Monday started like any other. Banal chatter about the weekend at work, small talk with front desk security about the weather, far too much cleaning up of other people’s messes - the usual. So I plopped myself down in front of the TV as soon as my wife and I got the kids to bed, and let Netflix and whiskey sweep away my worries. 3 episodes and the same number of glasses later, I checked the doors and headed upstairs.
No sooner had I begun part 2 of the nightly TV ritual than I noticed something odd - a booming sound, like somebody lit a firework on our block. I didn’t think too much of it, especially since the speciality stores had begun to open in preparation for July festivities. But then I noticed something while scrolling social media.
Pretty much everybody in my rural town - and no fewer than 4 surrounding towns - had heard the same boom. I pretty quickly deduced that if people heard that sound more than 20 miles away, it would have blown my windows out if it had actually been on my block. Now my curiosity had the better of me, and I began to scroll all of the local news feeds for anything about an explosion or something similar - but there was nothing.
“They can’t write a story that fast”, my wife assured me - “I’m sure they’ll have something to share by the morning”. And it made perfect sense, so I drifted off to sleep to the sound of late night talk shows.
My sleep was brief, though, because I woke up about 2 hours later to the unmistakable sound of a helicopter overhead. And when I say overhead, I mean no more than 20 yards from my house - my walls were shaking. “What the fuck?” - good to know the wife and I were on the same page, at least.
I grabbed my phone from the generic wireless charger and immediately opened social media again, only to discover that my short rest had made me miss plenty. No fewer than 100 people had posted on a page for parents in the town that they had seen the helicopter. And some of the accounts, although secondhand, sounded almost too strange to be true, if not for then immediately being verified by a handful other people nearby.
A couple good old boys laying on their trucks at the farm saw the light scan field after field.
The local librarian saw *2* helicopters, one of which descended to nearly ground level briefly.
2 overnight stockers at Walmart were taking a smoke break when the explosion happened and said the light from it was so bright and perfectly white that they were still seeing spots.
A dozen or so people from what seemed to be closer to the boom, at least from piecing together multiple accounts, said the explosion shook their entire house like an earthquake - and one had pictures of blown out windows to prove it.
The most gripping post, though, was video doorbell footage of what happened. It’s hard to gauge distances from a basically ground level video surrounded by trees and houses, but it seems to show an intensely bright white light from some miles away, stretching at least a couple thousand feet into the air. Maybe indicative of being farther away rather than closer, there’s then a 10 or so second delay before a defending sound wave sets off every car alarm in frame.
I’d just finished the video when I heard the helicopter circling back, the chopping blades growing louder. It was time to put on pants and hop outside, unfortunately.
I got to the back sliding glass door and before I could open it, saw my entire back yard bathed in bright light, then my neighbor’s soon after. When the light was 3 houses down, I stepped outside and immediately felt the usually still night air buzzing and whizzing past. I shot a glance to my neighbor, who was doing much the same. We simultaneously shrugged at each other, both seeming to figure that 2 AM was the wrong time to play detective any further.
“There’s still no news about this”, my wife said when I got back to our room. This was beyond odd, at this point. Our town is small enough that a second cat stuck in the tree leads the evening news - a scene out of an action movie should certainly be somewhere on the local news site, if not dominating the entire feed.
Stranger still was what she said next - “a few people have posted that the police aren’t answering any questions about it”.
“What do you mean?” I replied - “They’re saying ‘no comment’, or they’re saying they don’t know any more than the public?”
“Neither” she said “they’re saying they don’t know what explosion or helicopter the callers are talking about.”
“What the fuck?” was all I could muster for a few moments, before adding “there’s timestamped video of the explosion online, and it has local streets signs clearly in the background. Even if they didn’t know about it right away, they certainly should now.”
We doom scrolled for a solid hour, only becoming more confused the longer we did, before deciding the sunlight, coffee, and a solid 3 hours of sleep might help us figure it out in the morning - we were wrong.
We woke up to the first recognition by any public official that anything had even happened.
“We’ve received many calls about a loud sound many local residents claims to have heard last night. At approximately 4 AM, the city dispatched a truck to fix the report of a power outage in the vicinity of the sound, and power was quickly restored.”
That’s the entire post from the local police department. There’s no mention of the helicopter(s), or the sheer volume of the blast, which would have placed it significantly out of town, far away from the local power grid. There’s no explanation for why a power outage at 4 AM would be related to an explosion at 2 AM, nor is there anyone online claiming to have lost power the night before.
Although to be fair, there’s no posts from last night - everything is gone. I thought maybe I dreamed the entire thing, until I got a text from my neighbor.
“My buddy down at the pawn shop has more videos. Why the fuck are they gaslighting us?”
I’m gonna try to find out.