Lights Above the Hills

We arrived in Kings Valley just after noon, having left the motel around 9:30 AM. The drive northeast was just under 80 miles, mostly clear two-lane roads. We took a brief break just outside Corvallis to stretch and fill the tank. Vernon picked up three bags of trail mix and passed them around like he was feeding a research lab.

Kings Valley isn’t large. It’s more of a junction than a town, with a few farmhouses, one community building, and a general store that also sells fishing gear, chewing tobacco, and microwaved burritos. We parked in the community center lot and met our contact: a man named Jim, 47, who works part-time at the local feed store and organizes the occasional town meeting. He was one of the original eight eyewitnesses who reported seeing what they described as “hovering lights that blinked and danced like fireflies on a string.”

Interviews were held in the back room of the community center. We split into two groups: Egiel, Caleb, and Josh took one half of the group, while I stayed with Robin, Jennifer, and Professor to handle the others. All eight individuals—five women and three men, aged between 30 and 70—gave generally consistent testimonies: the lights appeared on September 18th, beginning around 9:20 PM. They were described as round, amber-gold in color, silent, and hovering just above the west hills for close to fifty minutes. Some claimed the lights moved in synchronized patterns, including figure-eights and sudden angular zigzags.

None of the witnesses were intoxicated or under the influence, and six out of eight had never seen anything unusual in the sky before. Only one of them—the oldest, Margaret Duval, 73—mentioned the possibility of it being “non-human.” She described them as “watchful… not just passing over.”

Mathew and Vernon set up a basic EMF sweep of the hill area that evening, just in case. No anomalies. The Professor—suggested that the light pattern described could correspond to plasma-based phenomena but didn’t rule out manmade drones or unregistered aerial tests. “The silence is what bothers me,” he said, staring at the empty sky just before dusk. “Even helicopters hum.”

I had a conversation with one of the teenage witnesses who admitted they were frightened enough to sleep with the light on for the foreseeable future, after the event. “Not because I thought they were coming back,” the kid said. “Because I thought they were still here.”

We didn’t see anything ourselves, but this one will go in the growing file. Robin kept a few soil samples from the base of the hill, just in case.

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Miles Driven: 78 mi