This story takes place in 1961 or 1962 when I was 14 or 15 years old. It would have been during the cooler months of the year, so it was probably either on a Christmas or Easter break. My mother, father and I had decided to spend a week at our favorite camping place the Turtle Mountains south of Needles. We enjoyed looking for gold, Indian artifacts, and just nosing around in the desert. What we found on this trip was totally unexpected and has remained in my memory as one of those “great unknowns.”
As was normally the case, we got up at about 2:00 am to get a nice early start on a long drive to the desert from our home in Sonoma. This early start would get us into our camping spot in plenty of time to set up camp before dark. On these trips I usually slept in the car until we were about in Bakersfield, waking up in time for breakfast before continuing over the Tehachapi Pass to the Mohave Desert.
The trip through the desert was uneventful, but beautiful as always. I especially liked the part of the desert from Mojave to Needles, passing through old railroad stops in alphabetical order – Amboy, Bagdad, Cadiz, Daggett, Essex, etc. At about 3:00 pm we pulled off the highway onto the faint track across the desert toward Mopa Peaks and “our” campsite next to a small oasis at the foot of North Mopa Peak.
When we got to the beginning of the road into the wash that winds its way up the canyon to the oasis we were stopped by a cable strung across the road. There was a white painted sign hanging in the middle of the cable. The sign said, “Keep out, Government Project in Progress.” The first thing that struck me was that while the lettering was stenciled in black, the paint had run down the sign so that it was really amateurish, not at all like a government sign. If the government does anything right, it is that they make good looking signs. Because of that, we decided that whatever was going on was not related to a government project. In some ways that made it even more perplexing – after all, this is government owned land, nobody has the right to post keep out signs.
My dad decided that the best thing to do was to wait for a bit before going past the blocked off road. We set up camp for the night at a nearby rock wall. When we first started going to the Turtle Mountains the “rock wall” was just a campfire with a couple of piles of rocks to provide a wind break. Over the years we added a few rocks on each trip, and the wall started to get much bigger. Apparently others did the same, and it eventually began to look like the remains of an old cabin. In fact, the BLM show it as the remains of a cabin, but it is actually just a wind break.
We set up camp and in a short time heard a vehicle slowly making its way down the sandy wash toward the sign and our camp. My father and I walked over to the sign to intercept them and find out what was going on, and to find out if we could gain access to the places we had come to explore. Once at the gate, we only had to wait a few minutes until a jeep station wagon with three men in it drove to our location. The driver got out to open the cable gate and stopped to talk to us. The two others stayed in their vehicle. I don’t recall exactly what they were wearing, but they were all dressed appropriately for the desert.
After exchanging hellos with the driver, we told him that we had driven in a couple of hours before and were camping over by the rock wall. The driver said he knew that because they had seen us when they flew over earlier in the day. This was a surprise since we had seen no aircraft, and there was really no place that seemed likely to act as a landing place for an aircraft. We asked what they were doing flying around in that area, and he said they had been working on their spacecraft and were test flying it following some repairs. I asked why they were there in the first place. They said that they were scientists and had been performing a survey of the planet when they developed trouble with their vehicle and were forced to land it to fix the problem. I asked why they had picked this location to work on their spacecraft, and the answer was that they had flown over much of the area and this spot appeared to be the “least contaminated with humans” that they could find.
Once it was clear that this conversation was headed in rather unusual directions, I started to pay a bit more attention to these guys. One of the odd features of the older gentleman sitting in the back seat of the jeep was that he had quite large (actually, very large) ears. This was before the time of Star Trek and Dr. Spock, but there may have been movies with spacemen having large ears. I thought it was kind of comical that these guys who claimed to be spacemen should have such big ears. I then noticed a much more intriguing thing, which was that while I was talking – they weren’t. I could “hear” and understand what they were saying, but it was as thoughts, not as sounds! I was “hearing” them, but their mouths weren’t moving and it felt more like a thought than a sound. This was most unsettling to say the least.
The conversation continued for some time. One of our concerns was to be able to get to the spring to get water because we didn’t bring enough to last the week that we hoped to be there. They showed great revulsion at this idea, saying that there were lots of little wiggly things in the water and that the water was therefore not fit to drink. We tried to explain that since there were things living in the water, that meant that it WAS fit to drink, otherwise the water would not have any life in it. They weren’t convinced at the logic of this. We asked if we could go to the spring to get water, but they said that we were not allowed to enter the valley, and they agreed to bring us water when they came back from town.
The conversation went back and forth in this odd way for awhile, until they finally said good bye and drove away. As they were driving away, my father (who is normally a most level headed guy), turned to me and excitedly asked if I noticed that they weren’t talking, but rather were just exchanging thoughts with us. Now THAT really freaked me out. I had kind of decided that I was just making the thought communication thing up because the topic of the conversation was so odd. However, to have my father bring up the topic meant that if nothing else, it wasn’t just my imagination running wild. If so, his was running wild in the same way. We went back to camp and by the time we got there we were talking a million words a minute telling my mother what had just happened.
We spent the night there by the rock wall, but they never came back so we didn’t get our extra water. The next morning my curiosity got the better of me and I hiked up to the top of a nearby hill in the hopes of getting a view of their space vehicle. However, I couldn’t see anything of interest from that vantage point because of the twists and turns in the valley and I didn’t have the nerve to approach any closer.
We decided to go to the nearby town of Vidal Junction to get breakfast and fill our jeep cans with water. The town was very small, consisting of a California Agriculture inspection station, a small motel, a restaurant, an old fashioned service station and a few houses. I guess the total population was less than 30 people. We went to the restaurant for breakfast. We ordered our meals and when they were served, my father told the waitress that we were camping near Mopa Peaks and asked her if she have any idea about what was going on out there by Mopa Peaks about 30 miles from town. She didn’t answer, but rather finished serving us and then left. In fact, everyone left the restaurant. The other customers got up and left, the waitress left and so did the cook and helper. We were soon by ourselves. When we finished there was nobody to take our money, so my dad just left what seemed about right on the table. We went outside to get water and top up on gasoline, but there was nobody in town to help us. The service station was open, but empty. We went across the street to the inspection station and it was empty. We thought that maybe someone might be at the motel, but when we checked, it was also empty. It appeared that everyone had abandoned the town after my father had asked that question. We finally got some water from a tap at the service station and went back to our camping spot.
We didn’t hear anything more from these self-proclaimed spacemen, but also didn’t go to our favorite spots because the cable and sign were still across the road. The whole thing was weird enough that we didn’t want to push our luck.
We returned the following year to see if they had left any signs of their activities, but could find nothing. That was the end of the story for about forty years until years later when my father and I got to talking about that day. He said that the most unusual part of the whole thing for him was that they were there in a big, fancy, black car that couldn’t possibly be driven in the part of the desert that we were in. He just couldn’t figure out how they got there. Not only that, but he couldn’t figure out why they were wearing suits and ties in the desert!
This was really weird because I remember seeing folks in a jeep and clothes that made good sense in the area. My father recalls experiencing something entirely different. Over the years I have often wondered that if they were really spacemen, how did they get their clothes and the Jeep? Maybe they didn’t have to get anything, maybe they merely allowed us to visualize then in the cloths and a vehicle that we knew about. Maybe they didn’t have to be able to speak English, or have these vehicles; maybe they only had to get us to think.
I guess I will never know what really happened that day, but I will not soon forget it either. The whole thing stands out as a very strange “close encounter” of a weird kind.