Chapter Four: Fynn

“Your thoughts are incredibly powerful. Choose yours wisely.”

– Joe Dispenza

Fynn’s scream shattered the darkness, waking his wife. Whatever Fynn had seen was gone. He was scared, confused, and questioning his sanity. Then the guilt set in. “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”

He and Liv had just gotten married the day before, and he wasn’t even sure that was the most dramatic part of the day. After the wedding, they drove to Marfa, Texas for a low-key honeymoon, with plans to check out a film festival as well as the local arts scene while they were there. A long day’s drive behind them, they had gone out to a nice dinner, and checked into their motel in the high desert of the Trans-Pecos.

There at the motel, staring out into the endless night sky, Fynn was reminded of the strange phenomenon known as the Marfa Lights. For ages people have reported seeing strange lights in the skies east of Marfa, and even today, credible explanations are hard to come by. Fynn had grown up on tales of the unexplained, and had inherited a treasure trove of UFO books from his grandfather. Yet for all his fascination, he'd maintained a skeptic's distance. Still, to be in Marfa and not try to see the fabled lights seemed a waste. He convinced Olivia to extend their long day just a bit more. 

They arrived at a roadside stop dedicated to viewing the lights. The only other person around was an older man sitting on the ground staring out into the desert sky. Being a photography buff, Fynn had brought his high-end digital SLR camera, just in case anything interesting did turn up, but seeing the coin-operated binoculars nearby, he got the feeling this was nothing more than a cheesy tourist stop. Liv and Fynn started chatting with the man, and he told them he’d arrived in town years ago. After seeing the lights the first time, his life had been changed. He’d lived in Marfa ever since. 

After talking for a bit and reveling in the beauty of the stars, they noticed a single red light over the nearby mountain range, pulsating like the light on a radio tower. Fynn thought this was a bit strange, since radio towers usually have more than one light. Then a second red light appeared, directly below the first one, blinking in unison with the first. Further down, a third light appeared, just like the first two. They spent the next fifteen minutes staring at a blinking radio tower. Olivia quickly lost interest and was ready to be done with this adventure. She was tired. 

The lights stopped blinking. They were now just solid red. “That’s odd,” though Fynn. Slowly, they started moving around, fading out, then coming back on again. That was definitely not a radio tower. With each cycle, the lights changed to a different color, working their way through the spectrum. The color and speed became more unpredictable, the lights sometimes blinking slowly, sometimes so fast they just appeared almost white. He saw of the lights split in two in an almost liquid way – like a cell dividing. 

“They’re really active tonight,” the old man remarked, his casual tone at odds with the extraordinary scene above them. Fynn nodded, unable to tear his gaze away from the sky. For the next two hours, Fynn sat wide-eyed and slack-jawed, watching five lights dart and swirl against the inky backdrop, their colors morphing from crimson to amber, emerald to sapphire, in a chromatic symphony that defied explanation. 

Finally, the lights coalesced into a horizontal line, five perfect spheres of electric blue hovering just above the mountain range. For a breathless moment, they hung there, pulsing out across the void. Then, as one, they winked out of existence, leaving only the countless stars and the weight of the unknown. Fynn stood rooted to the spot, his mind reeling. The rational part of him scrambled for explanations, but deep in his bones, he knew he'd witnessed something beyond the realm of the ordinary.

The old man embraced him, and then looked him in the eye and said, “you must be really special,” in a way that felt almost unsettling. Later, Fynn would wonder about this enigmatic figure, questioning whether he too was part of the night's strange magic.

Fynn wanted this experience to go on for as long as possible, but while his new wife had been patient, she wasn’t nearly as impressed with the display as he had been. She was getting bored and sleepy, ready to call it a night. As they made their way back to the motel, each step felt to Fynn like a negotiation between worlds. The ground beneath his feet seemed less solid, the boundaries of what he thought he knew about the universe suddenly permeable. He was filled with an overwhelming urge to reach out, to somehow make contact with whatever intelligence lay behind the lights. “I felt the peace, and the intent, and playfulness, almost like how I felt when I would play with my little sisters and my siblings as a kid.” 

