It was in the grassy flatness where the border of Indiana edges on Ohio that I saw the terrible lights in the sky, and what they did. I was on my way back home on a long, lonely drive when I saw something that still sticks with me to this day. It was 2015 and I had just gotten done attending a conference in Chicago, and rather than cash out for a flight, I decided to drive from the Windy City to my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, a whole lot of flat nothing in between. Maybe I shouldn’t be so dismissive of Indiana, but other than Indianapolis it really is just wide open farm fields, barely a single hill for miles at a time.

First started to realize something was wrong when I came into little Jopry, Indiana, a town barely more than a single street near the highway. My car was running pretty low so I decided to get off there and get some gas. Now I knew the place was small, but as I coasted onto its main street, past its fire station and township meeting hall, I didn’t see a single soul. Normally you at least see someone out checking their mail or working on a pickup truck or even just driving around, but Jopry was dead silent. All that I saw were a bunch of these weird blue tractors, strewn about all over the place. I hadn’t been to Jopry before, but it’s a pretty agrarian community, so I figured tractors around town weren’t exactly unusual. But these weren’t John Deere or anything, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what brand these were. And they were all an identical shade of sky blue, with this identical misshapen metal logo on the front. It twisted in on itself in this oily melted spiral, not representing any object or specific idea, something completely nonsensical in design. Their wheels were in perfect condition, glistening black in the sun, their metal exteriors without a single speck of dirt. And some of these tractors were in the strangest places, some of them were just parked on the street like normal but there were blue tractors haphazard on the sidewalks, one with a convertible crushed underneath it, and several that I could even see through the windows on the inside of the town’s one restaurant.

I decided to take a closer look at a few of the tractors piled up close together on the side of the road, drove up next to them and got out. They were like a swarm of blue crayfish all bunched up together with their perfectly smooth shells, featureless but for that unidentifiable twisted metal logo and two great big headlights on the front, like deep sea fish eyes. A bunch of them were still on, strangely enough. In perfect condition, no wear and tear, no nothing, but chugging along on a tank full of gas right there in the middle of town. Not being driven anywhere, not being used. I thought I heard a haggard breath in my ear, but chalked it up to the wind blowing through the gaps between buildings. I decided to take a few pictures of these ones, to have some record of them at least. The sun glinted off the curved arch of their hulls and almost blinded me when I tried to take a picture.

I hopped back into my car and cruised on up to the gas station. I got out to the pump but the mechanism was broken, wouldn’t turn on, wouldn’t accept my card. Moved back to the pump next door, same situation. I tried to go inside to ask whoever was working about it, but there wasn’t anybody to be found. When I stepped back from the convenience store door, I saw another of those sky blue tractors sitting on the roof. Shielding my vision from the sun, I shook my head at whatever prank was being pulled on this town. So, with my car practically on empty, I decided to double back to this motel I saw. I didn’t know where the next gas station would be, and my phone was getting barely any signal out there so I couldn’t check my GPS. I figured the people at the motel might be helpful. So I drove out of Jopry, its eerie silence broken only by the occasional cawing of birds and engine sounds.

It was about three miles back, that motel. When I checked in, I asked the clerk if there was a spare gas can anywhere and he said there was, so I paid him and refueled. I also mentioned what I saw in Jopry, how there wasn’t a soul to be found and the place was littered with those weird blue tractors of unclear origin. He seemed confused, but just said that might explain the lack of traffic the past few days. When I showed him a picture I took of one of the blue tractors, its smooth metallic exhaust pipes jutting up toward the sky, reflecting on its shiny sky blue carapace, he said he had never seen a tractor like that before.

Got back on the road the next morning and passed through Jopry again. Still nobody in sight, still the dozens of blue tractors littered all over the place. A few of them seemed to have moved since the last I was there, in different spots around town. One had even crashed through the glassfront window of the township meeting hall. Ironically enough, this made me a little less anxious. Jopry was a ghost town, but I figured it was some pranksters or local kids that moved the tractors, made me think there were still people in town and I just hadn’t seen them.

Just past Jopry, I drove by a farm with those same blue tractors in the fields. Abandoned farms, with barns and farmhouses practically caving in on themselves, are really common in the Midwest, but this place looked like the family just up and left last week. Not a cow or horse in the fields either, just more of those tractors, one of them was even crashed right into the porch, splinters of wood stabbing up around it. Wasn’t just Jopry anymore, there was something up with this stretch of road. Those tractors, something about their uncanny uniformity just made me sick with worry.

