interested in finding out what happened to them.
But
imagine my reaction when I overheard someone in my new hometown of Marshall talking
about very similar lights and disappearances from the top of a ridge called Brown
Mountain in Burke County, North Carolina, not far from the famous tourist
attraction of the Linville Gorge. From the days of the Cherokee, people have
been seeing mysterious lights there, some way off across the deep ravine at the base
of the mountain, some in the sky above the ridge, some even as close as an arm’s
length. Some are round and softly glowing, some streak across the sky “like an
angel’s crown,” in the words of an old folk song recorded by artists as
divergent as The Kingston Trio and Roy Orbison.
Beaming up? |
There
have been two investigations of the Brown Mountain Lights by the U.S.
Geological Survey which have tried to explain them as ball lightning, airplanes,
forest fires and other normal phenomena. The area also made the U.S. Air Force’s
infamous Project Blue Book study of UFOs and other alleged extraterrestrial
activity in the Fifties. The Blue Book investigators listed the Lights as “unexplained.”
I
don’t know about you, but I’m not packing up my camera to head over to Brown
Mountain. The only aliens I really want to see are the ones in my head.
GIVEAWAYS
STILL ONGOING!
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Cheers,
Donna
You picked a fascinating place to move to Donna! I hope you get some great pictures. Make sure you are in an abduction prevention zone though, so you will be able to share the pictures.
ReplyDeleteWow, Donna. Life imitating art, fer shure! Very spooky. If you ever DO decide to take photos, I'd suggest a really high-powered telephoto lens...from far, far away! :)
ReplyDelete