Encounter at China Lake

BUTCH'S GREAT ADVENTURE XV

ENCOUNTER AT CHINA LAKE

It was late summer 1983. I was leaving the rental home, first wife Renea and I had in Victorville, Ca., and was driving north up to Ridgecrest. Months before, I had lost my special education job with the Palm Springs office of Braille Institute. Renea was a regional manager for four Dunkin Donuts stores spread out from Redlands to Ridgecrest, and I was working as an assistant manager of the Burger King in Ridgecrest. We both worked for the same guy, who owned several businesses and real estate and a car lot. He was a chubby passive aggressive borderline homosexual, who loved to do things for you so that you would "owe" him. So that he would have his greasy tentacles wrapped around your young ankles.

I would come home early every Saturday morning, 75 miles down to Victorville, and spend some time with my nubile wife, and I would have to be back in Ridgecrest Monday morning to open the BK by 6am. So I would bed down with Renea Sunday night, and rouse myself up at 2am Monday, and head north still steaming from her body's warmth, wrapped in the high hot desert darkness, up highway 395, streaming past the gleaming brilliant runway lights of Edwards AFB , up and through the near ghost town of Red Mountain, just so many clapboard shacks crouching along the quiet road, with one solitary store open, that had been a gas station, but not the gas pumps were converted to flower pots.

It was 3:30am. I was still a half hours out of Ridgecrest. My ' 66 yellow Pinto cranked strong along the secluded desert highway. There were no city lights to distract me. The closest almost city was Mojave, gateway to the Tehachepies, had some dim street lights 25 miles southwest of me. The black sky was full of dazzling cold stars. My German engineered overhead cam four-banger purred as the fastback Pinto cleared the lip of a large valley. The road ran down its west side, hugging some low foothills, like a bowl-shaped semi-canyon. It stretched out ten miles due east. The summer moon shone bright and white, casting night shadows on fence posts, and lonely railway cars parked and forgotten on dusty pieces of side track. Perpendicular to the highway, a jagged ridge of hills ran almost straight out toward the eastern horizon.

I had driven this section of dark highway dozens of early Monday mornings. This time I was sleepy, and I had my driver's window rolled down, letting the chill of the near dawn pummel my drooping lids. A mile, or so, ahead I could see some bright lights near the head of the valley, on the edge of the bowl, where the two sets of foothills allowed a gap for the highway to squeeze through; where the road dropped hard and low, twisting northwest, and then back on itself, avoiding the rocky teeth of the ridges rushing perpendicular out to it. It kind of looked like some kind of road crew, or railroad gang. The lights, two of them, were mercury vapor halogen bright.

"What the hell could be going on at three in the morning?" I asked myself.

After the twist in the road, it straightened out, and ran hard east, down into the slumbering town of Ridgecrest, perched at the feet of the China Lake Naval Weapons Center. Some of the teenagers that worked on my BK crew had parents with civil service jobs over at the Naval Base; big time wages, GS13's and 14's; engineers and physicists.

No one seemed to know exactly what kind of a base it was. It was a Naval Airbase, but there was no squadrens assigned to it. There were some hints and rumors that some kinds of "secret weapons" were worked on. The place had Herculean aluminum hangers, three and four stories tall, like Boeings builds super jumbo jets in; a whole connected city of tall 1940's giant quantset huts, choked with hushed civil servants and Naval personnel in civvies working feverishly under artificial lights on "secret weapons".

On that particular morning as I sleepily approached the bright work lights, I expected to see a road crew of 8 or 10 tanned guys wearing orange and yellow vests and no shirts and chrome hard hats. As I got closer, I could see three or four small buildings, and a boxcar, and those two strong spotlights were moving, criss-crossing over the worksheds. There seemed to be a tall metal water tower, several hundred feet above the buildings, and the lights were projecting from it. Somehow that didn't seem odd to me at the time. Even with my driver's door car window rolled down I couldn't hear any voices or the growl of any machinery. I began to stare intently at the water tower as I sped toward it. Three long minutes had elapsed since I had burst over the lip of that three-sided almost canyon.

"Jesus Christ...what the fuck?" I think I said aloud.

There were no stantions, no boards holding up the shiny metal water tower. It was suspended dead stop three hundred feet off the ground with nothing but desert air beneath it.

"Sonofabitch...that is a UFO !" I thought.

I continued to drive at 70mph toward it.

"Why do we always seem to see things like this at three in the morning when we are alone on the desert?" I questioned myself.

My hands were shaking with fear. Sweat trickled down my spine and into my underwear.
The craft was definitely saucer-shaped, ellipitical, with a dark curved top and bottom. Running across its middle were a double row of lights; red or orange opposed to green or blue. Pulsations of light were dancing back and forth along those rows in opposite directions; like the alien blips on the flat faceplates of the Cylon chrome warriors on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

Christ, what was going to happen to me? I could not seem to concentrate on braking or slowing down. I seemed to shoot toward the craft like a bullet in a barrel. Would I be abducted? Had I been taken before? Was I a star child, an elite member of a small segment of society? Would I remember any of it, or would I be hypnotised or given bizarre drugs to create the veil of forgetfulness? Would they shove probes up my ass? Would I be found naked wandering on the desert, babbling and foaming at the mouth?