Back in the motel room, Fynn couldn’t sleep. He felt as though he had had a glimpse of some bigger truth, and he wanted more. He felt as though an opportunity was slipping away. Liv tried to dissuade him from going back outside, but he couldn’t help himself. At about one in the morning, Fynn left the motel and started walking out into the desert, toward where the lights had been. 

During his earlier encounter, he had been hesitant to get out his camera, afraid it might break the spell, or somehow deter whatever intelligence seemed to be behind these lights. “I don't know if that was just my natural inclination, or that feeling was being put into me,” he said, “like if you pick up the camera then we're gonna leave.” He didn’t want to miss a millisecond of whatever it was. So this time, desperate for more interactions, he left his camera behind, and shut off his phone.

After walking for a while, he started to become aware of the risk of stumbling into a cactus, a rattlesnake, or whatever other perils the desert might offer up. He found a clearing and laid down on the ground, and using his jacket as a pillow, he stared up into the night sky. In this remote place, with minimal light pollution, he gained a new appreciation for the vastness of the cosmos. The shimmering stars looked like diamond dust. 

In those moments, something came over him, and he said a sort of prayer – at first silently, and then out loud into the night. “If what I just saw was real, and that's really you, please, show me more. Show me the truth. Show me what's real. My whole life I've known there's something more and I feel I just got a glimpse of something real. If that was you, please, show me. Show me the truth of this world. Take me with you. I'm willing to go.” He continued this prayer until finally falling asleep.

When he woke up, he was freezing. The cold night air had enveloped him. The realization of what he had done crept in. He turned on his phone and found countless missed messages and calls from Olivia. He walked back to the motel, shivering from the cold. Liv was panicked and crying, oscillating between anger and relief.  “She was still flipping out wondering what the fuck was going on, and I felt so terrible,” Fynn reported. “I felt like such an asshole for what I did, like, oh God, I am crazy.”

Fynn consoled her, and reassured her that he was okay, and that he had just wanted to try to see the lights again. It had been an extremely long day and an eventful night, and they were both exhausted. They finally settled into sleep… right up until the point where Fynn woke up screaming. 

Standing near the corner of his bed he saw three tall, lanky shadows with oversized heads. “These things were at least seven to eight feet tall, and they're standing in a triangle,” Fynn said. “I didn't see any features. I didn't see eyes, I didn't see a mouth. They just looked like a void. I got the feeling of a ‘light vacuum.’ I don't feel like silhouette is even the right term because a silhouette is just your eyes adjusting to the light behind it. This looked like black holes – they looked like a vacuum, in a humanoid form.”
“As soon as my wife woke up, she was like what the fuck is wrong, and as soon as I screamed they were gone. And it all started flooding back: What I had said, what I had prayed for, and I started to kind of feel guilty. I started to feel like they answered the call, and I bitched out.”

In the years since that experience, Fynn said the closest thing he has seen to the Marfa Lights was in a documentary called “Capturing the Light” about a woman named Dorothy Izatt. “If there's any UFO documentary anyone should ever watch, it's that, and everything that she was experiencing is exactly what I was saying those Marfa lights looked like. It's the exact same thing.”

Fynn has prayed to the skies on numerous occasions, and he says more often than not, lights will appear, though never anything nearly as dramatic as on his wedding night in Marfa. He described one of his recent encounters: “I live behind some train tracks, so I can walk on these train tracks and kind of get lost. It was in the middle of the day, clear skies. This was completely different than any of the others I've seen before. The other ones have always been orbs, darting in and out, floating. But I laid on the train tracks looking up at the clear blue sky.” 

He started praying like he had so many times before. “I was like, I know you probably don't show yourself during the day, but if you do feel so inclined, I'm here. I'm open. Let's have a chat.”

 “And all of a sudden right above me, very faintly, it looked like a little fish, or a butterfly. It had flapping wings, and it was changing colors, just very faint. I even tried to capture it on my phone. My phone couldn't really get it. It was doing a figure eight right above where I was, swimming back and forth. I'll never forget it.”

