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Salt flat
Texas
USA
March 20, 2009

I was driving west on 62/180 around midnight in may of 2009. Me and my fiancé was leaving the Carlsbad New Mexico area after a daytrip at the caverns and night time dessert trail driving. There were big orange construction barrels lining the shoulder of this very dark 2 lane hiway, the barrels seemed to continue for over an hour and the speed limit was greatly reduced. I was overcome with a deep need for a nap before I finished the trip back to El Paso where I had just recently moved to, just a few months prior with my fiancé. So sleepy from the long monotonous drive yet I cant pull over due to the construction zone. As I follow the dark roads' bend to the right, combined with the uphill incline, the big orange construction barrels finally ended and an enormous ascending plateau came into view with a perfect place to pull over, off of the road. The view was breath taking, a piercing black silhouette of a mountain against an illuminated night sky full of giant stars with their colors very distinct, reds and yellows of brilliance like I've never seen before. I put the jeep in park, took off my seatbelt and turned around to release the lever to recline the back seats (so that the front seats would recline further down)when my fiancé grabbed my right knee with a fearful clutching grip and screamed "What the heck is that thing" as she pointed beyond the front windshield. Rapidly I turn back to the front and look out the window. At the bottom right side of the black mountain silhouette ( about 200 feet away) was an orange glowing orb shaped light, swaying back and forth very gently. Obviously my first thought was that it was a porch light swinging back and forth on its chain from the wind. WE stared and it contently for a couple minutes wondering if there was a house over there, it was pitch black down on the dessert floor area, so we could only speculate, but, after another moment of looking at the light orb, it came into focus. It was not an orange orb, but 3 white, independently floating orbs, floating together, emitting an orange glow. My body instantly was flushed with goose bumps and my heart rate rose rapidly in a single moment. Her hand gripped my knee with more force as she started trembling and yelling " Lets get the hell out of here now, HURRY HURRY LETS GO". Instantly that was my first thought as well, I reached for the ignition, shaking like a leaf, when the glowing orbs shot straight up into the sky in a nano second. Speechless, we looked at each other for a slight moment, both wondering if this really just happened, then we turned our attention back to the hypnotizing sky above. At the peak of the black mountain, just above, in the sky was a blue star, bright blue, radiant. What I thought was a star, maybe a planet, this thing is huge, but no sign of the orange glowing orb. A couple minutes have passed since the orange glowing orb had launched up into the sky when, It hurled back down from space, and slowed down as it passed in front of the mountain, then stopped. A brilliant beam of white light shot out from this orange ball of light and proceeded to light up the mountains' surface. The spotlight swayed from left to right as the orange ball slowly descended on the other wise black mountain silhouette. We were scared, we were very scared, shaking and trembling. My fiancé, we'll call her "devil woman" ( were broke up now ), started to cry in fear, begging me to start the car, I replied " Hey, I know this is scary, I'm completely freaked out too but, how many times in our lives are we going to experience something like this, lets stay for a few and break out the camera". She took a moments to calm down and agreed, lets photograph this thing. She climbed in the back to pull the camera out of her back pack and I continued watching the ball of light emit a beam of light on the mountains surface, it had almost made its way to the base of the mountain when, to our shocking surprise, the blue star/ planet light in the sky.........fell, fell right out of the sky like a missile straight towards the orange glowing light at the base of the mountain. The blue ball of light hit the orange orb with disastrous force, but then the orange orb seemed to just absorb the blue light, after a brief moment, there was an explosion of the two, colored orbs flying in all directions, multiplied in numbers. we were shaking and scared but mesmerized and excited at the same time. The only sounds I heard for hours was the shutter on the canon 40D that devil woman just bought when we moved to El Paso. We watched in amazement the dancing like characteristics of these balls of light flowing at high speeds right in front of us, 5 feet off of the ground, up in the sky, and everywhere in between, it was as if they were playing, running around the sky in an innocent game of tag or red rover. There were a couple of tractor trailers speed by during this nights events, and when they did, the dancing balls of light just froze, they didn't disappear, they just froze, like street lights randomly placed on the mountain side, and as soon as the trucks lights turned around the bend and were out of sight, the orbs slowly started moving again until they were back at full speed, dancing in the night. This happened 3 times during the spectacle. We didn't say too much t each other, devil woman and I, except for the regular intervals of " Did you see that"? and " Oh my god". We watched enchanted till the sun started to rise, and the balls of light slowly started to dissipate. The more sunlight, the less we could see the orbs until slowly they completely left our vision. They did not disappear, but merely bleached out by the morning sun. When the final bit of light faded out completely and we could see the land in front of us, I noticed a sign up ahead, I couldn't read it from where I was parked. We didn't speak as I stared the car and crept further up the hill another 50 feet or so until I could read the sign, it read, Guadalupe Mountains State Park, and there was a right hand turn in to the park. We used the bathroom house at the camp ground and then hiked up around the base of the mountain looking for anything that might be considered a remnant from the alien light show that we witnessed over the last 6 hours or so, but come up with nothing. Our heart rates were finally returning to normal, the shaking subsiding, our lives changed forever. Credit: Mufon