There was a time when I was growing up back in Indiana that we were remodelling part of the old house. We'd peeled the wallpaper off the walls around the stairway that went up to my bedroom and had just put on a fresh layer of spackling compound to level-off and even-out the old plaster in preparation for gluing cork and mirror tiles on the walls the next day. (Yes, it was the 70's.)

In the middle of the night I got up to go downstairs to pee. (Nice to remember that even as a kid I had to do that once in awhile.)

There was a rocking chair in my room that the family cat, Rascal, liked to sleep in at night.

With my glasses off everything was blurry and there was just the moonlight and the street light through the two windows at opposite ends of the room. One window was at the top of the stairs. I thought I was seeing Rascal's fuzzy white shape in that old wooden rocker, so I leaned down to pet him on my way to the steps.

But as I reached down, my hand passed through the fuzzy, furry white blob I'd thought was the cat and my fingertips touched the rough material of the cushion he would have been sleeping on. There was a sudden cold tingling feeling, like an electrical charge, except it was really, really cold. It chilled my hand to above the wrist almost immediately. This is gonna sound weird, but, its outermost edges "gathered blue" as I looked at it. My mind was still in shock from my hand passing through my cat, and I know it doesn't make sense now, but it felt like it was "drawing blue" out of the room and the tingling intensified till my elbow hurt. Then, whatever it was took off through the back of the chair moving fast, like I'd startled it.

It shot across the room and over to the staircase, an elliptical blob of bluish-white light that never touched the floor, but rolled in the air, slightly churning as it moved.

Stupid as it might sound, I chased after it. It shot over to the stairwell, then down, keeping itself above the steps and sort of leaning into the wall until it finally passed through the wall and out of the house somewhere just shy of the other side of the landing.

I was still at the top of the stairs, and looked out the window and down, trying to see if I could find it moving out of the house. I caught sight of it briefly, just a glimpse as it darted above the hedges and tomato plants in the side yard, then suddenly shot upwards, out of sight. As it moved up, it seemed to peel backwards, like it was turning itself inside out, just before it disappeared. When I stopped seeing it, it was about ten feet above my head, and almost halfway across the neighbor's back yard. That thing moved fast! and weird....

I kept watching the sky for few minutes to see if there was anything else out there, till I really had to pee. So, I went down the stairs and over to the bathroom to relieve myself... then went back to bed. It was awful late in the night and I didn't figure anyone would want to be woken up just to hear about something that was already over, so I went back to bed.

When I woke up the next day and walked down the stairs, the spackling compound was dried and would have been ready for setting tile -- except now it was all scratched up. But it wasn't like claw marks, which you would have expected to follow a straight path or make curving arcs, lifting the compound, if it really was the stupid cat and I'd just imagined everything else in the moonlight... no, these marks were more like a series of badly drawn lightning bolts. It looked like they'd been "squiggled" into the compound. They were all jaggedy, in short -almost methodical- bursts. Like someone was writing something but forgot how to use the alphabet.

But the really weird thing goes like this: The spackling compound wasn't dragged through... I don't know how to explain this, but hang in there with me for a minute. Imagine dragging your finger through some cake frosting (that's pretty much the consistency of spackling compound) to make the letter Z like Zorro would. Notice how the frosting is displaced outwards by the movement of your finger. Notice how the heaviest amount of frosting ends up in a little pile pushed at the end where you lifted your finger away from the cake to lick the frosting... notice how the frosting lifted up with you to follow your finger as long as it could before seperating and falling back slightly. Now here's the really weird thing: with these markings in the wall, THERE WAS NO HEAVIEST EDGE OR END, anywhere! Period. All along all those little jagged letter-ish shapes the displacement was even, as if you'd started at the center (of each axis) and pushed evenly outwards to displace the mud (that's what you call spackling compound). Even. Smooth. Uniform displacement. Everywhere. Plus, when I said these things were "letter-ish," I meant that they were of fairly uniform height and consistent width, prety much like you were scribbling something down in a hurry. (Yeah, I know, alien spaceghost graffiti from the other side. But, this really could have been some kind of writing, it looked that intentional. Know what I mean?)

Believe me, my brother and I studied these markings a long time, twisting around to look at these things from all angles, even holding up a mirror to look at them backwards, before we had to smear on the glue and tile them over.