My night with a total freak

What 'dominance by a greater power' actually feels like

There’s a lot more I’d like to know about “Immaculate Constellation.” That’s the code name, according to indie reporter Michael Shellenberger, for the Pentagon’s deep-black UFO collection. This generations-deep inventory is supposedly so rich with evidence – pix, videos, multiple sensor data – it’ll never make its way into the Defense Department’s bogus transparency project, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office.

Last year Shellenberger dropped another unsourced bomb, about former Principle Assistant Director of National Intelligence Stephanie O’Sullivan having inside knowledge of an active UFO reverse engineering program. No one stepped out of the shadows to confirm, and the revelation went nowhere. So yeah, I’d like to know the name of his source on this one. Unfortunately, Shellenberger says, Deep Throat and his disclosure-minded colleagues are “terrified” of coming forward because of inadequate whistleblower protection laws. I’d like to know exactly what problems they have with the immunity they’ve been guaranteed; at least, they could tell us how to fix it. And of course it’d be cool to see if the sequestered UFO footage actually lives up to the hype.

But one thing he said in an interview with NewsNation’s Ross Coulthart – just hours before I lost the Internet and reliable cell phone service – foreshadowed the personal ordeal ahead. Shellenberger was describing an event stashed in the “Immaculate Constellation” files involving UFOs and an F-22 Raptor. In an unusually aggressive move, anywhere from three to half a dozen orbs swarmed the jet fighter in mid-flight and boxed it in. Their formation was so tight it forced the pilot to “break trajectory” and change course. So, for a few moments at least, UFOs hijacked an American warplane. Balls.

“The first most obvious thing you’re struck by with that particular case,” Shellenberger told Coulthart, “is that this technology or form of life or whatever it is – adversary – is demonstrating dominance . . . There’s dominance by a greater power . . . Dominance is about power and about a demonstration of capabilities . . .  It’s not showing benevolent space brotherhood, it’s demonstrating dominance at a very basic, physical level.”

After getting a real good look at what non-human dominance feels like Wednesday evening, I’m not sure there’s any daylight between what happened to the F-22 and the payback dished out by Hurricane Milton, neither of which we can ignore, wish away, or accommodate.

Trembling with fever

When a dip in the summer surf feels like a hot tub cranked a notch or two from triple digits, it means the sea is seriously ill and running a fever. It produces atmospheric antibodies to fight the infection, often in inverse proportion to the blithe passive way the infection was induced. The Earth takes a long drag of the manmade carbons saturating the sea, fills its lungs with ocean heat, then pounds the shit out the guilty and the innocent.

The venting agents are given names like Debby, Helene, and Milton. Time was, hurricanes like these used to assemble off Saharan Africa and march toward the Americas in almost stately processions. Many still do. However, these three – as with an increasing number of recent predecessors – bucked that trend and began bulking up in the western Caribbean. And over the past three months, each of those pop-ups decided to puke all over Florida’s west coast. That’s me.

Debby wasn’t even a hurricane when, more than a hundred miles offshore, she firehosed Sarasota with more rain (17 inches) than Helene and Milton combined; with no heads up, mainlanders near Phillippi Creek and other low-lying neighborhoods needed kayaks to make cigarette runs. Helene, the monster that went on to eat bridges and swallow homes in the Smokies, swamped the barrier islands and packed the ground floors of beach houses with tons of sand and debris.

But Milton was a total freak. A week after Helene savaged the Carolina mountains, Milton went from zero to a Category 2 within 48 hours. When it attained homicidal Old Testament speeds of 180 mph and charted a collision course for the Circus Coast, I heard from a few concerned citizens: When are you leaving? Where will you go? Well, by last Monday, the whole state was one big dartboard, so the second question was pretty much irrelevant.

Sarasota had sweated out its share of close calls, but a head-on assault wasn’t anywhere in the books. We attributed our immunity to the Calusa Bubble, allegedly erected by the indigenous people who settled here because it was hurricane proof. Also: meteorologists kept insisting Milton would “only” be a Cat-3 when he tried to bulldoze this place. I’d survived Cat-3s before. They suck, but they’re tolerable if you don’t live in a flood zone, which is out of my price range. Furthermore: there were no mandatory evacuation orders for my neighborhood, located on what was, a century ago, elevated ranchland.

Ripping it all to shreds

I woke up Wednesday morning to find Milton’s furious purple blob still grinding to the northeast on Cat-5 adrenalin. Even when Milton’s fever dropped from a 5 to a 4 as he drilled in late that afternoon, I started thinking, hmm, maybe I really am as dumb as I look. But when 6:30 rolled around without evacuation orders, the trees were hissing and it was too late to leave anyway. The best option was to grab a beer and watch the show.

Milton was rolling up from the south, and I had a decent seat – a north-facing screened-in third-floor porch – without having to worry about flooding or getting a broken nose from flying human garbage. The clouds were moving low, fast and dark, their sagging underbellies inviting convection. With the TV blasting out tornado watches and warnings, the oaks below started getting radical. Amid Milton’s increasingly savage microbursts, the trees’ shaggy crowns thrashed hydra-like, out of synch, straining to break loose and join Milton’s rampage.

