The Break
A true encounter with the Phenomenon.
A single moment can break a life, dividing a person's narrative into that which came before and that which comes after.
This is the story of Saul on the way to Damascus when the light of the Lord falls on him in all its terrifying glory. If you are a seeker, you yearn for such moments of revelation without considering what happens to your life if they actually arrive.
My Revelation was not consequential to the world, but it still divided my life in two. It came early in the morning of May 17, 2015, when an object that Could Not Be revealed itself over the Oregon Coast. As you get older, you realize that a decade passes like the snap of a finger and for ten years now that event has hovered over me.
A decade ago, I had just gotten legally married to my partner of ten years in a ceremony at our home in Portland with friends from all over the country. I lived in a beautiful century-old farmhouse in North Portland with lush gardens I had nursed into flourishing. I had a tenured teaching position at the local college, a new car, a healthy circle of friends, and we had just adopted our second dog. My life, to any outside observer, was thriving.
But internally, all was not well. Since our wedding my husband had slid into a deep depression and then an alarming manic state. As someone who had been diagnosed Type II Bipolar in his early 20s, my husband had always had manias which brought long periods of instability to our relationship, but this period was different. There was a deeply unsettled edge to the long mania, and by the Spring of 2015 the idea of just another mania was giving way to something much deeper and more severe.
On May 15, 2015, we rented a house in the town of Rockaway Beach, Oregon to celebrate my husband's 40th birthday. We invited another couple to join us. My husband and I drove out a day early to get settled in before our friends joined us on Saturday. We had been fighting for weeks, and my husband’s mania was relentless as he raved on about his emerging superpowers and his great philosophical work that would save humanity.
Saturday morning we took a walk on the beach, a place where we often found the most peace, but that morning my husband—stoned since sun up and rambling frantically—kept walking into me on the empty beach. He was so caught up in talking that he was unaware of my physical presence. The last time it happened, I snapped.
I unleashed on him and let out the frustration that had been building for weeks, then I sent him back to the house with our dogs and sat down on the beach, letting the tides swell up around me. I was so very tired. A clear voice came to me and told me—go back to the house, call our friends to cancel, and tell my husband that it was over.
I sat there with the tide lapping up around me, heavy with the knowledge of what I needed to do.
On the walk back to the beach house, I remembered the many good days with my husband, our early years in Chicago, our adventures in the outdoors, our wedding, and I felt guilty that I was about to end it all on this special weekend. By the time I reached the house, I had lost my resolve, and from that night forward, my life forked.
Our friends arrived by late afternoon. We had decorated the house with leis, candles, tiki torches, and party lights we brought from home. Shortly after nightfall, the music was going, the four of us swallowed tabs of ecstasy, and the night was on. Somewhere after 4:00 am, we started to wind down. Our friends went to bed, and my husband and I went to the porch so I could have a cigarette.
As I smoked, the E had mostly worn off, my husband talked excitedly. I looked out over the ocean and noticed what seemed like a distant star, bright and low far on the horizon. Being no stranger to the night sky, something seemed off about this star—its intensity, its location on the horizon, and just as I noticed this the star blinked and was in another part of the sky. I held my cigarette and tried to make sense of what I had just seen, then it did it again.
"What, what is that?" I asked my husband and he stopped talking long enough to follow my finger out to the horizon.
He observed for a few seconds then said calmly, ”Well, that’s a UFO,” and laughed.
That particular laugh worried me. ”No fucking way…" but I knew immediately that he was right.
We watched for several minutes and debated running inside to find our phones or to wake our friends, but did neither of these things, not wanting to miss a moment of what we were watching. We stood frozen as the ship zipped from one part of the sky to another, crossing impossible distances instantaneously.
The light drew closer, and we saw the form from which the light radiated. It was a ship: very large, dark metallic, spherical, and in the center was a crystalline lattice structure with a stark white light unlike any I had seen before. I remember thinking, I wish we could get a better look and immediately the ship came directly over us so we were staring into the blinding white structure at the ship’s center. Instinctively, I knew, it was highly unlikely that whatever was in there was human.
Over the shore, the light played tricks with the environment. Time became sticky, reality splintered, became like frames of negatives on a roll of film. Whatever power this thing was emitting, it altered the space around it. I thought about running out to the beach, throwing my arms open wide and surrendering, but no sooner did the thought come to mind than an immense fear ran through me.
