Some people have stories that are so wild you might think it wasn’t true. Was that guy really abducted by aliens? Is her house truly haunted? I would venture to bet that most, if not all of us have at least one story that is beyond belief. When that story is told, the listener might roll their eyes and think: “What a load of BS.”
I have just such a story…
It happened in 1994 or ’95, so there’s no photographic evidence – camera phones weren’t a thing yet. And I can’t recall the exact date, but it must have been in the late spring or early summer because we were driving around with the windows down, which does not happen year-round here in the soggy Pacific Northwest. And though my details of the time and date might be fuzzy, the rest of this story… that’s crystal clear, and every word of it is true.
It was later in the evening, and my friend and I had been driving around in my little, gold Honda Civic hatchback. We pulled into a cul-de-sac in a quiet residential neighborhood in our home town, which is about an hour to the west of Seattle by ferry, or about 15 miles across the Puget Sound as the crow flies. There wasn’t a lot to do in our little town, so we spent many nights loitering in parking lots or taking up tables at the local diner, drinking massive amounts of coffee and smoking far too many cigarettes.
On this particular night, we chose to pull over on the side of the road just next to the sidewalk to have a little (ahem) smoke and share some laughs. And my friend did laugh when she said, “Let’s listen to Snoop while we puff!” … And I laughed too as I pulled out my trusty pipe. It was so apropos. I popped the well-played cassette in the tape deck, fast-forwarded to our favorite, “Lodi Dodi,” and pressed ‘play.’ We sang along while I prepped our gear, laughing and enjoying ourselves, excited for the buzz we were about to get on. As I lifted the pipe to my lips and flicked my Bic, I noticed a pair of bright headlights in my rearview mirror. “Oh shit! There’s a car coming up behind us,” I exclaimed while quickly dropping the pipe between my legs and setting the lighter in the console. I rolled up the windows and looked at my friend who was staring out through the hatchback.
“Dude?” she said.
“What?” I replied.
“Um… that car…” I checked my mirrors again. But the headlights were gone.
That’s when I noticed that those headlights were ABOVE us.
Right above my car. We quickly rolled the windows back down to listen, expecting to hear some kind of engine hum or maybe the sound of rotors, but the night was silent. The “headlights” didn’t make a sound. We watched, dumbfounded as the lights rose above us, higher and higher, our eyes popping out of our skulls. We hadn’t even smoked yet! Could we already be high?
We may not have been, but the lights above us were unbelievably high now. In an instant, they shot even farther up in the sky and off to the east. I couldn’t help myself; I hit the gas in hot pursuit. My friend laughed while I drove like a bat out of hell, staring at the sky. I raced through neighborhoods and back roads until we arrived at the local junior high school on the hilltop where you could see all the way across the water to Seattle. Believe it or not, those lights were across the Sound, past Seattle now, and still flying–faster and higher than I’d ever seen anything fly. We sat there for quite some time, silently staring in awe at what we had just witnessed.
To this day, I still wonder what those headlights really were… and I still wonder how much cooler it would have been if we’d have finished that smoke session first.
Now…what’s YOUR story? // LEANN KURTZ
Got a weird-but-true, believe-it-or-not kinda story? Send your stuff to: kitsapsmokestack@gmail.com
