My Friend is an Alien

Yes, I have had an encounter with an alien. It happened when I was camping alone in my

tent amid the dreary slime-soaked hummocks of Tate’s Hell Swamp near the sleepy fishing

village of Carrabelle stuck in the sand-gnat infested bogs of Florida’s Forgotten Coast.

It was a dark and stormy night. The rain was heavy and relentless. Icky things from the mud

were crawling around all over the place trying to find a way inside the tent. The grim swamp

water was rising. That’s when people are most often bitten by deadly pit viper moccasins,

because the slithering obscenities are washed up from underneath the heaps of dead twigs, vine

tangled undergrowth, and rotting logs where the vicious serpents slink and skulk and hide,

waiting in stealthy treachery to sink their murderous curved-needle fangs into the naked flesh of

an exposed human leg.

I heard a bizarre inexplicable racket, a noise not normal to the eerie sounds of the swamp.

Amid the thrashing squalls of the violent thunderstorm, I couldn’t be sure what I was hearing, yet

I knew something wasn’t right about that ominously foreboding sound. The disturbing noise was

similar to someone breathing, only much louder and with enough raspy background to make the

skin crawl. It was a hot night in summer, so I wasn’t in my sleeping bag, I was lying on top of it

listening to the torrential rain hammering down onto the roof of my flimsy tent. In wary

contemplation, I watched the brilliant flashes of lightning. It was pink lightning that night. I

remember wondering about how lightning could be pink.

That’s when I saw the other light. It was a diabolical light. There was something

otherworldly about that macabre light. It was not flashing lightning. This new light did not go off

and on. It kept shining in a steady beam. I don’t know how it was, perhaps deep in my
subconscious the primal instinct had been triggered warning me of danger, but whatever the

cause, I was suddenly alert. I was alarmed by a creeping sense of lurking fear and imminent

danger.

The light was coming from just above the height of the gloomy moss-draped cypress

trees. It was a short distance away and was shining down through the pouring rain as if it was a

search light hunting for something on the ground. My tent was on the ground and I was in it.

At first the light was a chartreuse color, mostly pale yellow with a tinge of lime green. It

remained that haunting chartreuse color as it moved closer to my tent. Closer and closer the

sinister light moved.