Unidentified Federal Observation
A Short Story
Photo by Greg Jeanneau on Unsplash
This is a work of fiction, intended in good humor. I find it fun and funny. It is not to be construed.
I need to finally tell my story. I know that nobody will believe me, but at this point, I don’t care. This may label me a UFO-nut for life, but I have to go public. It keeps happening and it’s the utter brazenness of it that gets me. They may have stopped messing with me, but I know they’re doing it to other Americans. They know they’ll get away with it every time. That bothers me. Even if I go down as a conspiracy theorist, I need to expose this.
That’s what they said to me. That if I ever told my story, everyone would think I was crazy. I’d join the crowd of “wackos and crackpots who transmit their lack of credibility like an STD.”
If I close my eyes, I can still see it. Sitting in a dark room, no windows, concrete walls, metal chair, a stainless-steel metal table. Nothing on the table except a lamp, shining directly in my face. I could barely make out the dark figure in a dark suit sitting across from me. I kept waiting for him to pull out a Neuralyzer.
Instead, he was quite open with me. He surprised me with the candor with which he confirmed my theories. He told me the whole plan, the whole operation I’d been caught up in, including details I’d missed. He laughed at me, but he answered all of my questions.
Except one. That question has haunted me ever since. Perhaps my only purpose in life now is to find out the answer.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would the U.S. Government run a secret program to fake UFO sightings, alien abductions, and close encounters of the third kind? What is the purpose of all the hoaxes? All the money spent? All the agents running around playing tricks on unsuspecting citizens? Why me?
He laughed.
“That part’s classified.”
“You have to tell me.”
“And why is that?”
“You’ve told me everything. You’ve just told me the U.S. Government’s biggest secret. One that makes Watergate look like a kiddie club. If you don’t tell me why the hell the government took it upon itself to create crop circles in my fields, mutilate one of my cattle, levitate my tractor, fly a saucer over my house, and light up my barn like a DMT trip, I’m going to go public.”
“Who would believe you?”
I still remember the sinking sensation of fear when he said that. It took everything out of me. Because I knew immediately that he was right.
“We would deny everything, of course, and where would that leave you? A gentleman farmer with no other witnesses? Your word against the full faith and credit of the United States Government?”
“I thought that meant you backed the dollar.”
“They’ll say you’re a kook. They’ll call you crazy. You’ll never have any credibility. The only media that will interview you will be nuts themselves. Come on. Who are you going to tell?”
“What happens now?”
“You leave here quietly, and you don’t tell anyone a word of what has transpired. Or you do, and they tell you you’re wacked.”
“You aren’t going to wipe my memory?”
He laughed again.
“Why would we do that?”
“Can you wipe people’s memories?”
He just smiled.
“Goodbye, Mr. Reinhold.”
And I left.
That was three years ago. The strange happenings ceased, but I still get the sense that they’re watching me. That makes me sound like an anarchist nut, but knowing what I know now, I put nothing past them. It has been hard for me to go back to normal. I cannot pretend that nothing happened. I haven’t maintained any close relationships. It’s hard to trust people when people you love have been used against you, or in some cases actively deceived you. My wife left and took the kids years ago. Long before I met that agent in Washington. Back when I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
My wife thinks I’m cursed or haunted, or maybe she doesn’t know what to think. She just decided, after two or three years of craziness, that she had to leave for the sake of the kids. I don’t blame her. At the time, I thought that if they left, that might protect them. The kids were young enough that I hope they missed most of it. I hope they don’t start telling stories at school. The other kids will make fun of them.