Took me way too long to get to the next town over from Jopry. I drove by the farm real slow, to get a good look at it. Had to stop and call a friend of mine about the weird tractors I kept on running into along this road, once I got my signal back at least. Ended up in Union City around 4 P.M., and just wanted to get some dinner and rest somewhere I didn’t have to see those damn tractors. Booked another night in a motel, figuring it’d be my last stay before the hour and a half drive to Columbus. Being around way more people, even though Union City isn’t exactly big, just felt good after hours of nothing but a blue tractor ghost town and wide open fields of swaying corn and squat soybeans.

That night, I was out on the balcony for another smoke when I saw the lights again. This time they were closer. I saw six circular points of yellow light in the sky, rotating around a central point, sliding along the night sky like a sea star on the ocean floor. When a tentacular lash of light emerged from one of the points, I smiled and fished in my pocket for my phone to take a picture. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! The six pointed star of light slowed down until it came to a hover just on the other side of the street, over top of a guy who had his nighttime walk interrupted by the appearance of the miraculous living stars. His eyes were focused on the angler fish lure before him. We shared a brief moment, me and that man across the street, marveling at the sudden appearance of something out of this world.

That moment didn’t last long. The poor guy, I don’t even know who it was or what his name was, but just as quickly as we saw the lights in the sky that tentacle of brightness reached down and touched him. He was caught in its sickly bluish green glow, suddenly frozen in space right as he tried to turn to run away, his head turned to face me. I remember what he looked like, his mouth paralyzed in a silent scream of terror. And I remember how he looked once the light took its effect on him.

The first thing I noticed was his arm. His shirt started to tear, and under it his skin was tearing open like a balloon overfilled with air popping in slow motion, ripping at the seams. Blood was dripping down his ripped shirt and tattered pants, leaving a puddle on the sidewalk. His silent scream closed shut as the teeth on his upper jaw elongated into an enamel wall. I dropped my cigarette as I watched his eyes fall out, only to be replaced by shiny metal exhaust pipes slowly pushing up from his eye sockets. Eyeballs bouncing on the slick sidewalk below, his shoes cracking open to reveal smooth black rubber where his toes once were. The color emerging from beneath the blood and sundered skin was that very same shade of anxiety inducing sky blue that I had become oh so familiar with from Jopry and the farm just past it. He finally broke free from his frozen posture only to collapse to the sidewalk, as his legs cracked backwards at the knee and his black rubber feet ballooned in size. A pitiful high pitched squeal escaped his mouth before it finally turned into a shiny metal grill, his remaining functioning hand (the other had gone limp, the muscles presumably disconnected at the shoulder) desperately pawing at what was once his mouth before it too began to turn to rubber. Before my very eyes, what was once a man on a late night walk was transformed into a tractor, of the very same indeterminate make and model as all the other sky blue tractors I saw the day before.

It was only minutes before there was nothing visibly human left. The bloodstain on the sidewalk remained, but sitting atop it was a great big blue tractor, two huge black wheels in the back, two smaller ones in the front. The last thing to emerge, as if crawling up from deep inside, was that vague, melted logo, which affixed itself to the grill that was the poor guy’s mouth like it was a skittering beetle. With the transformation complete, the bluish green tentacle of light slid back up into the point of brightness on the tip of the vaguely defined starfish arm, and it moved on. Once the thing was gone, the shock of what I just saw caught up to me, and I couldn’t help myself but vomit over the side of the motel balcony. When I looked up, I saw the hovering six pointed star of shadow and light a few streets down, extruding its tentacle of light but to what target I couldn’t see.

My hands shaking, I rushed back into my room, packed up my things, and marched back out to my car. I had to get out of there, I could still see the thing out of the corner of my eye just a few streets down. I got in, closed the door as quiet as I could, turned the key and recoiled from the sudden sound of the engine, quickly checking outside for the flying object. I couldn’t see it anymore. I cruised out of the motel parking lot and started on the road out of town but after only a few moments I saw a six pointed star of circular points of light sink down to my line of sight in my rearview mirror. I didn’t give a shit about the speed limit or if I’d get caught, I just had to get out of there. It was like a hostile geometric swarm of fireflies, chasing me with hungry intent. I pushed on the accelerator, my foot like lead, trying to just speed past the thing, but it always kept up with me. That looming six pointed star could silently speed up and turn with ease, hovering in the air behind my car, its many glowing pseudopods grasping in the air for my vehicle.

