Alien Encounters of the Lunar Year Kind

Since I spent the  “real” New Year’s gambling at a casino shaped like an old-timey boat with retirees wearing celebratory hats made out of lampshades and their grandchildren’s craft supplies, I decided to spend the Lunar New Year’s trying to summon aliens to Earth. The idea was to go out into the darkness and try to communicate with extraterrestrials using a combination of meditation and police radars. According to the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sometimes cosmic beings that are too shy to show up in person will still try and talk to you through cop gear. Unfortunately, all of the Chinatown stores that promised they had EXACTLY what we needed on the phone didn’t actually carry it, so we were forced to go forward radar-less, relying solely on our capacity for universal hospitality.

We drove out to Chilao in the San Gabriel mountains because it was the first place that popped up when we Googled “Dark Night Skies outside of Los Angeles” and a physics website recommended it for star-gazing.  Winding up the icy mountain roads, it became darker and darker until the city was just a thin film of light pollution on the horizon.  Once we got there we realized that duh, of course the park was closed and were all hit with this sense of deep isolation and fear when we parked the car by the “Closed for the Season” sign. Without friendly park rangers and bonfires of drunken campers, the traces of civilization were so minimal (a gravestone memorial here, an amazingly murdery picnic table that seemed like it came straight out of an 80s horror movie there) that it seemed best to contact aliens with the car still within our range of vision. But in the end we decided to put our city dweller fear behind us, tie blue glow sticks around our necks, and take timid steps down the road to the dark flats.

It started to lightly snow, so we found an opening (actually in the middle of the road because we were still scared shitless by the woods) and placed blankets on the ground. Debating whether it would be scarier to see an alien or a random group of bros exiting the woods towards us, we created a salt circle of protection and invited in positive spirits only.  At roughly 11:39 PM—the time of the year’s first new moon—we started to meditate. I tried to focus on the way the snow felt, but I’m a terrible meditator so instead I thought about how I was a fucking moron for wearing a jean jacket and should have changed my tampon before leaving my apartment.

After a while of meditating, we started to do our own version of the CSETI invitation to connecting with alien life. Basically, this is where each person tries to visualize themselves going up into the sky, finding an alien, and pulling them down to the ground. You take turns doing it, going in a circle, and each time you try to do the visualization quicker and quicker than the last. When (in the visualization) you are back down on earth with your little green man in hand, you say “here” so that the next person can start their visualization. Not having experience with these kind of things, I chose to picture myself bouncing off a trampoline up into the universe, grabbing onto a green man’s skinny hand and then falling down, bouncing off the stars like a Pachinko ball until I landed on my butt on the ground. “Here!” As we went around the circle, the echoing “here”s turned into a chant probing space for other life forms.

We all opened our eyes to see—I kid you not—the most spectacular clouds shaped like a dragon moving across the sky.  Someone spotted two lights moving across the darky sky and postulated that they could be alien ships, though I was personally pretty sure they were airplanes making their way east from LAX.  Satisfied by the epic view and with telling ghost stories even if we didn’t make contact, we warmed ourselves up with some whiskey and started the hike back to the car.