ZIP!
UFO Encounter at Big Sur - Impossible Objects Scan the Pacific, 1973
Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
Chapter Eleven: ZIP!
"Piss stop!" Cosmic Eddie announces.
Pulls off at an overlook. Bixby Bridge visible to our left. Everyone piling out, laughing. Standing at the edge. Hundred-foot drop to rocks and foam. Dozen hippies in a row, streams arcing into space. Electric Mike laughing about something. The ocean massive below—that California blue that makes you understand why people die trying to paint it.
"Holy shit," Electric Mike says. "You see that?"
Then—movement. North. Fast.
"Holy shit."
Two of them. Spherical. Metallic but not metallic—like mercury decided to hold a shape. Moving maybe two hundred feet above the water. Fast. Faster than fast. Fighter-jet fast but silent. No sound. None.
They're coming straight at us. Someone's stream stops mid-arc.
Then they stop.
Not slow down—stop. Like hitting an invisible wall except no deceleration. Just velocity to zero. Instant. Both of them. Hovering maybe a quarter mile out, maybe three hundred feet above the swells.
"What the—"
Lights. Not like headlights. More like—consciousness made visible. Brilliant white beams shoot down from both objects. Not searching randomly—deliberate. Methodical. The beams hit the water and the ocean lights up. Not just surface reflection. The light penetrates. Goes deep.
Can see the beams moving through the water layers. Like they're reading something. Scanning. The foam patterns where waves break—the light follows those patterns. Traces them. One beam tracks a line of kelp, follows it precisely along its length. The other finds a riptide's path and illuminates the entire current structure.
My body won't move. None of ours will. Dozen grown men frozen like deer, dicks still out, watching something that shouldn't exist doing things that can't happen.
The objects themselves—maybe thirty feet across. Their surface ripples. Not solid. Not gas. Something between states. The sunlight hits them and scatters wrong. Makes colors that shouldn't be there. Purples and greens that hurt to process. Like looking at a color that hasn't been invented yet.
Thirty seconds. Maybe forty. Time dilates. Stretches.
Then the lights intensify. Both beams go brilliant—so bright the ocean turns transparent. Can see straight down through the water. The underwater topography. Rock formations. Kelp forests. Everything revealed in that impossible light. Like the entire ocean became glass.
Movement in the water. Not fish. Not kelp. Patterns. Geometric patterns flowing in the current. The lights track them. Follow specific formations. Mathematical. Purposeful. Like the ocean itself is conveying information and they're recording it to tape.
Someone whispers "Jesus Christ." Breaks the spell slightly.
The objects start rotating. Slow. Their surfaces shift and reform. Still that mercury-but-not quality. Still those impossible colors. The rotation speeds up. The light beams start spiraling. Creating helixes in the water. The ocean responds—the surface pulls up slightly where the lights touch. Defying physics. Water climbing toward the beams.
Then—
Movement. But wrong.
The object on the left doesn't accelerate. Doesn't turn. Just instantaneously exists in a new location. Ninety degrees east. Same altitude. The light beam swings with it—except the beam doesn't swing. It just stops existing in one place and starts existing in another. No arc. No transition.
ZIP!
The second object does the same thing. Different direction. North-northwest. That same impossible right-angle trajectory. Newton screaming somewhere.
ZIP!
Now they're hovering in new positions. The light beams resume their scanning. More intense now. Faster. The patterns in the water more complex. Sacred geometry written in foam and current. Fibonacci spirals. Golden ratios. Messages in mathematics older than language.
"They're reading the fucking ocean," someone says.
That's exactly what it is. Reading. The way you'd scan a page, but the page is the Pacific and the words are written in waves and temperature differentials and salt gradients and electromagnetic fields and—
The objects start pulsing. In unison. Their surfaces brightening and dimming. The light beams pulse too. The ocean pulses back. Everything synchronized. A conversation in frequencies we can almost feel but can't quite comprehend.
My teeth hurt. Fillings vibrating. The air pressure wrong. Too thick. Too thin. Both at once.
Then acceleration. Real acceleration this time. Both objects rise. Straight up. The light beams stretch as they climb. Grow thinner. More intense. The ocean where they were scanning glows. Phosphorescent. Wrong color again. That purple-green that makes your brain itch.
They rise to maybe a thousand feet. Stop again. Hover. We can see them clearly against the sky. Their surfaces more active now. Rippling. Reforming. Like they're considering something.
Decision made.
Both objects move. Different directions. Impossible speed. Not like aircraft. Like editing film—here one frame, there the next. The sky tears slightly where they pass. Leaves a shimmer. A scar in the air that takes seconds to heal.
Gone.
The ocean still glows where they touched it. Five minutes. Ten. The phosphorescence fades gradually. The waves resume their normal patterns. The kelp sways naturally again.
Nobody moves. Nobody speaks.
"Did you—"
"We ALL fucking saw that."
Tucking in. Zipping up. Hands shaking. Not fear. Not exactly. More like—vertigo. Like the universe just revealed it has trap doors.
