by Philip Katzenellenbogen
On Wednesday, June 24, 1997, my friend Tony Viviano and I were returning to his abode from a lecture on evolution at Cal State Fullerton. We parked the car on the street at about a quarter after ten, and started walking toward his house when he called my attention to something luminous at the end of the street. On closer inspection, it was a group of helium filled balloons strapped to a flashlight, bobbing gently up and down in the breeze, caught in a chain link fence. The light was absorbed and reflected by the balloons, creating an eerie glow.
It was apparently someone's idea of a prank; the lecturer we had just seen mentioned that the 24th was the 50th anniversary of the first UFO sighting, and we guessed that whoever had sent this up had done so in recognition of that fact. We carefully disentangled the mass of writhing balloons from the fence, and then one of us suggested that it might be fun to take our picture with a "captured UFO"! I got my camera, an Olympus Stylus, and we snapped several photos of the "UFO", after which we let it sail away over the fields. The object rose upward, where it was pushed by the winds, first to the east and then to the south. It was truly an eerie sight--it couldn't hold a candle to Industrial Light and Magic, certainly, but someone driving along one of the isolated roads in that area late at night might well drive a little faster if they happened to spot it floating overhead.
Our little adventure having ended, I headed back to my home in Los Angeles. As I was getting out of my car, sometime near midnight, a bright light flashed about twenty feet overhead and to my left, near the power lines that run behind my house. When my eyes became adjusted to the darkness, I could find no explanation for the light, and when I awoke my wife, she hadn't seen or heard anything. Puzzled, I went to sleep.
When I awoke, my chest and belly were mildly irritated; upon investigation I discovered that they were bright red, as if they had been exposed to sunlight. Furthermore, there was an area that had not been burned, in the shape of the letter "M" or "H". 
For no apparent reason, I recalled a dream I had had early on the morning of the 24th. I was walking through some chaparral, there was nothing to distinguish one part of the landscape from any other part, and the light seemed more like a diffused glow than direct sunlight. I went up a slight hill and in a small valley below was a group of buildings, strangely unworn by the constant wind. I ducked down inside one; it seemed as if it had been built for a person about five feet tall. There were furnishings, and an empty picture frame on the wall opposite the door. On the table was a note that read only, "Mr. J. Brandon: It will serve you in time". Inside the attached envelope was a card that read something like "The El Físico Nuclear Experiment" in florid lettering, and that had an address on it. The name meant nothing to me. I put it in the front pocket of my shirt, and then I woke up.
The symbol on my chest was exactly where my shirt pocket would have been if I had been wearing it. I searched all of my shirts for such a card, but I found none like the one I had dreamt of. Convinced I had merely imagined it all, I thought no more about it until I developed the film. There were pictures of the honeymoon my wife and I had recently taken in France, and the photos of Tony and me holding the balloons. There was also a photo of something I couldn't explain, that had apparently been taken before Tony and I found the balloons. It was a photograph of a business card nearly identical to that which had been in my dream!
My wife denied responsibility for the photo, and I certainly hadn't taken it. Furthermore, there was a symbol at the bottom of the card which roughly matched the image outlined on my chest. More and more confused, I wrote to the address on the card, and was surprised when I actually received a reply. As you know, since you are reading this, there really is a journal called "The Físico Nuclear Experience", not "Experiment"--dreams are never 100% correct, I suppose--dedicated to the exploration and celebration of El Físico Nuclear, a wrestler-cum-ancient astronaut who has allegedly left traces of himself over various part of time and space. The symbol on the card was a "mu", which stands for the "muon atom in particle physics", according to the editor of the journal, Mr. Mike Palatkin. Apparently it is the source of all of El Físico Nuclear's energy. The symbol often appears on those whom El Físico is protecting. Mr. Palatkin said that these experiences were not uncommon, though they could be unsettling to the uninitiated. He suggested that the dream was a sign that I was being selected to be awakened by El Físico Nuclear. Furthermore, the dream had transferred itself to the camera as a "thoughtgraph", and it was that thoughtgraph which protected my vital heart region from the dangerous flash of radioactive light which I saw when I returned home from the balloon sighting. He thought it possible that the balloons were in fact more than we had thought them to be--they might really have been a paranormal phenomenon, which had assumed the guise of a juvenile prank in order to get the attention of a couple of skeptics. Certainly if I had seen a light moving overhead in the sky, I would have dismissed it as Venus or a meteorite; a bunch of balloons strapped to a flashlight and trapped on a fence, though, was something odd and funny, and it piqued my interest. I must admit that I am far from convinced, but the whole series of weird coincidences has proven interesting and exciting. Now only if this damn sunburn would go away...
© 1998 efn_archivist@oocities.com
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