PART 1. This story is long, and I’m still not quite over what I’ve seen. Forgive me for this lead in, but I promise it is important for explaining who Jean is, and why she means so much to me. I wouldn’t be writing this if I had a conventional way to explain what I’ve seen, so here goes:
I have always believed in UFOs. I watched TV shows about them growing up, followed YouTube channels covering the phenomena, and watched the US congressional hearing on them a good few months back. I’ve seen things before in my life that convinced me they were real, but I never had anyone to back up what I have seen. As a result, when I tell stories about them, I feel crazy. People make fun of it, or outright don’t believe me. That is, until about a year ago, when I went on a study abroad in Gold Coast, Australia and saw a UFO there with another person.
For starters, I had never been to the country, and had just barely heard about the city from travel vlogs. I needed a break from the US after the craziness of the past few years. Originally, I was going to study abroad in Wellington, New Zealand; but that opportunity closed. I was close to my senior year of college, so it was a “now or never” sort of situation. I worked really hard; missing some classes and crying in my room for fear of not hitting deadlines for the application. It had been a very stressful process; balancing class at a school I was no longer interested in attending with the work needed to make the trip happen. I was a wreck.
That’s why when I finally landing in Sydney a few days ahead of the rest of my study abroad group, I needed to escape my hotel room and explore the city. I felt safe there as it was a rainy day, and barely anyone was out. Airport customs had been smooth. It was much better than it had ever been on family vacations out of the US and back. I was genuinely shocked by the professionalism and courtesy of the agents at the Australian border in the airport.
Compared to my return to the US, the Australian customs went fast. They had me fill out a checklist, scanned my passport and bags, and asked me if any of my shoes had been on a farm recently. I passed with flying colors. Even the Uber driver to my hotel that night was very friendly. I shared information about my major: film production, to which he was very interested. Most people are. They say “that’s so cool, do you want to be a director?” or something to that effect. I had stepped out of the car excited to be in country, and parted with the driver on amicable terms. If you’re reading, thanks for the ride, good sir!
It was with these thoughts that I started to explore Sydney the next morning. The train system was something of an enigma at first, but that was mostly because I didn’t know the layout of the city. It struck me that such a cultural icon of the country was one whose layout was basically unknown to me. I have to admit, I was disappointed in myself for not familiarizing myself beforehand. I felt woefully unprepared to be doing what I was doing. I dismissed thoughts of ending up as a “lost traveler”, and got onto a train to Circular Quay. I had the hopes of visiting the zoo across Sydney Harbor that day, as I knew with the rain it wouldn’t be that packed.
I’m pretty socially reclusive, and didn’t ever really get out much back in the US. It was for that reason that this rainy day excursion through the city felt like my own little movie. I was overwhelmed by how much life there was, even in the rain. It had been a long time since I’d been to any city, let alone one over 10,000 miles from home. The hustle and bustle was something I hadn’t been immersed in for a while. It was a feeling I couldn’t explain; but being a young man, I was aware that venturing into the city is sort of a cultural rite of passage.
The train passengers had me utterly captivated as I listened to music in cheap, but overpriced airport earbuds. I had owned Raycons, due to the incessant insistence on their quality from YouTubers I have watched over the years, but one had died and the other was snapping in half, so I hastily replaced them for the plane journey. I get panic attacks, and motion sickness, especially near take off and landing during flying. Any headphones were instrumental in turning plane flights into time travel. The music from the low-quality speakers kept me company as I was still, blockheadedly too socially anxious to strike up a conversation with any Australian strangers. I didn’t want to seem like a tourist.
As I got off the train, I realized I was a few stops early and had a bit of a walk to Circular Quay. I welcomed the challenge as a stranger in a strange land, and walked over with the google maps AR feature as my guide. The rain started to pick up, and so did I. I walked around a corner near city hall, and the ferry wharfs came into view. Anyone who knows Sydney knows already that the Sydney Opera House and a highway running over the train station here are features of the area. I was embarrassed, but asked a ticket-taker which boat and wharf I needed to use to get to Taronga Zoo.
After finding the right one and buying my ticket, I sat and waited for the boat. It took me across the harbor on choppy waters, and I saw the iconic Opera House pass by through the rocking, rain-streaked window of the ferry. As I got out onto the wharf by the zoo, I realized I was the only idiot going to see animals in the rain. The upside to this was that it was early in the morning, I had my video camera, and an unquenchable thirst to see them. I didn’t mind if the rain meant I had to miss a few this time. I took the now-closed Sky Safari into the zoo for a couple of bucks. I was rewarded with a view of elephants, penguins, camels, seals, and more. I recorded all that I could, but the car moved so fast that I only got fleeting glimpses of all of them. The rainy window blocked some of that view, too.