She never divorced me. Just left. I haven’t seen her - or the kids - in five years. I send money every month, and she sends me pictures sometimes. They’ve grown up so much I almost don’t recognize them anymore. I told my wife the “encounters” had stopped, but I didn’t say that I knew why. I know she’s still scared. I would be too. So, I’m a 39-year-old man with a small farm who can’t make friends and lost his wife and kids and can’t tell anyone about the most important thing that ever happened in his life. My parents think I’m nuts. I think they see the kids somewhat regularly. That’s good. If I can’t be there, I’m glad they can. My brother actually is crazy, and he occasionally used to come around with some “experts” who wore legit tinfoil hats and spoke excitedly about an interdimensional Bigfoot from another planet and said they wanted to inspect my farm for “evidence.” I told him two years ago if he was going to bring his weirdo friends, he couldn’t come around no more. My sister thinks we’re both crazy. Or that Dakota is and that he played some tricks on me. I told her it wasn’t his fault, but she moved across the country with her husband, so I don’t see her anymore. I wish I did, though. If I could talk to anyone about this whole thing, it would be her. My little sister always was the smart one in the family and if anyone could make head or tail of this it would be her.
Anyway, I rambled a bit about my life story, but I needed to explain why I’m going public now. They ruined my life and I can’t get it back. And even after the weirdness stopped, I’m still bitter. Because I don’t understand why. Maybe if I go public, they’ll finally tell me.
Or maybe they’ll kill me. Not sure if that mightn’t be better.
It all started seven years ago, when my oldest was four and my youngest was a newborn. At first, we figured it was some local high-school pranksters, but eventually the hoaxes got too elaborate. Professional. Or real. We didn’t know what to believe. I’d never put much stock in UFOs and aliens myself. Or ghosts. I guess if you’d asked me, I would have said that with so many billions of galaxies with billions of stars there had to be some sort of life out there somewhere. But I didn’t think they’d visited us. I figured we would know if they had. It would be hard to keep something like that secret. Now I’m not so sure of that statement, but I still don’t think any aliens have ever visited us. Well, maybe I don’t know what I think. The government’s messed with me and they messed with my head even if they never gave me LSD or anything. But I doubt any real aliens have been to Earth. I’d say we’re all the real aliens we need.
Anyway, I didn’t believe in aliens at the time. And the preacher always used to talk about life after death, and I guess I believed him. But he wasn’t much help to us when the sightings began, and after that we stopped going to church and I haven’t been back since. Not sure what I believe now. Maybe I should go back to church. Maybe that would help me. But I don’t know. I wonder sometimes about that and I have trouble making up my mind. I think he still wants to come out here and exorcise the farm. Maybe he’s right about demons and hell and all that, but all the demons I ever saw were human beings. And I know now that this was done to me by flesh and blood human beings. Who used my own tax dollars. They actually said that. Said that they went to the IRS and pulled directly from the money I sent in taxes. Not sure if I believe that either. That’s not how I thought money worked in the federal government, but I don’t know much about that anyhow. Not sure why they’d do that or why they’d tell me, other than to mess with me. I always paid my fair share. I never misreported, even though some of my friends do.
Anyway, it started with some crop circles. That seemed pretty dumb. I always thought crop circles were a hoax. Those stopped pretty quick. Now that I think about it, it must have been because it didn’t have any effect on us, other than that we complained to anyone we knew who had kids in high school, in case it was their kids doing it.
Next, they killed one of our cows and sliced it up, leaving the entrails in a mixed-up pile. You couldn’t tell head from hindquarters. We called the cops about that one, but they never tracked down any suspects. They actually investigated us, to make sure we hadn’t made the whole thing up as a publicity stunt. Or for the insurance. I was glad that no more cows got killed because dairy was the main moneymaker for our farm.
After that, things started disappearing. First, we still figured some local kids were just stealing stuff. But the stuff that went missing seemed harder and harder to steal. The glass out of some of our windowpanes. All the spark plugs out of my wife’s car. The motor out of my tractor. We had to buy a new motor and new spark plugs, but we just duct taped the windows. Then, stuff went missing and then it would turn back up in the oddest places. One of our cows disappeared one night and turned up the next day on the roof of the barn. My shotgun went missing and turned up in our kitchen sink a week later, stripped of all the metal parts. Not much more than the wooden stock left. My wife had walked out of the kitchen for a minute and came back and there it was. She had been washing dishes, so she couldn’t have missed that. Nobody else in the house. That scared her a bit.
