That Shit Happened 001

October 1, 2016

You know the feeling

You undoubtedly know the feeling.

Your pulse quickens. Your mouth goes dry, and your palms and feet start to sweat.

You get this pit in your stomach that feels like you swallowed a black hole, and it’s mission is to make you sick all over the ground.

Your mind is trying to process what you are seeing – and for a moment you doubt your own sanity.

In front of your eyes is something so unbelievably different than anything you have ever witnessed before. You know this is real life – that you aren’t dreaming.


You aren’t.

You aren’t under the influence of psychotropic drugs either.

For whatever reason, your mind is having difficulty processing this occurrence as something that isn’t a movie versus what society norms dictate as not possible.

Yet, there it is.

A thought pops into your mind between the synapses firing trying to categorize or reason what you are seeing. Or maybe whatever you saw disappeared (or maybe you even ran away) – the thoughts of, “Did that shit really just happen!?” and  “No one is going to believe me.”

But, you will always know…

That Shit Happened.

July and I have a love-hate relationship

I have always been an open yet rational-minded individual. Or, at least, I always believed myself to be.

I have learned over my years of seeing and experiencing weird shit that I should never come to a conclusion about anything until I have collected all of the information. Even then, I generally keep my conclusions as temporary possible answers until new information becomes available. It’s called the unknown or the unexplained for a reason. You never really know what the real truth behind something is.

Which makes what I saw all the more strange, because I doubted the phenomena before, and I don’t have an answer to it. The story I am going to tell is 100% true. This shit actually happened to me.

Let me be a bit more specific by asking you lovers of the strange a few questions:

Have you ever seen an Orange Orb UFO? Have you ever seen one up close? Like, 50 feet close for longer than 60 seconds? While it dances intricately in a figure-8 pattern?

In July 2013 I did. It freaked me right out.

Picture a quaint and homey cabin along the banks of the Ottawa river a warm new moon weekend during July in 2013. Mosquitos the size of your fist, and more wasps than you can shake a stick at (which you would never want to do, because they will fuck your shit up if you try. Wasps are assholes like that). The closest town is a half hour drive away, and the only people around are your cottage neighbours along the shoreline. The summer months have been getting quite dry, and burn bans are becoming more frequent due to the lack of rain.


I spent many a weekend at this cottage with my now wife, and her late uncle during the 2013 summer. The first weekend of July was one of the first times there, and all we did was rest in the sun during the day, and eat to our hearts content at night. The Friday evening, after my wife and I arrived, I shared a glass or two of Jammeson’s with my wife’s uncle, and sat with him talking about whatever subjects we found interesting to enjoy a sunset not much different than the one in the photo above.

We then retreated indoors to escape the evening mosquito contingents that were manifesting themselves among us, and played a few games of cards and dominos. After I having lost frequently to a gentleman 40 years my senior in wisdom and gamesmanship, my wife decided the evening was done for her and retired to her room. After another cheers and glass of whisky, her uncle did the same. By this time, it was around midnight, and I could not remember seeing a star in the sky.


Pitch Black without Vin Diesel

After everyone had gone to bed, I stepped out onto the front porch to enjoy one last cigarette before retiring myself. The air was still warm but had a crispness to it that brought to mind biting into fresh hard toffee just cooled in the fridge. I couldn’t see the 40-50 feed to the road the night was so dark. Although, in the pitch, fireflies were out everywhere (but not a joss Whedon in sight). Their lights flying left and right. small yellow flashes gently blinking in and out as if phasing into our plane just to slip from this dimension back into the void.

I clearly remember the night air while looking around, admiring the atmosphere of the night, and sound the leaves made as the gentle breeze as it blew through the trees at the edge of the property. As I shifted my weight back and forth from foot to foot in an absent minded way, pulling a drag on my smoke, I turned my attention to my 2-o’clock where I remembered the 3 big birch trees stood in the light of day. As best I could in the black of night, I traced my eye up their faint outlines. While doing this, the thought “aren’t the coyotes unusually quiet tonight…”

When my gaze reached the top, that’s when my night went to shit.

I clearly remember uttering, “What the fuck is that!?” before freezing in my tracks. Spellbound.

Not 50 feet to my right, some 10-20 feet above the trees, danced this thing.


I blinked. Looked down towards the road, and compared what I was seeing to the fireflies that were still dancing dimly in the night air. In my mind I was trying to reason away what I just saw. “There is no way in hell I am seeing what I am seeing. It has to be a firefly.”

So I looked back up to where it was.

The goddamned thing was still there! Still dancing!

