By Luke Campbell
December 14th, 2024. Approximately 1 AM.
There we were on the Garden State Parkway, heading south after a show at the Meatlocker in Montclair. I was in the back of the van, cramped between Gator hardshell guitar cases and a 4×12 Peavey cabinet which stuck to the sleeve of my denim jacket as it had been doused in beer earlier that night. Jason was driving us back to his and Sean’s place to crash for the night, and his girlfriend Amy was in the passenger seat next to him, chewing gum and indecisively scrolling through playlists on her phone. Sean, JD, and I were in the back, huddled between the equipment and old crumpled chip bags collected over tours past like tetris blocks.
“Put on the Descendents!” Sean shouted to the front seat, drumming his hands on his lap.
“Nah, bruh, put on some Circle Jerks, I wanna hear Red Tape,” JD said, taking a hit from his cart and blowing it towards the back of the van, then waving his arm as much as he could in this confinement to dissipate the lingering vapor.
“Hold on,” Amy yelled back, “I’m looking for a specific playlist I had in mind.”
“There should be a CD of Group Sex up front,” JD said.
“Nah, man,” Jason replied, glancing in the rearview mirror, “Aaron took that one back to his car when we were at the venue.”
“Damn, well, Amy, put Circle Jerks on anyway!”
“Just put anything on, man,” Sean sounded irritated. “I wanna hear some fuckin’ tunes.”
“I have a playlist with all those classic ‘80’s punk bands—Descendents, Circle Jerks, Black Flag—all of ‘em,” Amy tried to reassure us. “I just can’t remember what it was called.”
I was in the backseat, swinging between sleep and consciousness, my head and stomach swirling from all the beer I’d had. That last Coors Banquet was a mistake. I was too drunk to keep my skull in one place, too stoned to speak.
Suddenly, Jason slammed the brakes and our heads all shot forward to see what was happening. A streak of what looked to be glowing embers vertically in the sky ahead of us, heading down over the horizon, glistened and then faded into the night. We weren’t the only car who had stopped. Every vehicle within about a half a mile’s radius had come to a dead stop simultaneously, before slowly, cautiously resuming their expeditions.
“Holy shit, did you guys see that?” Jason asked, bewilderment in his eyes. “That thing just shot outta the fuckin’ sky!”
“Everyone on the parkway saw it, they must have! Why else would everyone have stopped like that?” Amy added with a similar blend of amazement and terror in her voice.
“It had to be one of those fuckin’ drones,” Jason said, steadying his shaking hands along the wheel.
At this time, all of us were feeling fully sober and alert, our heads spinning in different directions, silently searching for any additional visitors from the sky, but we didn’t see anything else that night. When we got back to Jason and Sean’s place, it seemed everyone had a different theory about what we’d seen.
“That had to be a UFO!” Sean said, lighting up a limp joint. “Fucker came from another planet.”
“No shit, it’s a UFO, dumbass,” Jason chastised his brother. “UFO means ‘unidentified flying object,’ that doesn’t mean it had to have been from outer space.”
“Alright, so it was an alien, whatever, dude,” Sean snapped back. “It had to be from somewhere else though. No man-made drone looks like that.”
“I don’t know, man,” JD joined in, “I’ve got a friend whose cousin used to be in the military. They got some crazy weaponry in their facilities that they don’t let most people know about.”
“Besides man,” he continued, taking a puff from the flaccid joint before passing it to me, “haven’t you been watching the news? There have been weird drone sightings all over New York lately, maybe this one just spilled over the state line.”
He was right. I had been watching the news, and had even become slightly consumed by the hoard of recent drone footage that had been making its rounds on social media. Indeed, the footage seemed to be mostly captured around Gotham City, occasionally drifting into New Jersey and upstate New York. A few weeks after this incident, my father would tell me that he too had recently spotted a strange glowing shape dancing through the black of night in Maryland, just outside of DC.
“The news outlets know more than they’re telling us,” I chimed in, having finally found my voice in the cold winter air. “This could be some sort of practice run for when they enact martial law.”
“Maybe it’s got something to do with terrorists,” Amy said. “Like maybe they’re looking for a bomb or something.”
She brought up a good point. New York is still scarred with the memory of 9/11. The pillars of smoke, the chorus of screams, the confusion of it all. It would make sense that a dirty bomb—perhaps even just the murmurings of a bomb—somewhere in the heart of the metropolitan mammoth would send the feds into a frenzy, whipping up the latest technology Lockheed tinkerers had crafted to scour the streets and their populace, perhaps programmed to look a little longer than average at a turban in Times Square or a hijab in Harlem. Maybe what we’d seen tonight was just a renegade, a lamb strayed from the herd right into the Garden State.
“I still think it was an alien,” Sean muttered before tossing the roach into the damp grass.
Days went by, and none of us ever brought up what we’d seen that night again, at least not that I knew of. Perhaps we just chalked it up to a weird night out, perhaps we just didn’t have anything else to say about it. Days turned to weeks turned to months. Footage of strange shapes in the sky became less and less frequent on my algorithm. Still, I wonder what exactly it was that leapt from infinity that cold December night. And why did we all collectively choose to forget that this happened? That this was something we had all spent so much time talking about?
I’ve grown so tired of the endless cycle, the “who cares, what’s next” lobotomy that keeps a stranglehold over the American public. Have we become so numb that we can no longer see the stars? They are indifferent to us, but should we really reciprocate their coldness? Their apathy?
I stare out at the horizon ahead of me through my smudged windshield. I’m driving on the Garden State Parkway, heading south after a show at the Meatlocker in Montclair. I tilt my eyes up towards the sky. The clouds overhead wash the heavens in a spotless black.