MARFA, Texas – An Alpine woman was abducted by aliens last Friday night when a spaceship landed amid the Marfa Lights.

    Witnesses said Letty Mendoza, 19, a student at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, walked “trancelike” toward the spaceship.

    “I tried to stop her, but the force was too great,” her friend David Garza told the Sentinel. Garza and Mendoza had parked along Highway 90 to watch the famous light display.

    Mendoza has not been seen since, according to officials at Sul Ross.

     David slammed on the brakes and pulled onto the shoulder. “The Marfa Lights,” he said, waving a hand. Letty strained to look, but all she could see were flickering spots that looked a lot like headlights.

    Then a bright beam of white light shot straight down from the sky amid the flickers. As they stared at this, a fiery red object floated down through the cylinder of light. It landed in the middle of a pasture, maybe 500 yards away. The shaft of light disappeared, but the object glowed brightly, and then began changing colors rapidly, going through the color spectrum from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to purple and back to red at a dizzying pace.

    “Oh my God,” Letty said. “I think that’s a UFO.”

    “I’ll protect you, baby,” David said, pulling her across the truck’s bench seat and squeezing her boob.

    “Not now.” She removed his hand and slid back over to her door. “Let’s go check it out.”

    “Are you nuts? There might be aliens in that thing.”

    “That’s the whole point.”

    “What if they want to eat us? I read this story once.”

    Letty got out of the truck.

    David cracked a window. “Come on, Letty. Fun’s fun, but that thing is dangerous.”

    She ignored him. There was a new smell in the air – was it fish? It must have come from the object. And that made it something real, something tangible: Light tricks don’t give off odors.

    She shivered. David was right. It was dangerous. She thought about getting back in the truck.

    But suppose it really had come from outer space. Suppose there really were aliens over there. She’d wanted to see aliens ever since fourth grade science class, when Mrs. Gonzales had told them there were billions of planets in the universe.

    “Who lives on them?” Letty had asked.

    “No one, dear. Earth is the only planet with life.”

    “That’s crazy,” she’d said. “That many planets, somebody has to be there.” And she hadn’t taken it back, either, even when she ended up in detention.

    She couldn’t pass up this chance to meet aliens. And if – more likely – it was some kind of hoax, well, then she’d know that, too.

    Letty walked away from the truck. David yelled, “Come back,” and honked the horn, but he didn’t get out. She slipped carefully through a barbed wire fence and tried to steer clear of cacti as she walked toward whatever it was. 

    When she reached the object – which had settled on a silvery color and still smelled of fish – a door slid open. She hesitated for a few seconds, crossed herself even though she hadn’t been to mass in years, and stepped inside. The door closed behind her and she felt a sudden acceleration. She barely had time to worry about whether she was going to become alien dinner before the movement stopped and the door opened again.

    They were aliens, all right. Short, with blue faces and hands, and a body covered by a hard multicolored shell that made Letty think of turtles.

    Letty’s stomach was doing flip-flops, but the longer she stared at the aliens, the safer she felt. Maybe it was the little devices they all seemed to be holding – things that looked a lot more like tech equipment than weapons. Maybe it was the fact that they all seemed scared, too. They looked like, well, nerds. If they’d been human, they’d have worn horn rims and had 3G devices hanging from their belts.

    Letty was a computer science major. She knew nerds. She smiled and pulled out her iPhone. She pointed at their devices, then back at the phone, and after a few minutes – and a lot of noisy sounds that must have been alien conversation – one of them came over to check it out.

    You could always make friends with nerds by showing them new tech. And – truth be told – she wanted a look at their devices, too.

    Letty sat and stared at Earth from orbit. It was a beautiful planet. But they were leaving as soon as the aliens finished collecting their probes. They had shown her their home system on a star chart. She calculated it was 100 light years away. Even if the aliens had FTL capacity – she wasn’t sure – everyone she knew would be dead when she returned. If she returned.

    Letty knew she’d miss her family, her friends. But how could she pass up the chance to learn all about an alien culture, especially one so highly developed? Alien tech made even the most advanced human devices look like something from the time of the cavemen. Maybe she could lay the groundwork for a human-alien alliance, bring some of that tech back with her.

    As long as they were in orbit, the space ship acted like a huge antenna, picking up all signals from Earth. Her iPhone worked. She thought about posting pictures of the aliens online, writing a long explanation of where she was going.

    But who would believe it? Better to be simple. She called up her whole address book and sent a  text: “Off to see the stars. Don’t wait up.”