Good evening. Name's Tony, calling from Long Island. I'm a science teachee, or I was, retired now, but thirty-plus years in the classroom teaching earth science and chemistry. I say that upfront because I need you to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not a credulous person. I have spent my entire professional life teaching kids how to observe, how to question, how to test. So when I tell you that something happened to me I cannot explain, I need you to know that I have been trying to explain it for fifty years and I still can't. This was the summer of 1975. I was living in Oyster Bay, out on Long Island. Saturday morning, mid-summer. I remember I'd been up way too late the night before going through student assessments, you know that kind of tired where you're moving but not really awake yet. I was dragging myself out to my car, keys in hand, just thinking about getting some coffee into me before the day started. I stepped out my front door into a beautiful morning. Clear. Warm. The kind of summer day you actually look forward to. I was halfway to my car when I looked up. And I stopped. There was something above my house.
Now I want to paint the scene clearly, because the context matters. The sky that morning was wide open. There were some high clouds way up, cumulocirrus, scattered, nothing unusual - drifting along at altitude the way they do on a summer morning. Nothing low. Nothing close to the ground. Except for this thing. It was hanging right above my roofline. Maybe forty feet up, give or take. Dark in color, darker than the sky behind it, with a kind of density to it that regular clouds don't have. At first pass I thought maybe it was smoke, some neighbor had a fire going, maybe. But it wasn't dispersing the way smoke does. It had edges. Defined edges, which clouds don't really have at that scale. And it was about the size of a basketball. I stood there and watched it. And here's the first thing that told me something was genuinely wrong. The high clouds above it were moving east. Light breeze from the west, which is normal for that area on a summer morning. This thing was moving west. Against the wind. Slowly drifting, kind of rocking back and forth over the peak of the roof, moving in the opposite direction from everything else in the sky. I set my thermos down on the hood of my car. I just stood there watching it. Because that's what you do when you're a scientist and something doesn't make sense. You observe.
It started to change shape on me. Slowly at first. The basketball-sized mass began to elongate, top and bottom pulling apart, and then to widen slightly. It went from round to oval, then from oval to something harder to describe, multi-curved, asymmetric, like something between a column and an abstract sculpture. The texture of it stayed dense, dark, defined. Not diffusing. Not spreading out the way steam or smoke would. By the time it stopped changing it was maybe six feet tall and about a foot and a half wide. Vertical. Just hanging there above my roofline. something shift shape like that would make me freeze - Carl' And it was still moving against the wind. The whole time it changed shape, it kept that slow rocking drift, westward, against everything around it. And then it inhaled. I don't know how else to describe it. The upper portion of the thing compressed, and the lower portion expanded, and there was this unmistakable sense of intake - like watching a chest rise when someone takes a deep breath. I know exactly how that sounds coming out of my mouth. I know. But that's what I saw. It drew itself inward. And then it held there for just a second or two. Still. Like it was deciding something.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]