ELBERTA, UTAH October 1, 2024
The announcement of antigravity took everyone by surprise, but none more than Sam Davis, who was right on top of it. Literally. Sam was a retired civil engineer from Chicago who came to Utah to not be surrounded by buildings anymore, thank you very much. On a sunny fall afternoon, he was riding his ATV out in the hills to the west of Utah Lake. He liked being out in the low scrub of the desert, the sun shining bright, and the cool wind blowing over his face and arms. Riding the trails kept his mind focused. He came out here almost every day and knew the trails well, almost as well as he knew the underground vaults and pipe-racks back in Chicago. The nearest town was Elberta, not much more than a wide spot on the road and home to a few dozen farming families, and even that was miles away. Sam liked it here, riding alone, riding where he felt like going. Enjoying the freedom of a man on his bike.
At exactly 3:00 in the afternoon he was riding what might be called a “transitional trail,” leading from the dirt patches used for trailer parking near the highway to up into the taller hills to the west. He felt a bump. This bump was not in the trail as he rode over. Puzzled, he stopped and looked back. He saw a six foot hole in the ground immediately behind him, right in the trail, with a stream of black objects flowing straight up out of it.
“Bats,” he thought. It occurred to him that he’d never seen bats in the sunlight.
Around the edge of the hole were metal triangles, splayed out like petals of a flower. It was those petals, swinging outward, that hit his ATV. “Unnatural” was the impression he got. The hole didn’t seem to have sides, and the bats weren’t bats at all. They were spheres. And there were a lot of them. They continued to rise straight into the sky and seemed to form a line above him. As he fumbled with his phone to take a picture one of the spheres one left the stream and floated over to him. The sphere was black and about the size of a softball. It floated easily in the air, and sometimes rotated slightly, as if to see something better through the windows distributed on all sides. Then it spoke.
“It’s not safe to be here. That hole is about to open wider and you need to be at least a mile away. Probably further if you want to see what’s going to happen.”
Sam stammered, “Thanks,” but was too dumbfounded to move. He stared as the sphere retreated, slowed, then returned. A bright green laser shone from the side, illuminating a dot on a rather tall hill about two miles west.
“That should be a good place to watch. Go up there. The big show starts at 6. Go now.” It quickly rejoined the stream of spheres.
Sam went. He missed most of what happened next, which he couldn’t have seen from below anyway. The spheres, later estimated to be about 250,000 in number, had formed into a long rectangular panel about 2000 feet above the ground. The panel was large, about a mile long and a half mile high. It was one sphere thick. No one from the cities across the lake, where the panel was facing, noticed. The few in the west desert didn’t notice either. Sam remained the only witness, and as he rode at a speed higher than he was comfortable riding, he lamented having no photos or video to prove it.
At 3:30 Sam Davis heard a rumble. He was climbing the base of the tallest hill to the West and looked to the east to see dust rising up from all over. As he climbed the trail he saw “petals” opening up, far wider than before. Juniper trees were in his way so he didn’t have a good view, but those petals looked huge, maybe 2000 feet long each. Each had a tall wall around its rim to retain the soil and sand that overlay it, and as the petals neared the vertical the dirt was beginning to fall towards the rim. He gunned his engine and raced to the top. When Sam reached the top of the hill the petals were passed vertical and thousands of tons of dirt had fallen beyond the rim and the petals were settling down on it, apparently compressing it, for the petals went nearly flat. The nearest two extended towards Sam far enough to worry him; man-made things aren’t supposed to be that big and move that fast, he thought. It took another half hour for the dust to settle to where he could see the hole, but by then other things drew Sam’s attention.