One of our dogs went missing. Then he came back and something was different. Something was wrong with him. He was skittish and he would bark like crazy every night. Every time it got dark, you couldn’t calm him down. Then sometimes during the day he would start tearing around in circles and barking and he would back away from you if you tried to go near him or whatnot. Even my wife, who was always good with dogs, couldn’t touch him. The other dogs wouldn’t go near him. They knew something was wrong with him. Most of the other stuff I still don’t know how they did it. But with Bucky, I figure those spooks were slipping him some DMT or something. Would explain him acting like he was on a bad trip all the time.
We started having some noises - especially at night - and doors opening and shutting. You would walk into a room and all the furniture was rearranged. My wife started getting really spooked. I was scared myself. People said we had some kind of haunted house. I didn’t know what to think. She put her foot down when things started levitating. In front of us. First cutlery, then chairs, and then our bed with me and my wife in it one night. It was around that time that my tractor started levitating too. My wife said this was stuff the children shouldn’t see. I said that what was happening was impossible and that there had to be some explanation, but she didn’t care.
“I just want it to stop. I don’t want to see my knives float off the cutting board. I don’t want to hear noises at night anymore. Last night it sounded like radio chatter in an alien language. Like some kinda broadcast from the 9th circle. I don’t want to watch a chicken put itself back together after I cut all the meat off the bone. That happened the other day. I didn’t tell you. If this continues for one more week, I’m done. One week. I’m taking the kids and we’re going.”
“It’s not my fault. There’s not anything I can do about it.”
“Did you hear what I said?”
“Yes. I’m just as clueless as you. Wish I knew what was going on.”
“One week.”
“Okay.”
I wonder whether maybe they were slipping us DMT, too. But there was solid evidence of stuff going crazy. We weren’t the only ones to see it. We saw strange tracks in the mud that couldn’t be made by any animal I knew of. Half the town saw the burnt patterns in the grass like some craft had taken off. Everybody saw the lights in the sky.
That was next. The strange lights in the sky and the moving saucers and multicolored flashings. Along with stranger sounds than any yet. I wasn’t surprised that she left and took the kids then. I resigned myself to it.
I started seeing metallic craft shooting around in the dark, buzzing over the barn and the house. I didn’t believe in UFOs before, but it was hard to argue when the entire town had seen them too. They started saying I was cursed. This was when my brother started showing up with his tinfoil-hat friends. I’m not lying. One of them actually wore a hat made of aluminum foil. I used to think that was a joke. At the time, I wondered whether some kind of giant joke was being played on me. Maybe a cosmic one. Now I don’t know what’s a joke anymore.
Around that time, my neighbor Lemmy mentioned Skinwalker Ranch. Said he’d seen some stuff on TV about it. I began researching it on my computer. My first foray into the online world of UFOs and paranormal activity. At first, it was hard to tell the real mysteries from the bullshit. I never believed all the stuff about abductions, especially not when people said the aliens had put things up their asses. But one thing did seem clear to me about Skinwalker Ranch. It had something to do with the U.S. Government. I began to wonder.
A friend of mine’s buddy’s uncle was in MK Ultra back in the day. I don’t mean he was a spook. I mean he was one of the test subjects. So, I never trusted the government farther then I could throw them. The more I read about UFOs, the more I kept hearing about how the U.S. Government knew stuff they wouldn’t tell the public. I think it was back during the pandemic that I heard a government contractor said the government had crafts that were “not of this Earth.” I wondered some more.
I spent about a year in the online world of conspiracies, hoaxes, misinformation, and UFOs. Some of it seemed plausible and some of it seemed made up. I read about Bigfoot and the Moon Landing and everything I could find about the U.S. Government. A lot of it seemed untrue, but by the end, I sure didn’t trust the government, even if I also didn’t trust most of what I was reading. I didn’t know what to believe.