Suddenly the two roving searchlights snapped silently off. I stared at the dark craft, hovering motionless there. In the blink of an eye, in a tenth of a second, it accelerated from a dead stop to mach speed, due east out toward the blackness of the horizon.

It made absolutely no noise, not even a whoosh. I followed it with one quick jerk of my head to the right. Moonlight illuminated it as it rocketed mute on a straight as an arrow even course, silently as a bolt of light, just over the tops of the jagged perpendicular hills. And then in less than a breathe, it was gone, thrust magnificently into the darkest apeture of the night sky.
Freaked out, short of breath, barely able to grip my steering wheel, I continued to drive down into Ridgecrest. I didn't stop. I was afraid to stop. My brain felt violated and scrambled. As the weeks and months passed, I found very few people that I even wanted to recount that incident to, my encounter at China Lake.

Years later, upon reflection, while studying UFO-ology and metaphysics, I realized that on that fateful morning I had only been seconds from the flight paths of China Lake Naval Airbase, and just a few flight moments from the Skunk Works over at Area 51. I postulated that it was not an accident that I saw the craft there, close to those places, where other sightings had been made. I know it was an alien ship, and it must have been using some futuristic electromagnetic gravity controlling power source. But was it one of ours, or one of theirs? Were men flying it secretly, or were aliens prowling the sky that summer's morn? Or was it a hybrid, like a German foofighter, or something we constructed after 40 years of studying the craft left at Roswell? Or was it a scout ship foraging far from the mother ship? And again, why did I get to see it while alone in the dark? Many folks I have met, true believers in the UFO lore and phenomenon would have killed for an actual sighting like that, something concrete, not just a cluster of fast and furious lights criss-crossing in the sky. So why was I singled out?

Thirty years later, after relating my story to many eager ears, Melva and I drove down to Cloudcroft, NM. to visit her sister, high in the mountains above White Sands and Almagordo. As a lark, near the 4th of July, my in-laws drove us over to Roswell, and knowing my interest in such things, we stopped at the International UFO Museum; a converted movie theatre and warehouse. There is an annual convention there over the fourth of July. So I was plopped down amongst hundreds of believers. I was soon talking with some of the staff, and of course, my UFO encounter was related. They persuaded me to recount my tale, so that it could be recorded and registered in the official UFO archives there at the museum. I was honored and pleased to do so. Being there, looking at the "evidence" from Roswell's 1947 encounter, reawakend my dormant memories, and seemed to help close the gap on those three turbulent decades.

A month later, over the Labor Day weekend, I announced to Melva that we were driving down to California, a 1000 miles south, so that I could ease my compulsion to feast my eyes on the place of my encounter. Melva is always at the ready for a road trip, so off we sped. On Saturday afternoon, we were gassing up at Burns Junction, east of Mojave. I stood staring north up the two lanes of 395. What did I expect to find? I really did not know. I just felt compelled to got there, to revisit, to reconnect to that other morning.

Soon we were motoring magnetic north, and I felt a tinkling of deju vu, as we climbed up through the thick gray sagebrush, past the boarded-up shacks of Red Mountain. It was close to 5pm, and the late summer's sun was bright and low.

And then we were there. We came up over the lip of the canyon edge, and I could see the width of it, fenced in by jagged foothills, and dozens of abandoned boxcars standing lonely on dusty sidetracks. But...wait a minute ! Things somehow did not look right. For one thing, I had remembered a wide expanse, maybe several miles wide. But what I was confronted with was barely one mile wide. My memory had elongated both the distance and the time. The five minutes I recalled driving toward the UFO, but have been more like one minute. I peered left and west of the road. There were no tracks, and no buildings there. What the hell? There was some light traffic on our bumper, so we traversed the small valley quickly, while I squirmed fervently in my passenger seat, searching for the invisible structures.

I had Melva turn our P/T cruiser around, and we doubled back. We slowed and pulled over in the gravel alongside the road. I got out and stood there a long time, gazing at the place, knowing it had to be correct, but feeling strongly that only half of the landmarks were extant. There was not even evidence of old foundations or lumber from the specific phantom buildings. There was a white farm house, with a large barn and outbuildings, further west and north, but they did not look right either.

Finally, shaking my head, I crawled back into my Mopar vehicle and merged quickly into the gathering traffic, and into the gathering twilight shadows, north toward Bishop.
A great emptiness, a thick sadness, opened up in my chest. I had retold and recounted my encounter dozens of times, and the memories were vivid and clear. But I was leaving behind a specific piece of half truth and vagueness. Did I really see a UFO in 1983. Yes, the voices in my head said. Yes, my spirit said.

Then I remembered a passage I had read in THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES regarding reality and recall for UFO witnesses. " Witnesses often can not relocate the site of their experience. Buildings and landmarks clearly seen at the time seem to vanish. This phenomenon is well known in psychic lore."

Memory, our bastion, our historian, our recorder of our past. Yet, damn it, each of us perceives, possibly helps to create reality individually, differently. I know that I definitely did see that UFO, that dark craft, in all its vivid detail. But was it completely in this dimension? Was Time and distance folded slightly as my perky Pinto approached it?

Glenn Buttkus 2004