After the zoo, I went back to my hotel, and caught up with the time zone. I didn’t realize how bad my jet lag was until I laid down on my bed, and passed out for 12 hours. I slept from 4pm to 4am, but welcomed the early awakening. I stepped out onto my balcony, and took in the city birds, as well as the sun rising in a part of the sky I wasn’t used to. I video called my dad, and we caught up. He was visibly happy to see how engaged I was, noting that this was the happiest I seemed to have been in a long time. He was right. Even the hotel breakfast was the most delicious one I’ve had in my life (outside of some childhood trips to Chicago where we were lucky enough to stay in the Four Seasons; which is the closest to that Home Alone 2 “fancy hotel” experience that movies always portray).
Over the next couple days, I ventured back into the city to see some of the other sights. I walked around the Opera House, and later regretted not fully exploring the botanical gardens. Sydney is a beautiful city, with a lot to see, and the pressure of my group arriving soon, I didn’t want to get around too much, to the point of being bored when we inevitably would cover some of the same ground. I’m always hard on myself, setting boundaries and standards that no one but myself enforces. On some levels, I’m aware that it’s a blessing to be sensible like that, but I often think about how I miss the novelty of letting go and just having fun sometimes that I always could do as a kid.
In any event, I checked out of my hotel room on the third day, and took another Uber back to the airport, where my group would be meeting. For some reason, during this time waiting in the airport, I experienced memories of seeing UFOs in my childhood. I thought to myself that it was very weird, almost like Deja vu. Something in the airport that morning had triggered a flood of memories related to the topic. I mentioned already that I’m a bit of a social recluse, and part of that is due to my belief in UFOs and alien life in general. Every time I bring up the subject, I’m either mocked or the person I’m talking with doesn’t “bite”. I retracted into my shell as my study abroad group arrived, thinking of UFOs and anything else to keep my social interaction to a minimum. Even as I write, something doesn’t feel right about how familiar that whole day was. It was like I had met all of them already, and wasn’t surprised at the group dynamic that soon fell into place.
The group consisted mostly of girls, who were kind and pretty, but who were not nearly as mysterious as the Australian girls I had been seeing in the country for the last few days. I didn’t feel too inclined to introduce myself right away. I sat in the front of our travel van to the hostel we’d be staying in for the next few days so I didn’t have to start talking to any of them right away. The most interaction I had with them was when a few asked what was in a giant box I had, to which the answer was my PC, which I had lugged across the Pacific Ocean so as to have an excuse to stay inside as frequently as I wanted. They all had the same response: “you brought your computer to Australia?”
They were all nice enough people, but the fact of the matter was that most of them went to the school in my hometown. The coincidence of this occurrence upset me more than anything, as I was hoping to meet people with different interests and stories to tell from across the US; not just people from where I already lived. Within hours, I had gone from being an adventurer in a new land to my same old silent, socially awkward self. I felt a little trapped over the next few days with them. I think they could tell that I was hesitant to talk to them, so I took a leap and sat with a whole table of girls at a restaurant while all the other boys in the group went to Hungry Jack’s for lunch. I sat next to one girl, in particular, who at the time was just the one sitting next to me, but soon became my best friend from the group. Her name is Jean.
We hadn’t talked much at all for the first month of the study abroad, including at that lunch in Sydney. When I first met her, it struck me just how silent she was. When we had landed in Gold Coast, she stared out the window as all the other girls exchanged “wow, this place is so pretty!” and other similar obvious remarks. A flood of emotions had hit me at the time, and behind my “you can’t see what I’m feeling” sunglasses, some tears had streaked down my face. If you’ve never been to Gold Coast, it’s kind of a paradise. To barely know this going in, I could feel nothing but gratitude that this would be the place I’d call home for the next 4 months. At the end of that first one, though, I finally met Jean properly.
Jean was studying sustainable practices, or some such. It was a complicated name for an emerging field, and I remarked to her that “if you want to help the environment, your major should have an easier-to-remember name.” While I’m not sure she appreciated that, I knew she understood that I had meant it in earnest rather than in any sort of mocking way. I care a lot about climate change, but admittedly don’t do a whole lot to actually deal with it. I’m something of a living contradiction.