I tried to do everything to get that thing off my trail, taking side roads and turning on my turn signal but then taking the other turn, turning on my high beams, stopping suddenly before trying to speed back up again, but nothing worked, the faceless shadow ringed with lights ceaselessly chased me. I was back in the cornfield flatness, the soybean emptiness, the sky all dark and full of stars, six uncaring stars chasing me along the long lonely road. My headlights to the front of me, the living lights behind.

It felt like I was being chased for an hour or more, but eventually the thing caught up to me. One of its lashing tentacles touched my car and I was first blinded by the bluish green glow, then deafened by the awful screech of metal on metal as my car crunched and twisted in on itself. The terrible scraping sound assaulted my ears as I squirmed in pain in the driver’s seat. I was barely able to open my eyes but when I did I watched as the roof of my car curled back like the top to a can of sardines, the window melting before my very eyes, receding into the dashboard. I felt myself suddenly boosted up as the tires inflated to twice, three times their original size. And that blue, that same shade of sky blue, over the whole surface of what was my car.

The grating, ear splitting sound subsided as the transformation came to a close, and I looked up to see the six pointed star turn back around and soundlessly float back toward Union City. On the way, I saw in the distance the tentacle of light touch a horse in a field beside the road, which neighed in pain as its skin split and its skull cracked into the sputtering engine of a blue tractor. I couldn’t see in nearly as much detail as that awful transformation back in Union City. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I sure as hell wasn’t going back to Union City, at least not that night. I decided to turn the tractor on and find a place to sleep for the night. In the darkness all I could see was an old barn next to the road, near where the horse was transformed. The tractor was so slow it was almost comical, had I not seen where they came from, so it took me ages to get there. On the way, I heard a terrible loud crash, and looked down the road only to see the burning gory remains of that horse that became a tractor.

When I got there, I looked down into the roadside ditch it had fallen into. I didn’t even know the things could move on their own, but I guess this one could. Part of the metal had crumpled in on itself, while the engine up at the front had exploded and left little pieces of burnt flesh strewn all along the road. The blue tractor had practically split open just from falling on its engine, and inside was what was left of the horse. I watched as its liver pulsated, a glistening metal pipe driven through it haphazardly, but showing no sign of actually piercing tissue. It was as if the organ, still living despite the explosive crash, had been grown around the metal. The horse’s lungs still ballooned with air, its intestines squirmed like desperate worms trying to get back into the dirt. After some examination, I found the horse’s heart, buried in the midst of the charred diesel engine, electrical wires running out of it where arteries once were. The horse’s insides had been remixed or something, to accommodate the new structures, even to integrate them into the full functioning of the tractor. A tractor, why on Earth was it a tractor, I wondered, what point was there in doing this to horses or cows or, or people for that matter. I hate to think that guy I saw transformed was still in there in that tractor, half alive just to keep a piece of nondescript farm equipment functioning.

I had to get some sleep though, at this point it must have been three, four A.M., I just wanted some sleep. I got to the old barn in the field and rested on a pile of hay, waking up not too long after sunrise the next morning. So far I had only seen the terrible lights at night, so I figured it would be safe to go to Union City now that it was day. So I hopped on my sky blue tractor and slowly made my way back into town, before hitching a ride with someone to the nearest bus station and taking Greyhound back into Columbus. I was haggard and sweaty and dirty and I was back two or three days later than I had planned, but I was back home. The next day, I checked the news for anything about what happened in Jopry and Union City and saw nothing, like it never even happened.

Except that wasn’t the end of it. About a week after I got back home, a week after my close encounter with the terrible six pointed star of light, two men came knocking at my apartment door. They were both pale as chalk, with weird misshapen lumps all over their faces and hands. Their mouths were too wide, much too wide for their faces, mouths like tight zippers, a bright scarlet red from what must have been lipstick. They were wearing black suits and wide brimmed hats, but one of them was shorter than the other and his suit hung much too long on his squat little body, his fingers barely poking out the bottom of his sleeves. When I opened the door, the short one darted in before I could even do anything, sliding between my body and the doorframe. I turned to start to shout at him, ask for a warrant, whatever, when the taller one, his suit a bit too small for him, leaned in and started asking me questions.

“Where were you the night of August 13th?” That was the week before, the night that I was chased, but I didn’t want to tell him that, I tried to deflect the question.

“Do you have a motor vehicle? Have you ridden on the bus recently? Have you ever frequented any of the following websites:...” Just a litany of questions, all asked so quickly. I turned around to see what the short one was doing, and I saw the back of his lumpy pallid head leaned over examining the contents of my shelves.

