An Alien Green Chile Run

“Welcome back to Undisclosed Skies, Episode 241. I’m your host, Manny Gallegos, coming to you live from I-25, somewhere south of Truth or Consequences and the middle of absolutely nowhere, and folks, tonight might be the night.”

I said that into the microphone. The microphone was clipped to my sun visor, plugged into the recorder on the dash. The recorder was in my truck. The truck was doing eighty-three in a seventy-five zone because I was running late to meet an alien.

I should clarify. I didn’t know I was running late to meet an alien. At that point, I was running late to stand in a dark field for two hours, see nothing, drive home, edit out the parts where I sneezed, and upload the episode to a platform that would deliver it to my thirteen subscribers. One of whom was my abuela. One of whom was me, because I liked to check the audio quality. The other eleven were, statistically speaking, probably bots.

Five years I’d been doing this. Five years of chasing lights, filing FOIA requests, driving to places Google Maps had to think about before it gave me directions. I had covered every mile of New Mexico’s sky and found exactly as much as every other podcaster in the UFO space, which was nothing, but I found it with more enthusiasm.

The cab smelled of green chile. Not the metaphorical kind, not the spiritual essence of New Mexico that tourists talk about after they spend a weekend in Santa Fe. My abuela had sent me home with a bag of roasted green chile last Sunday, and even though I’d put it in the fridge that night, the smell had soaked into the seat cushion and the headliner and was never coming out. Doña Rosalinda Gallegos didn’t care about UFOs. She cared about whether I was eating enough, whether the chile skins were blistered right, and whether I had a girlfriend yet, in that order. I told her the podcast was about to break through. She told me the Hatch Sandias needed another week on the vine.

The tip had come in by email three days ago. No name, no return address that led anywhere, just a Proton Mail account and two sentences: “Lights drop into the chile fields south of Hatch every August during peak harvest. Go at 2:00 a.m.”

I had chased a hundred tips like this. But this one felt different. Not “I saw lights.” Not “something weird happened.” Just a time, a place, and a crop. Chile fields. August. 2:00 a.m.

I checked the clock on the dashboard. 1:45 a.m.

The exit came up fast. I killed the headlights before I turned off the highway, because that’s what you do when you’re trying to be stealthy in a 2014 Tacoma with a muffler that sounds like a dog clearing its throat. The dirt road ran straight between two fields. Chile plants on both sides, rows and rows of them, Big Jims by the look of it, heavy with fruit, plants that made Hatch the center of the universe if you measured the universe by the right criteria.

I pulled over, killed the engine, and sat in the silence. The field stretched into a darkness so complete that the stars looked like someone had punched holes in the ceiling.

I grabbed the recorder and the microphone, stuffed my phone in my pocket, and picked up the pencil and notebook I kept for sketches and the flashlight I’d promised myself I’d replace the batteries in.

“Alright, Undisclosed Skies,” I said to nobody. “Let’s go see what’s out there.”

I left the flashlight in the truck. The batteries were dead. Of course they were.

The chile rows came up to my waist, thick with fruit on both sides, close enough to brush my arms as I walked between them. I had the recorder running, whispering into the microphone like a nature documentarian who’d wandered into the wrong show.

“I’m approximately two hundred yards from the road. The field is, uh, dark. Very dark. I can smell the chile ripening on the plants. For the record, the ambient conditions are clear skies, no wind, maybe seventy-five degrees. If there’s anything out here, it’s picked a beautiful night.”

There wasn’t going to be anything out here. I’d known it since the email came in, the same way I’d known it every other time. But I kept walking, because the moment I stopped walking toward something, I’d have to figure out what I was walking away from, and five years of nothing is a lot easier to carry when you’re still moving.

I came around a dirt berm at the far end of the field.

I stopped.

The craft sat in the furrows like it had grown there. Thirty feet across, maybe more, settled into the rows at a slight angle, the way a car sinks into a sandy shoulder. No landing gear that I could see. No ramp, no doorway, no blinking lights. Just a shape that did not belong in a chile field, lit from underneath by a color I have spent every day since trying to name. Not blue. Not green. Not white. Something my eyes could see, but my brain refused to file.