I snapped out of my dumbstruck curiosity to the realization that whatever was in that craft was infinitely more powerful than we were. ”I think we should go inside…" my husband said, and we retreated back through the sliding doors while continuing to watch the ship. As it pulled away, we went back outside, but the ship was now far in the distance where it was when we first spotted it, and then it was just gone, and the moment was over. The whole incident began and ended in about five minutes though it seemed much longer.
After a few hours of sleep, we had breakfast with our friends before packing up and heading home. We told our friends about what we had seen in excited detail, but we could tell they were skeptical. It was a skepticism I would become familiar with.
Back in Portland, I was shaken. I had gone from being convinced that I needed to leave my husband to sharing this experience with him—the sort of transcendent moment we had searched for together for over a decade. It was real, and we had both witnessed it together.
My husband didn't sleep that night or the night after that or the night after that. Within 48 hours of leaving the coast, he was admitted to a mental health facility. Within a week, his mother was in town. There were encounters with the police, spiraling voicemails, and text messages I would get on my phone after class; a world of pain and anguish unfolded, but those are stories for another time.
I would finish out the semester, going from work to the psych-ward to a home I didn’t understand anymore, and we would enter the summer with my husband on paid leave from his job. By that fall, he would move out of our home, the next Spring we divorced, and the next Fall—after a summer in Peru working with ayahuasca to try to make sense of the chaos my life was becoming—I would quit my job and uproot my life to go on the road with him for a year in an RV. I would come to call that year “The Apocalypse Roadshow”, but that is also a story for another time.
That two year span from 2015-2017 destabilized me in ways that I am still recovering from, and over all of the changes hung the specter of the UFO. I saw it. There was no doubt that WE had seen it, and the universe became vastly larger and more mysterious to me because of the sighting. That we had seen it together on the day I almost left my X became a knot in my mind that convinced me that we were meant to be together. It wasn’t a rational conclusion, but those were not rational times.
A decade later, I still don't want to write about my X or that period of my life, but in my subsequent research on the Phenomenon, I have learned that details matter—that there is some subjective element to these anomalous experiences, that the Phenomenon and our consciousness are bound.
So let me recap here just the facts: On the early morning of May 17, 2015, at approximately 5:15 a.m. my X and I saw a UFO/UAP over the Pacific Ocean in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. We had taken tabs of Ecstasy many hours earlier but not psychedelics, and we had no hallucinatory experiences that night. We were, overall, sober when the sighting happened. We saw was a ship, cylindrical, dark metallic, with a bright white light radiating from its center. I would estimate that it was roughly the size of a football field though spatial intelligence is not my strong suit. It looked nothing like any human technology that we know exists. The ship made no sound. It came directly over us. We were amazed, then frightened, then in awe. I “felt” as though it was aware of us if not outright responsive to our thoughts.
An encounter with the Phenomenon changes you—there is life before, and there is life after. My studies have gone down countless roads in the last ten years, most of them dead ends. In all the searching I’ve learned how others interpret these events, but I have reached no firm conclusions about the event itself. It is possible that what we saw was military (though why would it be flying over a populated area of the Oregon coast?). It is possible that it was a reverse engineered craft. It is possible that we saw beings from another planet, another dimension, or from the oceans themselves. Everything is a theory until it isn’t.
In the last few years it seems that the public is finally having serious conversations about UFOs and UAP after The New York Times gave skeptics the permission to be curious. There have been countless books, documentaries, podcasts, and testimonies before Congress making all sorts of claims that only a few years ago would have been deemed too outrageous for the mainstream. Disclosure has already begun. The truth is out there and it’s coming out of hiding.
People are looking to the skies again, as our ancestors did every night for hundreds of generations, and they are seeing things. Soon, I am certain that reverse-engineered alien technology will be used in terrestrial warfare. Disclosure will accelerate, and we will start to learn just how much our government has known and for how long.
Not everyone is going to handle this new reality well, but it is coming whether we are prepared for it or not.
The weirdness we have been waiting for is upon us. I have experienced the weirdness directly, there was a break, and for the last ten years I have lived in the world that comes after. Soon, the rest of you will join me.
