December 8, 2003. 8:45 p.m. A sky darker than the pit hung above Houston, British Columbia—so crystalline that stars seemed to crawl across it like maggots on obsidian. My friend—call her Marlene—had just been delivered home by her husband when childhood screams erupted from the driveway. Two children, rigid as grave-stones, pointed to the mountain that looms behind their farm like the humped shoulder of a buried god.
They exited the car and saw it: a white oval of impossible symmetry suspended just above the treetops, rimmed by a living circlet of blue light that pulsed like an exposed artery. From its underside came a droning thrum—low, insistent, mechanical, yet somehow alive. The white hull looked metallic, but not of any earthly alloy; it drank the starlight and gave back a sterile glow, as though fluorescence itself had grown ill.
Marlene herded the children inside. Behind locked doors and blackout curtains they crept to the back bedroom, hearts hammering in funeral cadence. Through the slats they watched trees transfigured into pallid skeletons by the glare—every branch etched in stark, cold neon. Blue sparks spat from the craft’s underside in lazy spirals, drifting like phosphorescent snow before winking out against the snow-laden ground.
Four endless minutes.
Then, with no roar of engines, no sudden leap to warp, the craft simply ascended—a monstrous firefly lifting above the ridge, sparks still cascading in its wake. It skimmed the mountain crest, dipped beyond, and vanished into the black throat of night. The silence it left behind was heavier than thunder.
No helicopter—my friend’s husband knows the sound of rotor blades the way a coroner’s clerk knows the clink of bone saws. This thing hummed like a tuning fork struck in a mausoleum. And its scale—impossible. Large enough to blot out multiple constellations, close enough that the family swore they felt static electricity on their skin. Half the valley must have seen it—blinding oval, devil-blue halo, human voices lost in its electric drone.
Take an ice scraper to that night and you’ll still find frost prints: four witnesses, four minutes, one single shard of cosmic nightmare nailed forever to the dark sky over Houston Mountain.