The Object That Ended My Doubt

I have called lights out of the night sky with my own mind, and I have watched them answer. For roughly two months in 2019, from the balcony of my Toronto apartment, I summoned Orbs of Light almost every night. I had repeated success, and I filmed some of it. But the reason I know, past any argument, that what I was doing was real is a single object: the strangest thing I have ever seen, which hovered past my window one night and then flew off down the street as if the ordinary laws of the world did not apply to it.

Between attempts I would sit in meditation, trying to understand the entities I was reaching. Those weeks gave me my deepest insight into the practice, and they are where the idea for a book first took hold. That project became the work I have since published, A Philosophical Testimony on Contact. What follows is one event from inside it.

Most of the time the Orbs arrive as exactly that: balls of light, often several at once. If you are paying real attention, the way they move gives them away. They behave like something under intelligent control, a technology well beyond our own. If you are not paying attention, the same lights are easy to write off as satellites, planes, or whatever explanation asks the least of you.

I say that as someone who went looking for the ordinary explanation. Even doing this deliberately, with the express aim of contact, I kept one eye on the mundane. Could these be aircraft? Was I simply so taken with the subject that I was reading meaning into ordinary things? I took those questions seriously, because a claim like mine is worth nothing if you have not. Then, one night, they were answered for good.

After what I saw, I no longer wondered whether the practice was real. I believe the object was shown to me on purpose, to close the last of my doubt.

I could not photograph it, and I have made my peace with that. When it came past the window I felt a stab of anxiety as I fumbled to unlock my phone, but it was moving too fast. The object simply hovered past the glass, level and exact. The moment I understood I would not get a clean shot in time, I stopped reaching for the camera and decided to watch. I went out onto the balcony, leaned over the railing, and followed it as it sailed past the neighbouring buildings and down the side street.

By the end I had no doubt that I had watched advanced technology. The reason sounds like a contradiction, so stay with me. The object was not made of any strange material. It bore no alien markings. There was nothing inside piloting it. What I saw looked shockingly human.

A single glass tube formed the body. Inside it, another glass tube was coiled through the centre in a loose, almost haphazard way, like something from a chemistry set. Resting on top, held on either side by what looked like two glass couplings, were two light bulbs. The one on the left was clear, or a frosted white. The one on the right was red. The red bulb was blinking, and the clear one was dark. That was the object, and that was all of it.

It looked superimposed on reality, as if it had not flown into the scene but appeared within it.

And somehow that absurd little thing flew perfectly, with no wings, no rotor, no exhaust, and no sound. The nearest I can come to describing it is that it looked like an animation laid over the street. I have turned it over for years and cannot invent a way for that object to move as it moved. It looked like a prop from an old science-fiction serial, and it behaved like nothing our world knows how to build.

Sometimes I forget it happened. Then it comes back to me, and I am struck all over again that it did. Whatever these entities are, they showed me something I still cannot explain.

For a long time the closest I could come to a picture was a collage, a glass tube and a bulb and a coil and a coupling stitched together, since I cannot draw. Recently it occurred to me that I could use that same process to have an image generated more faithfully. The picture at the top of this piece is the result. It is not exact, but I would put it at ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of what I saw, and the small differences change nothing.

If you have seen something like it, anything this strangely human, I want to hear from you. My own guess is that it was shapeshifting, or wearing a form on purpose. I would be genuinely surprised if advanced technology, ours or anyone's, simply looked like a glass tube with two bulbs on top.

I watched it come and I watched it go, and I have never found the bottom of it. I know exactly what I saw, and I have not doubted it since.