"My cousin saw something like this in Mendocino," Starshine says. "Same thing. Lights on the water. But just one object."
"They're mapping," Rainbow says. Quiet. Certain. "Mapping the ocean. Reading it."
"Reading what?"
"Information. The ocean stores information. Every ship that's passed. Every storm. Every life. It's all there in the currents. In the temperature layers. They're reading the history."
Electric Mike laughs. Nervous. "Come on."
"No, she's right," says Cosmos. "Water has memory. Scientific fact. And the ocean—fuck, the ocean's been here longer than anything. It knows things."
Back at the bus. Different energy now. Reverent. Shaken. Everyone talking at once but quiet. Comparing details. Making sure we all saw the same thing.
"They stopped time," someone says. "When they hovered. Time stopped."
"No. Time stretched."
"The light went through the water. All the way through."
"Did you see the patterns? Like Sanskrit. Like symbols."
"My filling still hurts."
"The colors. Fuck, those colors."
Cosmic Eddie starts the engine. Looks at me in the mirror. "You okay, brother?"
Am I? The universe just cracked open. Showed its machinery. The impossible made casual. Two objects treating physics like a suggestion, reading the ocean like a book, having a conversation in light and frequency with the largest body of water on Earth.
"I need to stay."
Words out before I think them.
"What?"
"I need to stay here tonight. Camp. Process this."
They look at me. Understanding. Sometimes you need to sit with the impossible alone. Let it settle into your bones.
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"Got everything you need?"
Pat my pack. Tent. Sleeping bag. Water. Guitar. Everything except explanations.
Handshakes. Hugs. Exchange of scraps of paper with phone numbers. Promises to meet at the Greek Theatre for the Dead in September. Talk about what we saw. Compare notes. Try to understand.
The bus pulls away. Diesel and patchouli and disbelief trailing behind it.
Alone now. The sun starting its descent. The ocean below still looking normal. Like it didn't just have a conversation with something from somewhere else.
Find a spot above the highway. Flat enough for my sleeping bag. Hidden enough from the road. Perfect view of where it happened. Set up camp. Mechanical movements. Hands still shaking slightly.
Sit on my sleeping bag. Guitar across my lap. Watch the ocean. Wait.
No objects. No lights. Just ocean being ocean.
But I know what I saw. We all saw. The universe has doors. Things come through. They read our ocean like scripture. They move like thoughts. They exist outside our physics.
Start playing. Soft. Something in D minor. The wood of the guitar warm from the day. Jerry was right—it remembers everything. And now it remembers this. Two impossible objects dancing with light above the Pacific. Scanning the memories held in water. Having a conversation we couldn't understand in a language older than words.
Night comes full. Stars emerge. More stars than cities let you see. The Milky Way like a scar across the sky. How many watching? How many reading?
The ocean breathes below. Holding its secrets. Storing information in every molecule. Every wave a word. Every current a chapter. The whole Pacific a library they come to read.
Did they find what they were looking for? What story were they reading in the foam? What message in the kelp forests and riptides?
Sleep comes eventually. Dreams of light penetrating water. Of patterns that explain everything if only I could read them. Of objects that move like editing. Of a universe with doors that sometimes open.
Wake once in the night. Check the ocean. Dark except for phosphorescence. Natural phosphorescence. Nothing scanning. Nothing reading. Just the Pacific keeping its own counsel.
But they'll be back. Have to be. Too much information here to read in one visit. Too many stories written in water. Too much history dissolved in salt.
We saw them. All of us. Stone sober except for weed, and weed doesn't make you see the same impossible thing at the same time. Doesn't make physics break in identical ways for everyone watching.
They were here. Reading our ocean. And we were here to witness it.
The guitar feels heavier now. Carrying more than music. Carrying proof that the universe is stranger than we're taught. That things come here. Study us. Study our water. Study the memories held in the deep.
Tomorrow I'll hitchhike south. Find another ride. Tell the story maybe, or maybe not. Who'd believe it? Dozen hippies pissing off a cliff see two UFOs reading the ocean like a book.
The lights. The patterns. The impossible movements. The way they made the ocean transparent. The way they existed outside our understanding of how things must move.
Real. As real as this tent. As real as this guitar. As real as the ocean below still holding whatever information they came to read.
The universe has doors.
Sometimes they open.
And sometimes you're standing there with your dick out when they do.
→ Next Chapter: Chapter 12: Love Through Stone - "Desert visions and prophetic dreams in Big Bend - the woman who moves like water"
← Previous Chapter: Chapter 10: Let the Guitar Decide - "Jerry Garcia blesses my 1935 Harmony Cremona guitar at Grateful Dead headquarters in San Rafael"
📖 Full Table of Contents: Surfing the Interstates: Complete Chapter Guide
👁️ The UFO Encounter: This Big Sur sighting becomes a touchstone throughout the memoir trilogy - proof that the universe has doors that sometimes open.