The weirdness kept happening. I got used to it. I ignored the levitating coffee cups and the flashing lights in the sky. I ignored the sounds of radio chatter in some kind of alien language. Actually, one night I couldn’t sleep so I went outside with my shotgun and plugged away at the multicolored saucer that had been hovering outside my window. It seemed to have no effect. The next night, it was a metallic, cigar-shaped object. I shot my handgun out the window at it and it went away. I read about the drone technology that the U.S. Military employed, but it didn’t sound like anything I’d seen.
I had this lingering, nagging feeling that someone was playing tricks on me. I just couldn’t figure out who. And I had a suspicion someone was watching me. Or something. That suspicion grew and grew and eventually I was sure that multiple people were watching me. Sometimes, at night, if I couldn’t sleep, I’d go outside and yell at the trees.
“Who are you?” I’d yell, “Show yourselves.”
The neighbors already thought I was crazy. Or they thought they were. I didn’t have anybody to impress anymore. Sometimes I’d look up at the sky, at the stars, and wonder. Was I really being visited by beings from another planet? Or by some sort of secret terrestrial intelligent life like in The Abyss?
One day, two men from the government drove up to my door. They drove a black sedan and wore dark suits, and I kept thinking about Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. They asked me some questions about what was going on with my farm, and then they left. After reading about Skinwalker Ranch, I wondered if my farm would be next.
I read more about Area 51. It had always seemed like a joke to me. But I didn’t know what to do, or how to prove this theory I had that someone was watching me, and playing a joke on me, and laughing. I got this hunch that Area 51 was related to all this. So one day I drove out to Nevada and poked around.
I knew that the authorities wouldn’t let me get anywhere near the place, but I wanted to test my theory. I wanted to get caught trying to get into the Nevada Test and Training Range. I knew that some people had been arrested at the Storm Area 51 festival back in 2019. I figured if I went right up to one of the gates, some goons would come out to take me away. Turned out I was right.
As soon as I came within spitting distance of the main gate, a voice spoke to me through a speaker. It told me if I came closer, I risked arrest. I walked closer. Because I thought the fence might be electrified, I used a blade of grass to touch it. Nothing happened. I touched it with my finger and immediately pulled back. No shock. The electronic voice told me I faced up to a $250000 fine and 5 years in prison. I touched the fence again. This time I held on to it. Still no shock. I figured the best way to get them to actually come out was to try to climb it. So I started climbing the fence. Sure enough, some guy in camo came out of the desert, seemingly from nowhere. He had a machine gun.
“You’re under arrest,” he told me.
“Good,” I told him.
I was taken inside the base and blindfolded in a building that looked like a guard post. Multiple guards with machine guns handcuffed me and bundled me into a vehicle. I have no idea where it took me, nor how long it took to get there. All I know is that we drove for many hours, and I was glad I did not have to pee. For part of the drive, I slept. I think it was near Washington. I know they released me in Washington and gave me a plane ticket and a voucher for a rental car to get home. Maybe the meeting wasn’t in Washington.
They took me into a base somewhere. I couldn’t figure out where. Maybe it wasn’t in Washington. They drove me around a bit before releasing me.
They took me inside a bunker, where I found myself in a dark room with an interrogator who knew all about me, and who reminded me of Tommy Lee Jones. Only younger. And with a less-recognizable face. I told you about him already.
I guess you could say he debriefed me. Or he interrogated me. To be honest, I don’t really know what it was. Our conversation led to the exchange I relayed to you earlier. I really have nothing much else to add to that, other than that as soon as I arrived, he knew exactly who I was and why I was there. He seemed to know everything about me.