I wish I could tell you I was brave. What I actually did was stand there with my mouth open while my hands forgot how hands worked. The recorder slipped. I caught it against my chest.

It was real.

The figure stood on the far side of the craft, between two rows of Big Jims. The light from underneath spilled out across the furrows, bright enough to turn the chile leaves silver and show me everything. It wasn’t shaped the way decades of movies had promised me it would be. I can tell you it had limbs, and I can tell you it moved with them, and after that my description falls apart because your brain keeps trying to match something genuinely new to something old and failing. A new color, walking around, pulling up chile plants.

That’s what it was doing. Pulling up chile plants by the root, calm and methodical, the way my abuela works her garden on a Saturday morning. Not picking the pods. The whole plant, roots and all. It would grip the base of the plant, ease it out of the dirt, shake the soil off the roots, and place the whole thing into an opening in the craft’s left side. Then it moved to the next one. Grip. Pull. Shake. Place. It had been doing this for a while.

I stood there. Thirty seconds, maybe. It felt like years. Then I did the only thing I knew how to do.

I raised the microphone.

“This is Manny Gallegos, Undisclosed Skies, Episode 241, and I am looking at something in a chile field south of Hatch, New Mexico. I am looking at a craft and a, a being, and it is, uh.” I swallowed. “It is harvesting green chile.”

The alien did not look up.

I said it louder. I identified myself again, stated my coordinates, described the craft, described the being, and described the chile plants disappearing one by one into the hull. I was narrating first contact with the enthusiasm of a man who had rehearsed this moment in his bathroom mirror for half a decade.

It pulled another plant. Shook the dirt off. Placed it inside.

And it was busy.

I approached. Not fast, not slow. The way you’d approach a coyote eating out of a dumpster: interested, cautious, and fully aware that you are the least important person in this situation.

“Hi,” I said. “Hello. I’m Manny. I come in peace. That’s, uh, that’s probably your line, but I figured somebody should say it.”

Nothing.

I tried Spanish. I tried Navajo, or what I remembered of Navajo from a community college elective I mostly slept through. I tried math. I said “prime numbers” and listed a few, which in retrospect was less impressive than I’d hoped because I stalled out after twenty-three.

It moved to the next row.

Fine. If it wouldn’t talk, I’d document. I pulled out my phone and opened the camera. The screen turned into something that looked like television static had a seizure. No image, no interface, just a wall of visual noise and a high whine from the speaker that made my back teeth hum. I killed the app. Reopened it. Same thing. Turned the phone off and back on. The phone restarted, showed me my lock screen for half a second, and went black. Dead. The phone I’d charged to ninety-two percent in the truck was now a glass brick.

The recorder. The recorder had been running this whole time. I’d bought it at a pawn shop in Deming specifically for situations where primary equipment failed, which happened to me often enough that I’d started budgeting for it. I checked the playback and heard nothing but a low, steady hum, like someone dragging a cello bow across the bottom of the ocean. My voice was gone. The alien’s movements were gone. Just the hum, fat and featureless, filling the entire recording. The red light still flickered on the front. The thing thought it was working.

The notebook. I still had the notebook. I flipped it open, pulled the pencil from the spiral binding, and started sketching the craft. Three lines in, the pencil snapped. Not the lead. The pencil. The wood split lengthwise, clean down the middle, without waiting for any reason to fall apart. I stared at the two halves in my hand. I had sharpened that pencil before I left the house.

I tried the phone again. It turned on this time, which felt like progress. I opened the notes app and typed six words before the screen froze and the phone shut off for good.

“It is pulling up the.” That was my evidence. Five words and an article, reaching for a noun that never came.

No photo. No audio. No video. No sketch. Six words in a notes app on a phone that didn’t work.

Through all of this, the alien harvested chile. It didn’t react to my phone, my recorder, my broken pencil, or my increasingly loud suggestions that it hold still. It worked the rows with the patience of someone who had been doing this job since before my family name existed in this valley.

