The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

The second time I observed an aerial object that I could not identify was in the evening of August 3, 2009, on the Mall about four blocks from the Capitol building in Washington, DC. I was camped out with friends, part of the crowd attending the weekly “Screen on the Green,” and this evening the movie On the Waterfront was playing. Probably around 9:15, just about 20 minutes after the movie started, I saw a single bright light move from due North to due South, almost straight overhead and thus seemingly directly over the Capitol (although without knowing its altitude there is no way of verifying that). I watched it for about 10 seconds, and then it faded out.

Had it been a clear star-filled night away from the city, in the mountains, and had the light been far dimmer, I would have identified it as a satellite with a polar orbit (i.e., carrying it straight North to South). I’ve never seen a straight North-South satellite before, but I’m sure they exist. But in this case there was far too much light pollution for it to be a satellite. Only one bright planet and the moon were visible at that hour, and this object was as bright as that planet. As I said, the sighting lasted maybe ten seconds in all. I did not see it first appear, so I don’t know if it came into view over the skyline or faded into view somewhere overhead.

I didn’t say anything to anybody, and I suspect I was probably the only person on the Mall looking up at the gray sky and not at the movie at that moment. I had viewed my first “UFO” only a month before, in similar circumstances (camped out on a park in a city in the evening) so I was particularly attuned to the sky, and I even admit I had a very clear sense of expectation, that I might see something anomalous if I paid attention. So I was not really watching the movie. And as I said, that expectation paid off literally within 15 to 20 minutes of the start of the film.

I saw nothing else strange the rest of the night, although I was constantly watching. At one point I saw a helicopter low over the skyline, which was not out of the ordinary, but it did provide a base of comparison. It also reminded me that the airspace over Washington, DC is highly restricted. Planes aren’t allowed to fly over it. But what I saw did not resemble a plane.

I won’t deny that this light in the sky probably had a very prosaic explanation—I’m not assuming it was an alien probe or anything so exotic. But at the time, an idea arose that will seem paranoid: As I was watching this light, I wondered if it could also see me, and see that I alone, among all the people on the Mall right then, perhaps even among all people out at night in the city that evening (because people actually don’t look up very much), was watching it fly over. If the light were somehow an observation device observing the Capitol and the people gathered near it, and if it were the product of super-advanced technology (a lot of ifs, obviously), then might it not possess optical capabilities of vastly greater scope and resolution than what we would envision? Even our own satellites can now discern objects on the ground at a size of under a meter. What if an advanced alien probe had effectively an optical “skin,” viewing at high resolution in all directions, and with the image-processing, analytical, and recognition power to match its information-gathering sensitivity?

What if, to that probe flying high over the capitol, the faces and the eyes and even the pores on the skin of the hundreds of people camped out on the lawn, dimly illuminated by the light of the screen and the gray evening sky, were clearly viewed and registered and recorded? What if it could recognize those individuals? What if it could independently note and record what each of those individuals were doing?

So, what if that UFO saw me seeing it, saw me, alone among the throng, track it across the sky, registered my silently satisfied yet surprised expression, and immediately knew who I was from the fine-grained data it and its fellow probes had gathered on the city and the country and the species? What if it added such knowledge (“observed by Eric Wargo”) to its memory, and made a “mental note” that I was among the witnesses to its presence, and marked me for possible future added surveillance?

What if it even dimmed its lights (faded out) because it detected that it was being seen?

The baboon sees the biologist crouching behind the tree on yonder hill. The human has never hurt her, indeed has never come near, but out of instinctive cautiousness she picks up her baby and moves under the cover of trees, where she sits and continues pulling up roots from the ground. Never does it enter her baboon mind that that human, to her just a distant colorful shape, is watching her through binoculars, can see up close her every facial expression and tic of behavior, knows her identity and her whole history, when she was born, her rank in the troupe, etc., and even at that moment is taking notes on a laptop computer, adding her current activities to a database.

It’s not absurd to think that a remote witness to advanced surveillance technology would reciprocally be witnessed, would be seen seeing it, and that that piece of technology would be able to see and know more about the witness than the witness could possibly fathom. There are probably no limits to the watching and knowing capabilities of a piece of technology thousands or millions of years in advance of our own and having “deep anthropology” as its raison d’etre.

There are also no limits to the paranoia of the human mind, once it goes down the kind of slippery slope that UFOs and other paranormal phenomena encourage.

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