meteor showers and aliens/ghosts....

this post doesnt have much to do with gardening, although it began on the idig forums. a few weeks ago, one of the people of idig posted a thread about the perseids meteor shower, and basically just gave us a heads up that this meteor shower would be happening soon. ive wanted to see a meteor shower for years, but i was never allowed to stay up long enough to see one when i was in high school, and over the past three years ive been working a gravyard shift in a steel plant so i could never see them even after high school. so after getting this heads up about the perseids, i decided i was going to watch the shower this time. i think the thread on idig had posted that the peak of the shower would be the night of august 12/13th, but i looked it up on nasa's website where i found the peak was actually last night, the night of the 11/12th. at the time i was on the computer looking at surprise! gardening stuff. anyway, it was about 12:40 when i read this, and i decided i was gonna go watch the meteor shower. i decided watching from home wouldnt work very well because there are too many lights around that would make poor visibility. so i planned on driving out to the benjamin/lake shore area to watch them. well, i posted this on facebook, and my brother then came down to see what i was talking about. of course i told him about the predicted meteor shower, and he decided he was going to come along and watch it as well.
we left the house, but couldnt take the road we usually take to get out to benjamin. it has been closed for about a year now, because i-15 has an overpass above it, and since theyve been doing construction on that overpass the road has been closed for some time. in retrospect, it would have been easier to take that same road, and instead of following throught the overpass which is closed, i could have taken the turnoff toward leland and then headed out to the area where we eventually ended up, but i figured it would be easier to take the road by the high school that has an overpass across the freeway, so we went that way instead.
the speed limit on this road is 55mph, but most of the people that live out there, especially the teenagers, will take these small country roads at 65/70mph. aways before we got to the bridge that crosses the river, a truck got behind us that we supposed was some teenagers either heading home or heading out for a night of bunny bashing. either way, they began to tail us, but seeing that i wasnt going to go any faster, i suppose they got annoyed, and turned off on a south road shortly after we crossed the bridge. about a mile or two after the bridge, you come to the benjamin intersection, which is what the entire municipality of lake shore amounts to. too small to call a town, this intersection is the most densely populated part of the lake shore area, with one building or house on each corner. normally when we are out here, our intention is to go shooting up on west mountain. to get to the mountain, we would have either gone straight (west) or right (north), as both of those roads eventually take you to the mountain. however, we figured being on flat ground would be best, so we went left instead.
taking the left means youre going to benjamin, which is also little more than an intersection, but it has several houses and even a church on this intersection. this intersection is made up of two roads (duh). the one going north/south is sr-115, while the east/west road is sr-147. we wanted to get really far away from the lights, so we decided to take sr-147 west, as sr-115 just takes you into payson. so we went that direction, but again, another truck, most likely carrying teenagers, began tailing us on our travel toward west mountain. just as the last one did, they got annoyed by our consistency in following the speed limit, so they turned off on another road and headed north back towards lake shore.
sr-147 makes an abrupt shift from being an east/west road and becomes a north/south road at the foot of west mountain. i have always called this part of the road dead bend, because it has a nearly 90 degree bend that takes you south, and no one uses the fields by this bend in the road, giving the area a very dead look. immediately after the bend, the road goes another 5 or 6 miles in a perfect straightaway with no side roads and no hills. it is a perfectly flat road, and once youre on it, you cant get off it without trespassing on private land and fields with the exception of 2 or 3 roads that go back into payson. sr-147 is poorly lit, with the only light out there coming from porch lights of the few houses on it. between two of the roads that go back to payson is a grouping of 7 or 8 houses, between 8800S and 9600S. this is where we saw what we cant explain. none of these houses had lights on at all. there were no other cars on the road at this point. shortly before coming up on 8800, we saw a light in the middle of the road. it was not a natural light, like the sun or the moon, and it was not a familiar artificial light, like porch light or car parking lights. it was orange like a street lamp, but it was in the center of the road, as if it was hovering above the pavement. what is more, it wasnt just a central light. it was a foggy light, with a sort of halo of light emanating from it. as we drove down the road, it didnt get closer, but it also didnt get further away. it stayed the same size and kept the same appearance the whole time, and in a moment, it disappeared. it did not turn, like a car would have, and it did not move in any way, it simply disappeared. not quickly, actually rather slowly, with the halo of light falling back into the the center, and then disappeared slowly. my brother and i wondered aloud what it could have been, but when we got to the point where we thought it had been, there was nothing in the road at all, and no lights from the houses around that it could have been. we kept driving on down the road, and we saw the second unexplained light. this time, it was like a stack of 4 or 5 lights sitting in the middle of the road. the did not have the halo that the other light had had, but it behaved the same way. it seemed to be above the pavement, did not get closer and did not get further away, and suddenly, despite the fact that there were no roads where a car could turn off the road, it disappearred. it did not turn, it stayed in the same spot, but suddenly disappeared.
as if that was not weird enough, we looked back in the rear view mirror as we came close to the intersection that takes you to genola. out of nowhere, this stack of four or five lights reappeared, behind us. i brought this to my brothers attention, and he looked back. 2 seconds after he looked back, it disappeared again. we came to the stop sign and waited, watching behind us. nothing happened, so we turned left to go park by one of the fields to watch the meteor shower. on the left side of the road is a group of trees, and as we turned and started down the road, through the trees we could see the foggy light reappear, with the stack of lights a short distance away from it. we stopped on the side of the road to watch the meteors.
it was a good night to watch meteors, not a cloud in the sky, and the moon was on the east side of the sky, so we were able to get a good view of the meteors falling. we stayed for about 25 minutes, could have been 40 minutes, but we werent keeping track of time. all in all, we saw 31 meteors fall, with the 26th meteor being the most impressive. it was 2 or 3 times brighter than the brightest star in the sky, with a huge tail, and it left a trail all the way across the sky. the 30th and 31st were probably the same one that just broke into two pieces on entry. they were pretty big and each had tails, and followed one right after the other. a very beautiful sight, and a really great experience.
as for the lights, i have to say i am puzzled and intrigued as to what it would have been.... i am a chemistry major and hope to be a scientist one day, so the scientific part of me says that it can be explained...somehow. however, the fantastical/religious side of me wonders if those lights could have been aliens or ghosts..... at any rate, it was confusing, and i know that very few people, if any, will believe me. i dont claim to know what it was i saw, but i know it was weird, and ghosts and aliens automatically become possibilities on a creepy road like sr-147.