I had chased this moment all my life. I was inside it. And I had nothing to show for it except a dead phone, a broken pencil, and a recorder full of hum.

I just stood there and let the weight of it settle. Five years. Five years of driving and waiting and talking into the dark, and the one time it mattered, I couldn’t hold on to any of it. Not a frame. Not a word. I felt the back of my throat go tight, and I looked away from the alien because I didn’t want to cry in front of whatever it was.

The alien turned toward the final row of Big Jims. The longest row, the fullest, heavy with late-August fruit. And I did something that was either the bravest or the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, which in my life is a competitive category.

I stepped into the row and blocked its path.

Without a plan, I just knew that when it finished and left, I would be standing alone in a field with nothing. No proof. No story. No validation. Five years of my life would collapse into an anecdote I’d tell at parties that nobody would believe, and the parties were hypothetical because I didn’t get invited to parties.

“Wait,” I said. “Please. Just, wait.”

The alien stopped.

For the first time since I’d walked into that field, it acknowledged me. Something happened that I can’t describe with any word that would hold up in court. It didn’t speak. It didn’t project images into my mind, because that’s a movie thing and this wasn’t a movie. What it did was closer to what happens when you walk into your abuela’s kitchen and the smell of roasting chile tells you everything you need to know without a single word. You just understand. The information arrives whole, like it was always there and you just hadn’t looked at it yet.

Here is what I understood.

It had been coming here for a long time. Longer than my family. Longer than the pueblo ruins on the mesa above the field. It came for the chile the way you’d cross town for the one restaurant that makes the thing you can’t get anywhere else, except the town was a spiral arm of the Milky Way and the restaurant was a field in southern New Mexico.

Nothing else in the galaxy tastes like it. This altitude, this soil, this sun. And we just grew it. Roasted it in parking lots, stuffed it into burritos, hung it in ristras on our porches, and never once looked up from the plate.

The alien didn’t care about me. It didn’t care about my podcast, about disclosure, about whether humanity was ready for contact. It was here for the same reason my abuela drove to the farmers’ market in Hatch every August. The chile was worth the trip.

Something shifted. Not in the field, not in the sky. In me. It was in the dirt under my boots. It was in the smell that would never leave my truck. It was in every jar of roasted green that my abuela had ever pressed into my hands and told me to eat before it went bad.

I stepped aside and just watched.

It finished the last row in about ten minutes. Methodical. Calm. It loaded the final plants, and then it disappeared into craft without a sound. The craft lifted out of the field, straight up, no thrust, no roar, no displaced air. The chile leaves on the remaining plants didn’t move. It rose until it was the size of a star, and then it was a star, and then it wasn’t.

I stood in the dark, in the dirt, in a field with gaps in the rows like missing teeth.

I smelled green chile. From my truck, probably. Or from the broken stems where the plants had been pulled. Or from somewhere I couldn’t explain and didn’t need to.

After walking back through the field, I got in the truck. I didn’t call the media, post on Reddit, or phone the one friend who would’ve believed me. Believing me wasn’t the point anymore.

I drove home to Las Cruces. The sun came up over the Organs and filled the valley with a light so clean it made you understand why people stay here even when the rest of the country forgets we exist.

I sat in my truck outside my apartment for a long time before going inside. I set up the microphone and recorded the rest of Episode 241.

It wasn’t about the encounter. It was about green chile. Where it comes from, what makes it different from every other pepper on the planet, and why the people who grow it have always known that without needing to be told.

I talked about my abuela. About the way she chars the skins on the open burner and turns them with her bare fingers because she says tongs bruise the flesh. About the way the whole house smells like the thing the universe crosses light-years to collect. About the way she has never once been impressed by the sky, because she’s too busy paying attention to what’s growing out of the ground.

I didn’t mention the alien. I didn’t need to.

I called my abuela that afternoon. She asked if I was eating enough. I told her I was. She said good, the Sandias were ready, come get them Sunday.

I said I’d be there.