A few decades ago, before internet, I am in a basement kiosk doing pen and ink illustrations alone. I hear footsteps and see out of the corner of my eye a shadow along the wall. Normal stuff. Accept nobody was there. I quit that place. I didn't believe in spirts or the afterlife... until then . Anybody else with a similar story?
Many years ago, as a young Army Ranger, I was assigned to an OPFOR "werewolf" team at Fort Irwin, CA NTC or National Training Center. Our job was to emulate or pretend to be Soviet era special operations forces and to engage other US Army units who rotated in every few months in massive force on force laser tag or MILES gear simulated battles.
During one such training exercise in the spring, somewhere around 1993, my werewolf team and I were bivouacked for the night between two rocky sandstone mountains in middle of nowhere Mojave Desert. Another soldier and I who were stuck on middle of the night guard duty decided to climb one of those mountains both to get a look from high ground of the surrounding area and because at the time climbing rocks fascinated me.
It was a breathtakingly clear night with a bright mid-phase moon beaming down a snowfield like albedo on sand and rock both. Millions of visible stars ran horizon to horizon, a glittering tapestry of cold, distant gods. The mountain we chose to climb was really a series of relatively flat rocky versants stepping up to its peak like a giant's staircase. Me being me at the time, I was aiming for the top, while the battle buddy who was with me didn't want to go that far.
We had ascended to the third or fourth plateau when one of us caught sight of something unusual on the second mountain across from us, perhaps a kilometer or so distant. Because of our role in the war games, we had been issued some pretty high tech equipment for the time, including night vision rifle scopes with decent magnification, which could also be used as standard daytime optics. When we looked through the scope with night vision turned off, we saw a campfire burning high atop the slopes of the second mountain—more bonfire, really. Which we found very odd—or seriously stupid. Obviously a fire of any kind would quickly give away one's unit position out there in the desert where one can see seemingly forever, no more so than at night.
Right, so here's the kicker. When we looked through the rifle scope
with night vision turned on we saw several people garbed head to toe in black robes dancing around the
same bonfire. Our first thought: the whole thing was some kind of sick psychological warfare tactic someone was using to mess with the heads of visiting Army units. We repeated our experiment a few times with quickening heartbeats; we checked out that bonfire with night vision and without. Same thing. About that time my watch alarm sounded time to change up guard duty shifts, so we headed back down the mountain.
To this day I still don't quite know what we saw that night. I've almost convinced myself I imagined it all. Almost.
