Good evening. This happened in August of 1996. My wife convinced me we should take the kids camping before school started up again. I wasn't thrilled about it, honestly. I'd been working overtime that whole month and just wanted to relax at home. But she was right. The kids needed it. We drove out to Deschutes National Forest in my Jeep Cherokee. Found a spot maybe two miles off the main road, nice and isolated. Pine Ridge area, if you know it. We had the whole clearing to ourselves that weekend. Just us, the trees, and about a million stars overhead. First night was perfect. We roasted marshmallows, told ghost stories. My son Tommy was eight at the time, my daughter Sarah was six. They were having the time of their lives. We all crashed around ten, maybe ten-thirty. Dead tired from setting everything up.
I woke up sometime around 2 AM. Not sure what woke me at first. Just had this feeling, you know? Like when you sense something's not right even before you're fully awake. That's when I heard it. This mechanical whirring sound. High-pitched, almost like a small motor or a hard drive spinning up. Except it was moving. Coming closer to our tent. My wife was still asleep next to me. The kids were in their sleeping bags on the other side of the tent. I didn't want to wake anyone and scare them over nothing. My phone had died earlier that day, completely dead battery, so I couldn't even check the time properly. But the sound kept getting closer. And it had this rhythm to it. Whir, pause, whir, pause. Like something was stopping and starting.
Then I saw it. Through the mesh window on the side of the tent, this small metallic thing zipped right up to us. Maybe a foot tall, moving on what looked like treads or wheels. I couldn't tell exactly in the dark. But it had this dome on top with what I can only describe as a lens or an eye. Red light glowing from it. It stopped right at the tent. Just sat there for maybe ten seconds, and I swear that lens was looking at us. Scanning back and forth across the tent interior. I was frozen. Didn't even breathe. My heart was hammering so loud I thought it would wake my wife. Then it backed away. Made this series of beeping sounds. Short beeps, long beeps. Like it was communicating with something. And I heard an answer. Same kind of beeping, but from different directions. Multiple different directions, actually. There were more of them out there.
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