Lights In The Sky - A Memory

    
In the 1990’s I moved to New Mexico for fun and adventure.

Yes, New Mexico is a place to have fun and find lots of adventure.
I ended up in a little place just North of El Paso, East of Las Cruces, West of Cloudcroft and South of Albuquerque.

This wild, rough and tumble former rail road town of about 25000 people was in the middle of the U.S. Military special projects testing grounds. All roads in and out were or at least could be controlled by the U.S. Military and the U.S. Government.

I liked the way the town looked, the small hometown look you saw on TV in the 1950’s.
To drive anywhere in New Mexico off of the interstate you have to drive through Alamogordo. The state is just set up that way.

I contacted a realtor and started house hunting the first day. It was only two days into the house hunt that I found a recently built and fabulous two story split level house located only blocks from the base of the Sacramento Mountain Range.

This house was well within my price range, had a filtered water system, was air conditioned, and had large windows with panoramic views of the mountain.

The house had rock yards, fence, a two-car garage, living room with sky light, dining room, kitchen combination, laundry room, two guestrooms on the bottom floor with attached baths and a master suite that covered the entire second floor of the house!

I immediately placed an application for the house and was told I had the place. No money down, one free month rent, and move in today! I should have known then that something was not right, but hey, this was a house most only dream about.

A check of the neighborhood found that most of the houses which were similar to mine were owned or rented by Air Force Officers from Holloman Air Force Base or workers form the Johnson Space Center and the White Sands Missile Range.

The neighborhood was in a very quiet location and was quiet day and night, which was strange since most of the neighbors had school age kids.
My hours were strange but apparently so were those of my neighbors. I tired to get to know my neighboors, boy was that a mistake. You would have thought I was the taxman when I knocked on their door and tried to say Hi.

After about a week in the house I noticed lights in the night and the early morning, not just any lights, but very bright lights that appeared at various times of the night and early morning. These lights appeared off and on all week. Now these lights were so bright they penetrated the curtains and blinds to the extent they woke me up.

There was no mention of these lights in the paper, on the radio, and no one talked about them. I was wondering if the lights were just in my mind since these lights were of such intensity they woke me up off an on during the week, but did not seem to bother anyone else.
I asked about the lights but no one seemed to know anything about them, nor had anyone I talked to in my neighborhood seen the lights.

My job during these days in New Mexico was one I still do not talk about, but one that should have made me privy to information on strange lights in the sky. Yet, I was not privy to where the lights in the sky were coming from or where they were going.

I tried to identify the lights but failed every time. As luck would have it, anytime family and friends not from New Mexico came to visit, the lights were not around.

My house was so nice and so bright that I decided to purchase a night mask, pull the blinds and curtains, and enjoy my job and my house and not worry about the lights in the sky.