I wrote this short essay a few years back about a UFO encounter I had as a kid:

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It's possible that we're not the most technologically advanced species on the planet. The next great leap in our scientific progress will be mastery of engineering at the molecular and atomic scale. I have reason to believe that when we finally achieve that level of control over matter, we will find that we are not the first of Earth's animals to reach that physics milestone. In my childhood I had an almost supernatural yet terrifying experience that would not have been possible without advanced nanotechnology. It was in the 1970's, and I was about 10 years old.

I lived on the outer edge of Vandenberg Village, a few miles from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. Behind my back yard there were miles of wooded forest in all directions, except for a new asphalt road and street lights that had just been installed in preparation for hundreds of new homes that would come years later. One clear summer night, I was watching bats catch moths underneath one of these new street lights. The moths were attracted to the lights, and the bats were feasting on them. I was playing with the bats by throwing pebbles high into the air during their hunt, watching in amazement as they would automatically lock on with their sonar and follow the rocks as they fell, until they got close enough to learn they weren't insects. That night I was lost in the pleasure of just throwing pebbles and watching the bats give chase when my attention shifted to the moon overhead. Something didn't feel right. That's when I had a life-changing close encounter with a miniature UFO.

It was too small for a person to occupy, approximately 2.5 feet in diameter, and it moved so quickly that it could not be seen except when hovering motionless at different points. One moment it was in the night sky directly between me and the full moon, illuminated so that it was perfectly camouflaged against the moon behind it, remaining absolutely still, silent, stealthy and as yet unnoticed. But as my eyes adjusted to its depth and it came into sharp focus, I felt a sudden shock as the moon appeared frighteningly closer than it was supposed to be. At the moment it registered it as out of place, I became slightly disoriented and it instantaneously jumped to within inches of my face.

It was so close that I could hear a soft humming electrical arcing sound coming from inside it, and the sound of large amounts of air flowing as if into the opening of a quiet vacuum. If I hadn't seen it so illuminated just before that, I would have guessed that its coating was a highly reflective silver-grey metal. The "fight or flight" center in my brain was so stimulated, as if through direct contact, that I was completely frozen in a primal, overwhelming, paralyzing fear. I was absolutely helpless, unable to turn away or escape this machine that seemed to be vastly superior wild predator taking the fullest advantage of the element of surprise. I remember thinking, "Oh my God! This is really happening." The entire incident lasted only a few seconds. The next thing I remember was waking up out of a mental fog while blindly strolling on my way back home about 30 yards from where I was before. I just calmly snapped out of some kind of walking daze.

This level of propulsion, active materials and robotics technology may have been an example of an already mature nanotech. While there is a chance that some extremely elite and super-secretive humans had that over 30 years ago, or that it was some advanced black project Air Force Unmanned Areal Vehicle, after giving it considerable thought I've come to believe that it was of a non-human or post-human origin. When we reach that very high degree of scientific progress, we may no longer need the large, cumbersome, inefficient bodies that we have now, as our future physical forms and distributed cognitive networks may be re-engineered on a scale too small for contemporary humans to detect, even with our most sensitive instruments. This could be the case for certain advanced civilizations that came before us. They could be invisible yet all around us, indeed even within us, as yet undiscovered.

Perhaps they monitor, track and manage us in the same way that we manage wildlife in nature preserves and zoos. They might just prefer to remain undetected as they intervene in our affairs only in the most subtle ways, such as by inspiring our best ideas and dreams from within our brains. Maybe I was never supposed to remember this incident, but by some strange fluke those first few seconds of our interaction slipped by their censors and were recorded and preserved by my conscious mind. On the other hand, maybe these guys don't "make mistakes" at all, and I remembered this event for reasons unknown to me.

One thing is for sure, I will never forget the sheer terror and utter helplessness I experienced on the night I played with the bats under a lonely street light on that new road through the woods.