Growing up I lived in the suburbs, living no more than a five minute drive to the city and with the tall skyscrapers easily visible on the horizon. In retrospect, I hated living there because of the pollution. I lived right next to a main road and it wasn’t uncommon while cleaning my bedroom windows that there would be this dark, soot-like substance accumulating on the towel. I have asthma which would cause me to have have sleepless nights when it would get bad. Not to mention living just up the street to a hospital, so habituating to ambulance sirens was part of life that I reluctantly got used to.
After my grandparents died, owing the house to me and my brother in their will, I along with my brother moved in. The area is fields upon fields situated on a kind of plateau. Living in a flat, semi-urban rural area you can get a good look at the night sky without much light pollution. Having an unoccluded view of the horizon is amazing and beautiful during sunset, where the colours of the sun intermixed with the sky don’t look too unlike a watercolour painting. During the night I’ve seen nebulas, comets, the ISS, Starlink, pretty much everything there is to see that can be seen with a high power telescope. The one I bought cost over ten grand but it was well worth it. I still remember having to explain to a paranoid and elderly neighbour that the trail of lights he was seeing in the sky were just Starlink satellites and not UFOs.
Given my heart condition, I have a lot of free time and tend to spend most of my time indoors. Astronomy is one of the things that helps distract me from the background anxiety associated with my condition.
It was a clear night I saw ‘it’. It was a very small but bright green light. At first, I figured that it was the navigation lights of an airplane, helicopter or even a drone. Except it never moved, I came back outside an hour or so later and it was still there but this time it seemed like it was flickering. I estimated that it was about fifteen degrees above the horizon. The best way I can describe it is like a disco ball spinning around very fast. I went to set up my telescope to get a closer look at the thing since it was definitely not flickering before, nor did I notice it the night prior. I looked through my telescope trying to find the thing and I saw it. As I was trying to focus on it, something weird happened. It started to shimmer violently, pulsating from vivid green (think of the brightest and most saturated green that can possibly be displayed on a screen) to white, then to green and back again. This lasted for about five seconds, but the way it pulsated looked eerie and made me feel strange. I’d never seen anything like this in my life.
After it pulsated it exploded. ‘Exploded’, for lack of a better word. It looked more like it was being torn up. Think of a reflection of the moon on a very calm lake, and then someone puts their hand in the water and distorts that reflection. It was like that. It left a faint green ring that expanded outwards and the ring dispersed after about a minute, from where it was no longer visible. There was no trace of the green light anymore after the ‘explosion’.
There were no reports of a fireball or any sonic booms, so I can rule out it being a meteorite. Whatever it was, it wasn’t in our atmosphere. I have no idea what it was, the closest thing that matched what I saw was a supernova, but there are no green stars. If a star’s emission wavelength is the same wavelength that we perceive as green, it’d also end up producing the same amount of light at the wavelength that we call red, so a ‘green’ star would be perceived as white, not green. There are red, orange, yellow, white and blue stars, but there have never been any stars that are green.
I shrugged my shoulders and just figured it was a UAP or something you see that happens from time to time but scientists don’t really have an explanation for it and to pay it no mind. The following weekend I was at the park walking my dog, a particularly yappy Yorkshire Terrier named Alice. It was a fairly warm day, so I stopped to rest under the shade of the park shelter which resembled a pagoda. There were a bunch of people in the park hanging around and drinking while talking to each other. It was about 2:30 PM on a beautiful clear Saturday afternoon, not a cloud in the sky.
Then, out of nowhere, ‘it’ happened. I heard a yelp coming from the direction of the guy who was standing just outside the shelter looking at his phone and saw a bunch of other people running to help him. He was lying on his side on the ground bleeding from his mouth and his torso in multiple places, but I couldn’t tell what exactly had caused him to bleed. At first glance, it looked as though he’d been shot by something. A woman rushed up to him in tears, crying that her husband has been seriously hurt. She embraced him as I was on the phone calling for an ambulance and asking for police as well as it looked like someone’s just been shot.
Just as I finished the call it happened again. A guy in the distance was watching everything and then suddenly it was as if he’d been shot, thrown off of his feet to the side with force, before collapsing onto the ground. Then again. An elderly woman, thrown off of her feet by some kind of unseen force. Except this time I got to see what happened in detail. Just as she was thrown off of her feet I saw these tiny spurts of blood. It looked like she was being pummelled with dozens of microscopic arrows before she fell to the ground and bled to death. At this point, people were running around screaming not knowing what to do, dogs were whining and running around, or acting aggressively. Several more people got ‘hit’ by something before immediately bleeding out and dying. Alice was barking and growling while looking skywards.
For some reason I froze, like my gut instinct told me not to leave the shelter. It was maybe an hour before I dared leave the shelter, even as ambulance crews were interviewing me and the survivors. Two police officers, a man and a woman, interviewed me. The male police officer asked me if I had heard any gunshots. I said that I didn’t. The woman police officer was keeping notes and asked me to describe in detail what I had witnessed, so I told her everything I could. They interviewed several other people who were understandably in a lot of shock. The police officers scouted the area and couldn’t find any evidence of a shooter. I was in a lot of shock so I was sent to hospital for examination. All my vitals were normal except for an ‘elevated’ heart rate.
There was still something that bugged me about the whole thing. It was how the grass began to look just after the people died. I managed to get a close look at it where the guy closest to the shelter I was in died. The patch of grass surrounding his body looked as though it was vibrating very fast. The grass itself looked normal, but it was as if that patch of ground was vibrating at a very fast rate, like an electric toothbrush on its maximum setting. In this vibrating patch of grass was a football, and the football displayed the same vibration as the grass.
Reports say that the people I saw die were stabbed, rather than shot, but the report was vague and didn’t include all of the details that I’d told the police and crew.
Shook up by what I’d seen, I waited a couple days before going to the park again to see if the vibrating grass was still there. Part of me wondered what the heck I was doing considering what I saw go down, but another part of me needed some closure. Was I simply seeing things this whole time? It was a cold cloudy day so there weren’t that many people at the park, and I knew where the shelter was, so I went there.
The patch of grass was no longer vibrating at all, but the grass looked strange. It didn’t look diseased or anything, but the grass blades themselves looked about half their original size so the patch stood out from the rest of the grass. Along the park there were more patches of this miniaturized grass. I went back to the shelter and that’s when I noticed the football was still there, right where it was when I saw the vibrating grass. The football looked…dusty, and it was now the size of a tennis ball. Being cautious, I grabbed a stick and touched the ball with the stick. The stick started to vibrate just like the grass did, before suddenly shrinking to half its size, causing me to drop the stick.
Something about this caused me to feel a massive sense of dread and I booted out of that place as fast as I humanly could. I haven’t visited that park ever since, and even to this day, I feel that same sense of dread whenever there’s nothing between me and the sky.
I haven’t been sleeping well and feel kind of sick. The memories and unanswered questions still haunt me. After typing all of this, my fingers hurt. I just looked at them, and it almost looks as if the tips of my fingers are vibrating..