As Fynn navigated these extraordinary experiences, his personal life was undergoing seismic shifts, including the end of his marriage. In the wake of this loss, strange occurrences plagued his home - unexplained noises, objects moving of their own accord, and most bizarrely, puddles of water appearing in impossible places. Fynn couldn't help but wonder if these disturbances were connected to his ex-wife's interest in witchcraft. Had she left behind more than just memories? The incidents culminated with Fynn witnessing a flashlight with no batteries flickering to life of its own accord.

The stresses of life led Fynn to start down some old familiar paths he didn’t really want to revisit. In his younger days, Fynn had issues with opioid abuse, and in an attempt to avoid repeating past mistakes, he fell into using kratom and alcohol to try to head off the cravings. He also dabbled in psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, but never had any experience that compares to life-altering as the night he spent sober outside of Marfa. He became particularly interested in trying a powerful hallucinogenic called DMT (dimethyltryptamine), primarily because he had heard people sometimes have connections to entities similar to his Marfa experience. 

DMT is a strange drug. Numerous studies have shown that it’s common for DMT users to feel like they are in a very familiar place while hallucinating, and they often encounter entities with whom they feel they have a prior, sometimes even familial bond. Another study found that “More than half of those who identified as atheist before the experience no longer identified as atheist afterwards. The experiences were rated as among the most meaningful, spiritual, and psychologically insightful lifetime experiences, with persisting positive changes in life satisfaction, purpose, and meaning attributed to the experiences.”

One night, a friend offered Fynn some DMT. “He gave me this little vaporizer. And I pushed the button, and I hit it as hard and long as I could. All of a sudden it just turned quiet. I ended up in this dark room, and I saw this… it looked like a jellyfish without tentacles. It was a white, translucent blob. Whatever it was, I just knew it was a female. She was beautiful, almost motherly. And the first thing that hit my brain was, ‘don't come back here until you've taken care of your substance issues.’ And then she disappeared, and the trippy weird colors and stuff subsided. The trip shut down. I hit that vaporizer again, and it didn't do anything. It was like I could not get high off of the thing.”  He also felt as though the entity was the same intelligence he had encountered in the skies above Marfa. He remembers thinking, “You're the lights that I saw. You're the same thing. It was like, oh my God, we know each other.”

“This was given to me,” his friend said about the DMT. “The guys that synthesized this stuff don't sell it because the entities will be upset if they make any money off of it. It has to be given to you.” 

Thinking back on his vision, Fynn said, “She was one of the most beautiful… I can still see it in my head right now. It almost looked like a jellyfish wedding dress, just swimming in the water.”

Fynn’s life is full of strange and wonderful experiences now. Much like the enigmatic old man he met in the desert years before, Fynn's trip to Marfa changed the trajectory of his life. It led him to question everything - the nature of reality, consciousness, and humanity's place in the cosmos. He became acutely aware of the limitations of materialist science in explaining the full spectrum of human experience. At the same time, he grew wary of dogma and rigid belief systems, preferring to remain open to the mystery. 

 “I always considered myself an agnostic, and I feel like that's a pretty good label. If I have to give myself one, agnostic is it. If there's one thing I'm a hundred percent sure about, it's that I'm not sure of anything. But the more things like this happen… It's given me hope. I don't want there to be nothing after we die. It's giving me hope that there is something else out there and… it’s gonna make me get emotional, honestly, but it's giving me peace, intent, knowing that maybe there is something else out there watching out for us. And maybe they're – the only thing that makes sense to me is: those are our fathers, those are our mothers up there, and the angels and the demons that we talk about.”

As he shared his story, Fynn emphasized the importance of personal experience over secondhand accounts or official narratives. "I truly believe that you can have an experience," he said, "because that's the only reason that I had my experience. I think the reason I didn't have one in the past was that I didn't truly open myself up."

As Fynn continues to navigate the borderlands between the ordinary and the extraordinary, he hopes to open a door for others, to suggest the possibility of a reality far stranger and more beautiful than we dare imagine. In doing so, he invites us all to look up at the night sky with fresh eyes and open hearts, ready to receive whatever wonders the universe might reveal.

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