We started to hang out every time we were both free. We’d have breakfast, lunch and dinner together; sometimes all 3 in one day. Best of all, she was also a movie nerd, so we started setting aside our Wednesday nights to rent out a private screening room at the school to show each other whatever we felt like watching. It was a really wonderful time to have a weekly event like that. I had come from a school where I alienated a lot of my friends and peers. I had a terrible outlook on life, and wasn’t fun to be around. I’m judgmental and opinionated, but worst of all I could be ignorant of other people’s wishes and feelings. To have a friend like that after years of being that way was both humbling, and life-reaffirming.
I could share my utter weirdness with her. I could go off on tangents about the latest UFO thing I heard, or read about, and she’d always either humor me, or even sometimes show an interest. I finally met someone who thought I wasn’t crazy. One time, at breakfast, she joked with me that we might see one together. I replied something like “yeah, and we’ll both get abducted and taken from this dying planet, while you’re at it. We’ll get to live in Star Trek.”
On those same Wednesdays, we also would occasionally return to my dorm room, and sit out on my balcony. It was unequivocally the best dorm room I’d ever, and probably will ever live in. This was helped by my roommate moving out. He was also American; one of the few who wasn’t from my hometown, but his sleep schedule clashed with mine. He was always on the move when he awoke; a workout/protein powder/business books sort of guy. I was always asleep at 9, and up by 6, and he was always asleep at midnight, and up at 9 or 10. He got tired of that rigmarole, and so the room had been all mine since the first month of school, which was beneficial for hanging out with Jean in a more private setting.
While we’d often share a drink, and life stories on the balcony, this night in particular we were both sober. Jean has some medical conditions I won’t disclose, but they are visible when you look at her. I had never asked exactly what they were, because I figured she was tired of a life of people asking if she was okay. That night, she had asked me if I wanted to know. I told her “if you’re willing to share, I’ll hear you, but I don’t need to know. It isn’t what makes you you.” She smiled very warmly, and I knew my feelings for her were getting more serious.
There we sat, soaking in the happiness of this simple moment of kindness, looking out at the student court of the school which my balcony sat over. There were palm trees, and giant fruit bats which flew around, so it was a pretty cool environment to hang out and observe. At the same time, both of our attention was caught by a star in the sky that was almost as bright as the moon. There had been seagulls flying around, which catch the light and reflect it off their white feathers, so at first both of us thought it was just a gull that was closer overhead. We both looked at the same time: and there was a glowing orb of light in the sky.
It had a color unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Milky white, but with a tinge of sea foam green, and a luminescence that no human aircraft I’ve ever seen has. My next thought was a meteorite, because it certainly moved fast enough to be one. No sooner than we glanced up at it, it darted off to the south west faster than any aircraft could ever move. It was under a second before it was gone; but it was thoroughly weird. We had both seen it in our peripheral vision for a few moments before looking right at it, indicating that it was stationary in the sky until we both looked up at it. For it to go from not moving to as fast as a meteorite was something that neither of us could explain.
We were both extremely excited. We went through the possibilities.
“That wasn’t a seagull! It was too fast, and way too bright to be reflecting the light.”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t car headlights coming through campus, those reflect off the building-they aren’t an orb in the sky.”
“Did it seem like the seagulls, and the wind got more quiet in the second it was flying away? I feel like I didn’t hear anything.”
“It didn’t have an arc, from gravity, like a meteorite!”
“And it didn’t have green and red lights like an aircraft, it was just-“
“A ball of light!”
“A ball of light, yeah! Have you ever seen a glow like that before??”
“And it was so fast! Like vshoom!” she shot her hand like a missile. “Gone!”
“What did we just see? Did we actually just see a UFO?”
“I think we did.” She said.
Our shared excitement over the event overtook us for the next few days. We couldn’t shut up about it. We walked to a local bottle-o (Aussie slang for a liquor store), the next night, and were still in utter disbelief. The suddenness of it all brought us closer together than ever. We spent the next few days spending all our free time together, trying to work through anything we might have missed. We wanted to be sure what we saw was in fact real. We looked up videos of nighttime aerial phenomena, and nothing compared to what we had seen. Eventually, we came to the conclusion that neither of us could explain it. That confirmed for us, that technically, it was in fact a UFO. Aliens or not.
I had no clue that these days of excitement were the last time I’d ever see Jean.
End of Part 1