Hi, thanks for having me on. I don't know how else to put it, so I'm just going to tell you what happened. This was February of 1993. I was working at a geothermal plant outside Reykjavik. Hellisheidi, if you know the area. Big facility, lots of steam vents, pipes running everywhere. I'd taken the job because my marriage had just ended and I needed something to keep my hands busy. Twelve hour shifts watching gauges and checking pressure valves. Mindless work, but that's what I wanted. The plant ran twenty-four hours, but the night crew was always skeleton staff. Most nights you'd have maybe three or four people spread across the whole facility. But that night, I don't know how else to put it, things just worked out so I was there alone. Two guys called in sick, one had a family emergency. So it was just me from midnight until six in the morning. I didn't mind. I liked the quiet. Just me and the steam and the hum of the turbines.
Iceland in February, you have to understand, it's dark. I mean really dark. The sun comes up around ten, goes down around five, and the rest is just this blue-black nothing. The plant had lights, sure, big sodium lamps all over the place, but step twenty meters out and it was like the world ended. Just steam rising up into darkness. I was doing my rounds about two in the morning. Checking the eastern vents, the ones furthest from the main building. It was cold, maybe minus eight, and the steam was thick that night. You could barely see the vent stacks, just these white columns rising up and disappearing. I had my flashlight but it didn't do much good in the steam. Just made everything glow. That's when I saw the light. Not my flashlight. Something else. Up above, through the steam. At first I thought it was a helicopter from the coast guard. We'd get those sometimes, checking on the plant. But this light wasn't moving like a helicopter. It was just sitting there. Hovering.
I turned off my flashlight and just watched. The light started coming down. Slow, deliberate. No sound. That's what I remember most. Helicopters, you hear them from kilometers away. This thing made no noise at all. Just this gentle descent through the steam. When it got low enough, I could see it wasn't just a light. There was a shape behind it. Disc-shaped, maybe fifteen meters across. The surface looked like brushed metal, but old somehow. Tarnished. Like copper that had been left in the rain. There were seams running across it, rivets maybe, like something built a hundred years ago. It looked like it belonged in a museum, not floating in the air. It came down right on top of the eastern vent cluster. Didn't land exactly, more like it settled into the steam, hovering maybe a meter off the ground. The steam kept rising around it, curling up the sides. And then a panel on the underside opened, and two figures stepped out.
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