They’re Definitely NOT Aliens

No matter how you say it, admitting that you’ve seen something — a series of directed and/or moving lights, shining down from the sky, for example — will brand you as the Alien Guy. Even when you start the story with I swear I know they weren’t aliens, you’ll still become Alien Guy.

Granted, it’s good to have a nickname, especially in the middle of nowhere, half-way up Mt. Kilimanjaro, trekking alongside a small group of mostly strangers. It makes you memorable. And, well, being the Alien Guy is better than being Stuck-in-the-Bathroom Guy.

Whether you, dear reader, believe in intelligent life forms hovering, planning, terraforming or vacationing somewhere above us, it remains difficult to justify why one (or many!) of them had nothing better to do — on Day 3 of an eight-day hike at 4:30 in the morning — than spy on an insomniac headed up the highest peak in Africa.

You can come down from the summit, but there’s no coming down from a good nickname.

***

The eight-day hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro is a beast of a thing. Each day, the trail passes through a completely different biome. What starts as a thick jungle (full of copulating monkeys, also always at 4:30), ascends into grasslands, heads through a “heather zone,” some rocky outcroppings and, finally, wends up the wind-swept and desultory desolation of the final peak.

Each day is a marvel. And each marvel kicks your ass.

I could spend paragraphs describing scenery, enumerating animals & plants, identifying topographic anomalies. But, well, there aren’t really any marvels or anomalies in the strict sense of the terms. Everything’s explainable. Evolution churns; thousands of years of human/animal movements give to and take from the land; unforgiving terrain predicts species’ survival.

My own experiences of what I saw—up there in the sky — are explainable, too: the sores on my feet, the buckets of tears (and other effluences), the temperature differentials, the food and altitude sickness, the dirt and grime that builds in every pocket of gear and every fold of skin.

Indescribably tired, affected by hunger and elevation, fiercely unsure of my surroundings, it’d be easy to rationalize away what I saw. Incidentally…

It was about 3:30 on that third morning that I awoke — like most nights — with an incredible urge to pee. We drank so much water each day, hydration was both savior and tyrant. The routine was already familiar: wake up, bargain with self (“you don’t really have to go. You can probably hold it”), eventually accept reality, add three layers of clothing, affix light source to head, open tent, trek as far away as possible, void.

We had camped near an intricate system of outhouses; so I headed there. At 4:15, heading back to the tent, I realized I was wide awake. And though there was no light on the horizon, the possibility of sun fueled my optimism. (The faintest hint of sunlight was a fiction I deployed to get through the toughest moments on the Mountain.)

After more bargaining (“At least try to sleep, the next section is a doozy”), I decided to ditch the tent — scrambling over some boulders instead. Finding a flat-ish surface, I sat in a lotus position.

I was feeling high; and I meditated on a mantra of disbelief: Ican’tbelieveI’mhere, I.can’t.believe.I’m.here.

At 4:45, I caught glimpses of light. My eyes opened widely to catch a searchlight darting ahead, searching the spaces in front of me (about 100 yards to the northwest). The light slowly zigzagged, moving east.

My first thought was this: prison break.

The light moved in the same way a helicopter might as it searches for someone below. My neck contorted up and away, looking for the source. Without any sun, in a clouded sky, I never detected one. I turned back to the light and watched it move: back and forth. Back and forth.

Off in the distance, I saw it begin trailing back. Towards me.

At 4:47, my brain flipped into fear and panic. (It’s incredible how motivating those emotions can be.) Far from fight or freeze, I flew. I uncrossed my legs and moved. I am not a graceful person by nature, so my escape was more like a haphazard flailing of limbs, swiping and sweeping back towards the grouped tents.

I sat between two of them, hiding.

At 4:49, the lights ceased and, yet, I remained affixed to place. I was conscious of my fellow climbers inside these tents, sleeping. Despite knowing that I definitely did not see an alien, I felt afraid and alone. Somehow, I was still conscious enough to be courteous. I did not want to wake these people. I did not want them to walk through Day 3 with the same amount of sleep as me.

So I sat.

And I stayed…waiting for something I couldn’t articulate. To be beamed up? (I’ll admit: the word “probe” had passed through my mind.)

Now, after months of reflection, I think I was waiting for the sun. As if the sun had the power to remove question and fear. By sitting between those tents, the gentle breathing of my compatriots steadied my own heartbeat as I beckoned the morning’s arrival.

At 5am, I unzipped my tent and climbed back in. I put in my earbuds and listened to music — somehow eking out a few more minutes of sleep. I woke with the crew at 6 and made my way to the mess tent.

At breakfast, I attempted conversation: “Hypothetically…if I were to have seen something that I know was absolutely not aliens…what do you think it was?” There was certainly no prison up there. There were hardly any people at all. Still reeling from the aftereffects of a pandemic-shocked economy, Tanzania was seeing only a trickle of returning mountain seekers. There was no reason for a searchlight.

The answer (from them, from me), of course, was the only rational one. The sores on my feet, the buckets of tears, the temperature differentials, the food and altitude sickness, the dirt and grime that builds in every pocket of gear and every fold of skin. I had hallucinated it.

***

This is where my training as a rhetorician — my research into public memory — comes in handy. I understand the power of interpretation. It is always instigated by internal and external stimuli, regulated by powerful social and political forces.

I know that a key trait of human experience involves explanation. Rituals and traditions, religions and laws solidify only after groups or cultures (and the powerful people in them) create and circulate arguments for what things mean. Believers, then, build those arguments into cases, turning explanations into conclusions.

What we once couldn’t understand evolves into common sense. Whether through scientific evidence or a good hunch, these accounts ossify, collecting adherents. We criminalize the word “challenge” (e.g., apostasy, heresy, sedition) so that people who reject an account — the unpowerful, the minority — are borne into a counterculture.

Alternative perspectives live in either counterfacts or conspiracy theories. Sometimes those fringes are right — Copernicus and co. — and sometimes they are bonkers, convincing just enough people to storm the Capitol.

It’s easy to sit and judge my fellow Americans who had their heads filled with thoughts of cults, networked pedophilia and God complexes. *Bonkers*

It’s entirely another thing to sort through a personal counterfactual in which, as the only person to see “it,” I must contend with the sheer implausibility of the event.

To witness is to experience something powerful. Witnessing is perceived as a way to pass on the Word, to tell the stories of the ancients, to right the wrongs of the past through testimony. Witnessing is, perhaps, too powerful to rationalize away.

Witnessing is power. Testimony is a form of proof. Each can drive a person to madness when met with disbelief. In contrast, when believed, people can turn themselves into prophets; they capitalize their truth into Truth — daring the world to label them as either crazy or soothsayer.

With five months now standing between me and that Mountain, I’m still trying to decide: Did I witness something? If I did, what did I see? How should I interpret it?

What testimony can I offer to fit a cultural norm or fulfill some system of beliefs? I was Alien Guy for five days; and I’d rather not be anymore.

Memory is fickle. The interpretations we make in a moment often calcify — turning into history or apocrypha.

I am writing this account so many months later because I still feel the need to check in, rethink, redefine. And yet…

There were lights. I’m sure of it.