Gently swaying without rhyme or reason. Back and forth. Tracing a figure-8. Then stopping. Then heading in one direction. Then stopping. Then another random pattern. Then back to dancing in a figure-8. On it’s own. Silently. Irrespective of the breeze that would pick up and die down at will. All as if to say, “Yeah Chris, I’m here. Look at me. Not a damned thing you can do about it. These are my treetops bitch!”

I watched it do this dance for almost 30 minutes. Frozen in terror the entire time.

After the orb wouldn’t go away, and I got a bit tired of feeling vulnerable out by myself on the porch. The porch light was on, and out there was blackness. If anything was out there, it could see me, and I couldn’t see it. With the hair standing up on the back of my neck even further, I had this feeling there was something out in the black. Looking at me.

Fully awake, I have never been more terrified in my life as I was at that moment.

You need to understand something. I grew up having seen and experienced crazy things. Things I can’t be sure are real or even say I can explain. I have seen more UFO’s (triangles, dancing lights in the sky, craft over power lines in the light of a clear summer day, etc.) than I can put down in a blog post or remember beyond a few quick examples.

I’ve experienced strange dreams that I can’t clearly remember that, until the last few years, have left me afraid to fall asleep.

Until recently, I’ve always been petrified of images of any realistic looking Gray alien. Or, afraid of  being taken by something in the night if I do fall asleep.

I cannot give a 100% rational explanation, or define with certainty the source of these fears beyond fears being fed by emotions. They could just come from the same place a phobia of spiders or snakes come from. I am actually too afraid to find out in case my suspicions are confirmed. Because, if I do, those fears could become as real as what I experienced the night described. The feeling of powerlessness is something I do not take very well. Confirming a fear and realizing I am is something that would take a while to digest.

But, I digress…



Seeing numerous UFOs in your life, having dreams you can’t place that leave you fearful of the dark or falling asleep, and knowing what the signs of being an abductee are can lead you to think you may have been at one point in your life. Mix that with seeing an unexplained dancing object in a very rural area, watching it for 30 minutes, while having the uncanny feeling you are being watched can make you do some pretty interesting (read: stupid idiotic) things.

I managed to will myself to move against the unnatural fear I was feeling, and before dashing back into the cottage, I snapped the photo above on my smartphone. Not realizing until much later – I became a statistic of bad UFO photos… Great.

My terror fueled my flight, and like a flash I ran inside. I then went around to every window and door to make sure they were locked tight, and drew all of their blinds closed. Thinking it was a smart thing to do, I barricaded myself into the only room I could think of that would be safe.

The washroom.

Did I mention I barricaded myself in the washroom with a double-barrel shotgun? One that was over 100 years old? Meant specifically as an ornament? And without ammunition?

In hindsight, if I had the ammo for it, it would have made the barrels explode if fired. Even as a club it would have been a poor weapon. Too long to swing effectively in the tight quarters. And, if it connected with anything, the ancient rifle undoubtedly would have cracked in half. This is a perfect example of a reaction. Not action. Action usually has planning behind it. This was some b-grade teenage horror movie shit I was pulling. If the upstairs loft to the cottage had been accessible, I probably would have been dumb enough to run upstairs like a high-school screaming teenager the villain is about to slice and dice.

I sat there, with the lights on, on the floor, and waited. One hour. Two hours. Then three. Checking my phone periodically to make sure I hadn’t experienced any missing time.

Finally, at 5:30 in the morning, I figured “they” weren’t coming, and poked my head outside the door.

Nothing. The main room was empty.

Slowly I made my way across the cottage from the washroom to the front door, where I could start to see the dawn breaking through the blinds.

Making my way outside onto the porch, where I stood in awed terror hours before, I looked up to where the orb had been and it was gone. So too was the feeling of being watched, and my lingering terror suddenly abated.

It was morning. I was still here. Nothing had come for me, but I know what I saw and the fear I felt.

I had my first smoke of the morning then, tired as all hell, but feeling relieved. An hour later, my now-wife woke up and joined me on the porch, where I told her what happened that night after she went to bed. After she stopped laughing at me, she told me I must have been drunk or seeing things, and began her turn at making breakfast. Even the photo did little to “prove” anything. I could have downloaded it, or made the whole thing up to have a laugh at her expense.

When her uncle woke up, he shuffled from his room to the washroom. “Why is the shotgun in the washroom?” he asked. So I told the whole story to him.

As my now-wife’s late loving and inquisitive uncle and I sat on the side porch, watching the fish jump out of the water at flies, I finished the second recounting that night’s of tale of weird.

With his pipe bowl of tobacco as done as my story, he glanced at me and asked – as if to be certain I said what I saw I actually said,

“Orange orb?”

“Yep…” I answered.

“Yeah… That shit’ll happen.”

True story.

That shit happened.

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