Well, that’s my story, or as much as I care to tell of it at this time. I’ll post this as widely as I can and try to spread it. Maybe it’ll get shut down or maybe it’ll go viral. I’ll see what happens. I’m sure most readers will think I’m crazy. Maybe I am. I lost the ability to tell a long time ago. The U.S. Government spied on me and my family and created elaborate hoaxes involving Unidentified Flying Objects, paranormal activity, and other stuff. I don’t know why. I don’t know why they would do that, why they would choose me, or why they would think this a good use of government resources. But what happened happened. It’s the truth, as crazy as it seems.
***
Well, it’s been a month since I first posted my story and a lot has happened in that time. The Feds haven’t contacted me yet, though I’m sure they will any day now. I know for a fact they’ve upped their surveillance on me. Not that I care. They know everything about me already.
At first, my story didn’t seem to get much traction. Then, some bloggers picked it up and it spread in the UFO community and among all the crazies and the conspiracists. As I expected. A few of them tried to contact me. Some came to my farm. I tried to turn away as many as I could, but I talked to a couple of them. At least the ones who seemed saner. Then a few media outlets reached out to me. First small, local newspapers in Texas. But then the story got picked up and run by the New York Times and pretty soon everyone in the country had heard about it. I was getting calls from CNN, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal. And a lot of tabloids, of course. I turned most of them down.
Then Moe Hogan emailed me. The former fighter-turned-comedian and host of the most popular podcast in America. He had famously interviewed some of the more credible UFO theorists and people who’d had sightings, including at least one guy who testified before Congress. His people flew me out and we had a three-hour conversation, during which I told him everything I knew. That interview spread like wildfire and if any American had yet to hear my name, they did after I was on Moe Hogan. It generated intense coverage for a week or so. People have been showing up outside my farm. Some nuts and some fans and some strange people whose purpose I cannot fathom and many members of the media. I can’t get no rest. I didn’t want this kind of publicity, but I guess I should have expected it.
Anyway, I haven’t left the farmhouse in a week, because every time I do I get mobbed by reporters and weirdos. I figure if I leave them alone, they’ll eventually lose interest and go away. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.
I’m also hoping the feds pull me back in soon, because I’d like some answers, or at least another crack at interrogating them. I know they’re read this.
Before I sign off, I wanted to relay one strange thing that happened to me this past week. That’s the reason I’m posting this follow up to my original story. I never blogged before and don’t understand it much, but I feel the need to keep telling my story. This latest thing seems to have some bearing on my original story. I can’t make head nor tale of it but then again I never could make head nor tail of any of this whole mess and I gave up trying a long time ago.
In my original story, I said that the UFO stuff and the weirdness had stopped after I had that conversation with the man in black. Well, that man showed up at my door on Wednesday morning. I heard a knock and I opened it and there he was. He walked in uninvited and sat down at my kitchen table. Perhaps this makes me sound schizophrenic, but my home security cameras recorded him.
Not knowing what to say, I asked if he wanted water, or coffee, or anything else. He said both and I obliged, not sure whether I shouldn’t have got my gun instead. I also wasn’t sure why I was giving this man my own coffee when he walked into my house uninvited in the first place, not to mention all the other shit. But, I wanted answers and I hoped another conversation might give them to me.
When I sat down across from him with my own cup of coffee, I just stared at him and waited for him to speak first. If he invited himself in unannounced, I figured he would start speaking without prompting. But I was wrong.
“What?” he finally asked.
“Why are you here?”
“I came to check in on you.”
“You mean you heard I went public and decided to silence me.”
He laughed. “Not exactly,” he said.
“You saw I went on Moe Hogan and now this is the part where you come in and sit down at my table and tell me, ‘I’m going to kill you. Someday. That is all you need to know. It won’t be today but your days are numbered,’ as calmly as you sit there staring at me right now. And then you’ll leave.”
“No.”
“Really.”
“I’m not going to kill you.”
“You wouldn’t do it yourself. You’ll have someone else kill me.”
