http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/travel/abandoning-doubt-in-sedona-arizona-.html 2015-01-01 17:58:58 Abandoning Doubt in Sedona, Arizona A couple choose to celebrate their love with a leap of faith in a mystical land. === While the idea of renewing your vows on a tropical beach at sunset like a pair of histrionic telenovela stars may sound romantic to some, my husband, Sacha, and I found the idea of celebrating our anniversary that way, well, boring. But we are not the most traditional couple. Five years ago, we surprised several dozen guests at our Upper Manhattan apartment by getting married at what we told our friends and family was an engagement party. Paying tribute to the 1980s hip-hop culture that reared us, we improvised, or free-styled, our vows in the form of searing one-liners that were padded with sincere toasts about love, friendship and devotion. Needless to say it was sublimely intimate, a small victory in a world where social networking made maintaining the element of surprise a near mission impossible. It was in this spirit of spontaneity, adventure and mostly curiosity that we decided one evening, after coming across a rerun of one of our guilty pleasures, “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel, while channel surfing, how we would mark the 11th year (we dated for six before getting hitched) of our own cosmic journey together. In the moments after an animated talking head with a tousled mane said something about an indigenous petroglyph seeming to depict intergalactic travel, it occurred to us: We should go on an alien adventure. Now, before you dismiss us as a couple of conspiracy-minded, ham-radio-listening extremists, let me explain why this went from something you nervously giggle about during the commercial break to a course of action. We had recently spoken about wanting to spend more time traveling within the United States, especially in the ostensibly quixotic Southwest. And I knew from researching the region and from indigenous-American folklore that Arizona was considered by many to be an ethereal place, a spiritual vortex if you will. We would be exploring the world beyond our perception — terrestrial and astral — but essentially discarding cynicism to focus on a belief system that sounds as fantastic as the idea that soul mates actually exist. Not a bad way to mark an anniversary. It took only a few minutes online to find just the right thing: a ­ As we made our way Optimism and a spirit of inquiry fueled this trip: Sacha and I have never seen — or even looked for — a U.F.O. hovering above our apartment building in New York City, where light pollution and Godzilla-size cranes block out all but the brightest stars. But U.F.O.s are an article of faith in Phoenix. Thousands of people from all walks of life in the city and others in Sonora, Mexico, claim to have witnessed something on March 13, 1997. That something has come to be known as the Phoenix Lights. The eyewitnesses included doctors, a local councilwoman and, eventually, Fife Symington, then the governor, who initially mocked his constituents about the sighting, only to apologize a decade later. Mr. Symington finally admitted to seeing, as he wrote in an Arizonans are hardly the only folks in America who believe that we aren’t alone in the universe. According to a 2012 The closer we got to our destination, the more energized and open I became. Maybe it was the altitude playing tricks on me (Sedona is 4,500 feet above sea level), but as we rolled into the city I felt as if the red rocks formed a welcoming embrace. The breathtaking scenery, at least from where we stood, rivaled the majesty of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Our hotel was in Uptown Sedona, the local equivalent of Woodstock in New York, but this version was teeming with souvenir shops and people hawking indigenous products and spiritual services. During our drive, I had missed a phone call from Ms. Carlsberg, who wanted us to arrive at her headquarters earlier than planned so that she could school us on a few things before our journey into the desert. Sacha and I were stoked. Djali was not. “If they do exist,” she said, looking out the window into the sky, “I’m not sure I want to know.” ­ The U.F.O. Vortex Tours I walked up to him and introduced myself. “I’m glad you guys showed up,” he said. “I’ve been sitting here for a while waiting and waiting, and was beginning to think I made this trip for nothing.” The man, who told us he was a landscaper from California named Jude — the Roman Catholic patron saint of desperate causes — was a believer. He wanted to see, was determined to see, something. Ms. Carlsberg’s brochure guaranteed we would, in capital letters: “We always see U.F.O.s!” This guy, I told Sacha, was going to make our jaunt all the more memorable. Just