Scintilla13 Day 11

tyunglebower ♦ March 23, 2013 ♦ Leave a comment

Write about an experience you had that was so strange or incredible, it sounds like it could have been made up.

When I was in my senior year of high school, my mother was driving us home one evening from somewhere. We traveled down US 15 in Maryland (something we don’t often do) and when we came to the point about halfway between town and where we lived, we saw that they skill was filled with scores of multi-colored spheres.

I remember having read something about a hot air balloon festival a few weeks before, and though I thought it had already occurred, I speculated that that is what we were seeing. (Though far more than I thought any festival could accommodate.

I also thought it strange that they were all perfect spheres, as opposed to a tear-dropped shape of your standard balloon. I wasn’t sure a balloon shaped like this could fly, but since I saw so many of them doing that very thing, I assumed I was wrong. (Though it also seemed weird that they were all the same shape.)

Solid colors for some. Stripes of different colors for others. Still others seemed to have shapes.

We dipped into a small hill in the highway, the view of the horizon temporarily covered by the road. As we drove over the crest of the hill…nothing.

They were gone. Not further away, and not fewer of them, but 100% of them were gone. Not a trace. In 20 seconds, the sky was clear again.

Mom and I looked at each other, and after a brief discussion to determine if it might have been the light on the windows that caused it, (we quickly determined it was not), we allowed ourselves to be dumbstruck.

“I’m thinking it wasn’t hot air balloons,” I said. I stand by that, as no balloon could vanish that fast.

We checked the paper for weeks to hear mention of the incident. But as we were the only ones on the street the whole time, I imagine we were the only people to see it. Impossible as that seems to be.

In the years since, I’ve not even come across a story that sounds similar. It was just many colorful spheres in the sky, and they vanished as soon as they were out of sight.

It remains one of the oddest things I have ever experienced.