Turning back to the tall one, I said that I didn’t know what they were here for but whatever it was I had nothing to do with it. The tall man in his jet black suit smiled and asked politely if he could come in and, despite my better judgment, I let him. My head was all foggy and delirious, I don’t know if it was some lingering effect of the sickening lights or if this man’s questions were just making my head spin. We sat down in my living room, the tall one pulling out a small notepad that looked wrong in his pale lanky hand, and he started asking me more questions.

“I will repeat, where were you on the night of August 13th?” His crimson zipperlike mouth curled at the edges with every syllable.

I was reluctant to give him a straight answer but felt a delirious urge to give it all up. I told him I was coming back from Chicago but got into a car accident (not a new lie; I had been telling my friends and family that for the past week), told him the accident happened just east of Union City. After about a dozen more “where were you”s and “have you ever”s, I heard an uncanny pitter patter behind me and turned around to see the short one, his poorly sized black hat perched uncomfortably on top his squat lumpy head, scurrying around my kitchen fingering my knives and cupboards with his pallid paws. After I turned around, I saw him reach into his pocket and pull out a polaroid camera, which he used to take a snapshot of my fridge.

“Don’t mind my partner, sir or ma’am, he is simply gathering necessary data.” Without lowering his head he glanced down at the notepad, “Do you have a family history of hallucinations or psychotic episodes?”

“What? No!” I blustered in response. “What are you getting at?”

He made direct eye contact with me and stayed silent for an uncomfortable moment, his much too wide eyes staring right into me. “Nothing at all, sir or ma’am, simply asking a few questions.” I watched as a thin moist tongue snaked out and licked his narrow scarlet lips. “Now, have you ever seen this particular shade of blue?”

He reached into his pocket and produced a single piece of cardstock on which was painted a little square of that very same anxiety inducing hue that I saw on the exoskeletons of the tractors. I began to sweat. I gulped down my paranoia and said something like “Well, it’s the color of the sky isn’t it?” He took a note of that and just moved on.

The next question was one of his last. “Have you seen any unusual aerial phenomena?”

I squirmed in my seat and struggled to decide what to say. Do I tell them what happened? They seemed like… some kind of authority. But I wasn’t exactly a fan of the authorities, and these guys weren’t exactly what I thought a normal cop or fed would look like.

Without me saying anything, the tall one frowned a much too wide frown and scribbled something on his notepad. “I see,” he said. “You haven’t seen anything, and our visit was unnecessary. You must want us out of your head.”

I remember that phrasing very clearly, “out of your head,” not out of your hair. I raised my hand to reply but the short one crawled on over and whispered something into the ear of the tall one, and I heard a high pitched whirring from behind the wide fingers just barely poking out the sleeve. The tall one nodded and I watched as his neck bulged like a knotted mass twisting just under his skin, before he said “Yes, of course. This will be over shortly.” He looked back to me and smiled, the only time he smiled that entire time, his short partner looked at me and smiled too. Baby teeth poked out gently from between their bright red lips, a quivering fake smile.

After another quick glance at his notepad, the tall one asked if I would be okay with a picture being taken of me. My head felt so foggy, when I moved my arms it didn’t even feel like a part of me, and against my better judgment I nodded. The short one pulled out his camera and in a bluish green flash shot a polaroid of me, which he frantically waved in the air before glancing at, wide eyed and pulsating. With his index finger he made a semicircle on the photo, which made the tall one bring his gaunt hand up to his face and nod.

Turning back to me, the tall one got up and said “Apologies for the bother, sir or ma’am. Nothing happened to prompt us to come here, and we apologize for taking so much time out of your day when there wasn’t anything of note going on. Our higher ups are just, very thorough, you see, very thorough.” The two of them nodded in unison. “Nothing happened and nothing will happen, we can be sure of that, yes?” He left a pregnant pause in the air, waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, uh, sure.”

“Nothing happened, nothing will happen. Nothing to be worried about. On behalf of our higher ups, we hope you have a grand rest of your day.” The two of them scurried back to the door like anxious dogs, the tall one turning around to wave goodbye before they were back in my apartment complex’s hallway, turned the corner, and disappeared.

When I checked the clock, it was a full two hours later than before they got there; it only felt like they’d been there for about thirty minutes.

Never saw those two again, and never even heard anything about those blue tractors again… not that I’d really want to ever see them after what I went through.