The wind began tacking from the southeast, strafing the rooftops and the cars and the asphalt and everything else in the complex with solid curtains of hard rain. Milton pried loose a gutter just outside the porch frame and sent it clattering. He Frisbee-tossed a chunk of siding over the roof. Something else broke apart with a loud crisp crack.

By nightfall, the radar graphics showed the northeast eyewall encroaching on Siesta Key, just a few miles up the road. My lights fluttered, but when Milton dipped an invisible finger into the toilet and started twiddling the water, I went bug-eyed and filled the bathtub. He emitted an endless hollow bowling-alley rumble, omnidirectional, never smacking the pins and pausing only to reload. Milton also livened the mix by whistling like Hollywood bombs falling on Nazi Germany.

Off to the northeast, behind a horizon of Spanish tiles at the next-door complex, a red-orange glow erupted as if from an artillery strike. Seconds later, another target flared, a shade more orange. One boomed, the other did not. Then came another silent red-impact flash.

Banging at the door

A minute or two passed before the sky blinked teal, or turquoise, or aquamarine, or whatever color transformers glow when they blow. The lights blacked out across the way, as well as at two other buildings. Their street lamps stuttered back to life, but the apartments behind them did not. As the oaks shimmied and flailed and flung their leaves and branches into the dance party, for a split second, Milton pressed the “pink lightning” button.

The tube was still working, and something weird was going on with the southern eye wall – wind shear was sawing the thing in half. Forecasters had accurately predicted this drawdown, but to see it on radar was trippy. Milton’s eyewall was now an upside down C, no longer a tight little O. Meaning what? That we’d suffered the worst of it? Were a few trailing bands, now way out at sea but swinging slowly this way, all there was to it?

For the next 45 minutes or so, neighbors and their dogs wandered into the lull of Milton’s semi-eye, trying to size it all up in the dark. Then the winds resumed. This time, they swept in from the north, chasing me off the porch. The TV conked out and rebooted so often I turned the damn thing off. Milton was spewing special effects again outside my breezeway corridor. I leaned into the trembling door, palms pressed flat against it. My entire body quivered. I rechecked the lock and fastened the latch. As if.

I got so tired of the dimming lights, I just shut everything down and sat in the dark, the view reduced to a drive-thru car wash. Milton hurled himself again and again and again into the quarter-inch thick glass that – whomp! whomp! – sounded like it was getting whacked by a wet quilt. Murky silhouettes of the backlit oaks continued to lunge for my window, rattling and clawing and raging against their roots. I got up to take Milton’s pulse again. I thought about putting an end to it by prying the door open and getting sucked into the vacuum like Goldfinger. Sweet bleeding Jesus, would this trial never end? I grabbed another beer. I spent the rest of the storm in the living-room rocking chair, concentrating on my breath, waiting for the windows to explode.

At least the conditions are affordable

The fever broke around midnight. Thursday morning’s aftermath was stirred by a cool autumn breeze, the way Octobers in Florida used to feel 40 years ago. The oaks stood firmly rooted, but were exhausted in the hangover.

Cut off from the news and images of smashed houses and boats blocking highways, I hopped on my bike to survey the local damage. It was pretty much standard fare, as high ground goes. Crashed trees, downed power lines, strips of aluminum draped across tall pines bordering a trailer park. Nothing on par with Hurricane Andrew in 1992, when a Cat-5 flipped tractor trailers onto Miami strip-mall roofs and drove boards and plywood through palm trees.

Despite the 28-foot waves, three million Floridians stranded without electricity, 23 dead and estimates of up to $80 billion in damages, it was clear that Milton wasn’t a Neptune or a Poseidon or any of those other classic-rock stars that compelled early civilizations to sacrifice virgins or slave babies in exchange for decent crops. But even if he had been – so what? In May, our governor signed a bill that scrubbed “climate change” language from Florida’s energy plans. Presiding over commercial-property insurance rates that have skyrocketed by 125 percent since 2018, Ron DeSantis stated “our energy policy is going to be driven by affordability for Floridians and reliability.”

Well, “dominance by a greater power” is a bitch. When confronted by the truth of it, maybe the only way to retain what’s left of your authority is to deny, a la Baghdad Bob in 2003. Maybe, when the guv’s term expires in 2027, he can get a job hawking T-shirts for AARO.

Lame-duck congressional UFO hearings, in both houses, are supposedly scheduled for November, after the elections. But without any accompanying legislation to enforce independent oversight of the Pentagon’s black UFO projects – and there is none – the proceedings will likely be performative. But hey, maybe more hearings will be scheduled for 2025.

I biked over to the largely abandoned sprawl of Sarasota Square Mall, taking in the storm’s chaotic new architecture along the way. Half the parking lot light poles had been knocked down and smashed. However, something sublime, sprouting from one of the concrete pedestals, caught my eye. Embroidered firmly within the tangle of severed wires and cable was an arrangement not made by human hands. Where electric currents once flowed, Milton had inserted a single twig, a calling card with an implicit message: I’ll be back.

UFOs, on the other hand, know no seasons.