This happened in November of 2003. I was working as a contractor for the power company out in Rhineland-Palatinate. Been in Germany for about three years at that point, doing maintenance on the transmission lines. Good work, decent pay. The area I was assigned to that month ran along the perimeter of what used to be a military installation. Base Delta, they called it. American facility from the Cold War era, decommissioned in the late 90s. Fenced off, restricted access, the whole deal. You could see some of the old buildings from the road, but the whole place was basically cut off. Nobody in, nobody out. I'd driven past it maybe fifty times and never thought much about it. Just another abandoned base. But that particular day, I had to work on a tower maybe half a kilometer from the fence line. Clear view across the field to the main compound.
It was a Tuesday, I remember because my partner had called in sick the day before and hadn't come back yet. Just me that day. Which was fine. Sometimes you work better alone, no distractions. Weather was typical for late November. Overcast, cold, that flat gray light you get in winter. Temperature was maybe four or five degrees Celsius. Wind coming from the east, not terrible but enough to notice when you're up on a tower. I got to the site around two in the afternoon. Parked the truck, got my gear together, started climbing. The tower I needed to work on was about twenty meters up. Routine voltage check, inspect the insulators, maybe an hour of work if everything looked good. From up there you could see the whole base spread out. Most of the buildings were concrete block construction. A few hangars, what looked like barracks, some kind of administration building. All of it empty. All of it quiet.
I'd been working for maybe twenty minutes when I heard it. Not really a sound, more like a feeling. You know that pressure change you get before a storm? Like that, but sharper. Made my ears pop. I looked toward the base and that's when I saw it rise up from behind one of the hangars. This white object, perfectly smooth, shaped like a Tic Tac mint. No wings, no visible engines, nothing. Just this oblong white shape, maybe twelve meters long, rising straight up into the air. It stopped about fifty meters above the hangar. Just hung there. Completely motionless. No sound at all. The wind was blowing, I could feel it on the tower, but this thing didn't move. Didn't tilt, didn't drift. Like it was locked in place. I just stared at it. Didn't know what I was looking at. Some kind of drone, maybe? But I'd never seen a drone that big, that smooth. And it was too far from the fence line to be a civilian thing. This was coming from inside the restricted zone.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]