A Mysterious Light

Until recently, I was convinced that, at some point back in my childhood, I had been visited by otherworldly beings.

I remembered lying in my crib in the house on San Anastasio Street (where my family lived until I was five) and seeing a light moving across the ceiling—a bright circle gliding above my crib and… nothing else. That was as far as my memory went.

Explanations? Hmm.

Many years later, living in San Diego, I read articles about alien abductions. I saw TV programs showing extraterrestrials beaming up innocent Earthlings with a cone of light, the abductees levitating into the ship…

Then in 2010, after Gary and I had settled in Taos (a dreamlike and almost extraterrestrial place in itself), I went to a psychic fair and heard people describe their own abduction experiences. Details varied, but the references to the cone of light appeared over and over—alarmingly often, considering my hazy childhood memories.

So… what if I had been abducted from my little crib, eh? That would explain a few quirks in my personality: the feeling of not belonging anywhere, my tendency to walk with my head a bit in the clouds most of the time… In short, it made a certain kind of sense.

The Roswell UFO Festival

Later, when we moved to Hobbs, I visited the source of all things alien: the famous Roswell UFO Festival, named after one of the most notorious extraterrestrial encounters: the mysterious disc-shaped object that crashed on a ranch near Corona in July 1947. (Technically, Corona and Roswell are about 130 miles and a good two-plus hours apart, but the air base where the supposedly non-human remains were taken was located in Roswell.)

At the festival, I bought piles of books and immersed myself in alien literature for a while, rummaging through my mind to see if any revealing memory would pop out. Nothing came of it, and eventually, I tossed the whole thing into the bag of forgotten mysteries.

Nosing Around on eBay

Then, a few weeks ago, my obsession with “recovering” objects from my childhood resurfaced with a vengeance. (In a previous post, Searching for Pieces of Yesterday, I documented this compulsion to recreate the imperfect past.)

While nosing around on eBay, I stumbled upon a rotating lamp identical to one that had been in my house since the moment I first opened my eyes in this world. Here it is, sitting on the shelf in my room; the photo was taken in November 1966, when yours truly had barely one month of earthly residence.

When we moved to Centro Habana, the little lamp lived for a few years on my dresser, but neither my mother nor I remember what eventually happened to it. I assume it broke.

The one I found on eBay was exactly the same, beautifully preserved despite being more than sixty years old. The moment it arrived, I placed it on my nightstand. I turned it on… and look what I saw in the dark:

It was exactly the reflection I remembered seeing above my crib! The mechanism that rotates inside the lamp created the moving circle of light I had watched so many times as a child, back when the lamp stayed on through the night.

I was slightly disappointed not to have been abducted, and thus unable to blame some poor extraterrestrial for my quirks, but I’m at least comforted by having finally solved the mystery of that childhood light on the ceiling.

At least now I know the truth: no aliens, no abductions—just a vintage lamp and an overactive imagination. Though honestly… the lamp never denied anything.