“I’m not going to have you killed.”
“Right. The U.S. Government doesn’t kill people. Executive order 12333 and all that.”
“Ha. No. I am not going to kill you. You are not going to die.”
“Well then why are you here?”
“I said, I wanted to check up on you. See how you were doing. See if you needed anything.”
“Good cop, bad cop, huh? You going to start with a bribe?”
“No, we are not going to bribe you for your silence. You’ve already told the world anyway. And we are not going to offer you anything to retract your story.”
“Then what are you here for?”
“Two reasons. One of them classified. The other I can tell you.”
“And that is?”
“We wanted to assess your mental state.”
“Bullshit.”
“That’s the less important reason, but it is the unclassified reason. It may only be part of the truth, but it’s the truth.”
“Why should I believe anything you say?”
He raised his hands in the air, palms up, “No reason. You shouldn’t. I don’t really care whether you believe me.”
“Well, have I passed?”
“Passed what?”
“Your assessment. Of my mind.”
He laughed again. “Yes,” he said.
“So, can you go?”
“You want me to leave?”
“Yes. You’re bothering me.”
“I just got here.”
“You can leave.”
“Don’t you have any questions for me?”
I wanted to know everything. But I didn’t know how to ask. Finally, I asked, “What was the point? How did this all start? Why me? What’s the U.S. Government doing faking UFO landings instead of faking moon landings?”
He laughed again. This was beginning to get on my nerves. He paused for a long time and finally he spoke again.
“Well, let’s just say that it has to do with a lot of complicated factors, including end of fiscal year spending, the need to justify budget line items, the desire not to get our agency shut down, a program that grew out of Cold War spying, some tech we took out of Nazi Germany, a little bit of plain old malfeasance and dark humor, an expansion during the war on terror, SETI, the gold in Fort Knox, a mess of classified documents and government secrets and information siloes, nuclear power, nuclear weapons, a confused network of information-gathering agencies and agents operating in cells that knew nothing about the activity of the other cells, the Apollo Program, the Federal Reserve, the various stimulus packages from the last two decades, the financial crisis, the Unabomber, Waco, Oklahoma City, the desire to keep certain presidents in the dark about clandestine activities, a growing network of worldwide operations all designed to one-up the others, over-classification, the coronavirus pandemic, a military program to create a new race of supersoldiers, and a whole host of other factors too complex to explain. But it really all boils down to something you just couldn’t understand anyway.”
I didn’t know what to say. So, I didn’t. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. After a while, he got up.
“If you aren’t going to ask me any more questions, I’m going to leave.”
“I wish you’d left already. I wish you’d never come.”
He walked to the door.
“Goodbye, Mr. Reinhold.”
“Don’t come back. You’re not invited. I don’t want to see you anymore. Just leave me alone. I just want my normal life back.”
But he was already gone.
I stewed over this encounter for a while. I didn’t know what to make of it. After a while, I got up and went to the window. And there, floating a few meters in front of my house, was a gray, rectangular, Tic-Tac-shaped craft. I’d seen the FLIR footage from the Nimitz incident. This looked exactly like that. It was one of those. I stared at it, and it stared back at me. I watched it, and it watched me. And then I remembered something from my first conversation with that unidentified government official. Something I had forgotten originally. I had asked him about the Nimitz, and about the Navy pilots, and about these Tic-Tac craft that defied the laws of physics. And as much as I think he could have lied to anyone as easy as telling the truth - and had them believe it - I think what he said about them was the truth. His face changed a little, as though he felt uncertain for the first time. It was the only time he seemed to lose composure, even slightly, even for a fleeting moment.
“Oh,” he said, “those. Yes. Well. To be honest, we have no idea what they are. We’re as clueless as you.”
And that was all he said on the matter.
Moe Hogan, I wonder who that could be.......Brilliantly written, thoroughly enjoyed reading this one!! The occasional "farmer-isms" were very well-done too.