as our new friend started educating us about the vast array of extraterrestrial races, Ms. Carlsberg showed up carrying a bag of equipment and ushered us inside her modest headquarters. It looked more like a living room than an office, with a comfortable couch and the books Ms. Carlsberg wrote, one about her experiences as an abductee and an illustrated collection of edited stories about other people’s galactic encounters, scattered on a coffee table. We watched Ms. Carlsberg, a handsome blond woman, as she took out several pairs of military-grade night-vision goggles from her gear bag and delivered an abridged version of her biography in a straightforward manner. She summarized a fascinating account of how in 1988 her sudden relationship with nonhuman entities began, a narrative she delivered in a no-nonsense manner that suggested she thought she had already won us over. It happened after a long day working on the set of “Baywatch” as the exclusive on-set photographer, she said. A large craft was hovering above the horizon of the Malibu beachfront home she shared with her then-boyfriend, Greg. (We’d have to buy a copy of her book, “Beyond My Wildest Dreams: Diary of a U.F.O. Abductee,” she said, for further details.) “O.K., so enough about me, what brought After a tutorial on the night vision goggles — we would be able to see more than 70,000 times clearer than the naked eye — and instructions on alerting one another anytime we spotted something in the sky, Ms. Carlsberg got to the most important bit of guidance: how not to confuse other things with a U.F.O. In addition to airplane lights, which flash red and white and appear at a relatively low altitude, there would be shooting stars, planets, satellites and birds, and depending on the clarity, maybe we would spot the Milky Way galaxy and its neighbor, Andromeda. (Under no circumstances, “are you to point the laser in the direction of a plane or each other,” she said, referring to the pointer, which she carefully guarded). What was a surefire sign that what we had succeeded in spotting was an alien spacecraft? The light emanating from within the vessel, usually shaped like an orb, triangle or tube: It pulsates. Minutes later, we were in a pitch-black expanse helping Ms. Carlsberg unload plastic folding chairs, bags with gear and a small boombox that played a new age score that Sacha and I could have done without. Looking upward at the sky through the night vision goggles was spectacular and in itself worth the $90-per-person fee. Before Ms. Carlsberg was able to slip on her goggles, our U.F.O.-enthusiast spotted something that turned out to be a shooting star. Ms. Carlsberg pointed out constellations. Sacha and I said little, standing close to each other and peering up at what looked like an inverted highway. And then we started seeing things that we simply couldn’t explain. “Look up here!” Sacha shouted, taking the laser from Ms. Carlsberg and flashing it in a direction where two objects were pulsating a bright light. Sacha laughed as I watched, dumbstruck by the two objects that floated above us to join two other dimmer ones, ultimately forming a square. As they floated away together like a group of synchronized swimmers, Ms. Carlsberg shouted up into the sky, “Woo-hoo!” Minutes later, I spotted a large object pulsating brightly like a heartbeat in the distance, gliding quietly through the sky. The light made it look like a round cotton ball. “What in the —!” I yelled. We were told to quickly remove our goggles. When I flashed the laser in its direction, the object — it was not an airplane, or satellite, a bird or a huge drone — dimmed its lights and shot up through the sky before it started brightly pulsating again, then floating away. We all studied the object quietly as Ms. Carlsberg, fired up by the sighting, gave us a spirited explanation about the differences between the larger, more conservative objects, the “mothers,” and their smaller and sometimes more playful counterparts, or “teenagers.” The smaller ones, she said, sometimes responded by flashing their lights. There would be plenty of time to second-guess what we were seeing. But not that night, when we were swept up in the sense of euphoria that came with abandoning doubt. In approximately two hours, we counted about 40 unidentifiable things flying high above us. We never checked with the military to see if there was an explanation because that would have seemed a surrender to skepticism. There we were, just four of us there, necks craned, hoping to catch a glimpse of what might lie beyond our planet in this vast world. You had to open yourself to the ludicrous, be a fool, so to speak, to have faith, in life and in love. When it came time to pack up and go, Ms. Carlsberg thanked whatever it was that we saw, or thought we saw, for making the cameos.