I've blogged about this before, and maybe a rare few of you have heard this story, but it's time to tell it again.

I was living with my family, a mother and father, a younger sister and an older brother, in a very small town called Floriston. It was on the side of a mountain along Hwy 40, just over the border into California from Reno, NV. We did our shopping in Reno, and us kids rode a school bus into Truckee, thirty miles away.

I figure I was about seven or eight, which would put the time frame in the early fifties. One day my older brother Dana and I took off into the mountains with these cool jungle hammocks that were designed to be hung between two trees and had a bug proof netting.

I don't know how we got them, but they were cool and we wanted to try them out. Imagine two young boys and their dog hiking way up into the Sierra Nevada mountains, to spend the night.

We found a nice clearing and hung our hammocks between trees, about fifty feet apart from each other, and went to bed. Our dog slept across from me with my brother.

In the middle of the night I woke up, and our campground was lit up. I looked over at my brother's hammock and it was empty, and our dog was standing next to it and barking loudly. I looked out the right side of my hammock and up into the night sky.

The memory of what I saw is still burned into my brain. There was a very bright round glowing object hovering over our campground. Suddenly I experienced the most amazing thing, a large mountain lion walked under my hammock, and I passed out.

When I woke up it was morning and my brother was back in his hammock. I have no memory of us talking about what happened, but Dana was never the same again. He had been abducted that night and it fucked up his life from that moment on.

I'm lucky it wasn't me, and I'm still able to sit here and write about it. I am so sorry my brother that this happened to you, and maybe one day we can talk about it, on the other side.