One afternoon in December 2018 we met the greys. We had traveled to New Mexico with Jennifer and Juan Jose, taking advantage of the fact that they go every year to celebrate their wedding anniversary. After visiting the Sanctuary of Chimayó, a well-known pilgrimage destination in the United States, we decided to enter a souvenir shop that looked like something out of a Clint Eastwood movie.
In the store there were wooden angels, T-shirts, votive offerings and Navajo fabrics. Suddenly the bell rang over the door. They were a man and a woman similar to each other, very tall, thin, with gray skin. They wore a woolen tunic, also gray. As they entered, they paused for a moment. One of them pulled down his hood and gray powder floated scattering the beam of light that still came through the door.
There was something in the air somewhere between mystical and magnetic. Without ceasing to see them, according to me very discreetly, I discovered their greatest power: they did not walk, they levitated. Some time later they entered the back room, without exchanging a word with the manager, who was still behind the counter, looking at his cell phone. I left there perplexed, but I didn’t say a word about the incident. A few hours later, someone asked: Weren’t they gray? Didn’t they float?
Taos
The next morning we went to the town of Taos: an adobe settlement of the original Pueblo group, created at the end of the thirteenth century. To enter, it is necessary to register and pass through a border post. Taos is a country within its own country, as it is on American Indian reservations.
The houses are joined in superimposed rows, on three or four levels, without it being possible to distinguish where one begins and the other ends. They all have a shared brown front, identical to the soil of Taos. Only the doors indicate where one house could start and end the other.
Well, through one of these doors Juan José disappeared. Since we were in a large group of tourists, led by a guide we could see in the distance, we thought that Juan could have joined another sector of the flock. When he resurfaced, he told us what had happened to him.
A lady from the town had seen his hat and Navajo-style braid. She sat him down in the living room of her house, took out a steaming bread and called her marriageable daughter to start negotiating. She asked him what tribe he belonged to and told him that her dowry might interest her. Juan, being Juan, decided to take advantage of his resemblance to the inhabitants of the neighboring tribes.
For a while, which seemed like months, Juan lived around that hearth, he connected with nature and with the multiple planes of existence, until he finally reintegrated into our world. When he returned, his eyes radiated and his braid was longer. More of his own.
Space Travel
A few miles from Taos, we stopped at the bridge over the Rio Grande, which has carved a nearly vertical valley about 200 meters deep. From there you can see the layers of lava that were expelled by the volcanoes that were formed when the continent decided to separate, about 5 million years ago.
That fracture has generated a kind of expanded valley, which extends from southern Colorado to the state of Chihuahua, in Mexico. It is possible that in a few million years a lake will form in that valley and then, perhaps, an ocean.
We returned to Santa Fe. That night, over dinner, we talked about the plan to go to Area 51: a restricted area where they are said to have experimented on aliens who were rescued after a flying saucer crashed in Roswell in 1947. I immediately agreed. I had no idea about the extraterrestrial connection, but I knew that the band U2 owes its name to a spy plane that was developed there.
By that time, I was ready to let my imagination run wild and share with my friends a broad vision of things.
I thought that the aliens who crashed in Roswell had been wrong in their calculations and arrived a few million years before a lake or ocean formed to smooth their landing.
I thought Juan had traveled back in time by entering through a dimensional gate, connected to the Rio Grande. I also thought about the grays and I knew that, thanks to their fondness for Clint Eastwood’s movies, they had managed to fit in among the earthlings.
Then I was happy to be part of the team of people who know that things are not painted in black and white, but in an infinite range of grays.