THE YELLOW VOLKSWAGEN

By Tom Dongo

This experience has baffled me for over fifteen years. Until, that is, I began the study of UFOs and related phenomena.

In the spring of 1973 I was driving across the country from California to Maine. I almost always camp out on these trips. I was driving on US Highway 666 between Wilcox and Safford, Arizona. Looking for a place to camp I had followed a gravel road off Highway 666 into a remote area of the Pinaleno Mountains. I drove until I found a spot that suited me, with good views and little chance of being disturbed by other campers.

I had been there about an hour and had the camp all set up. It was about 7:00 p.m. In the distance I heard the rattle and clatter of a vehicle coming rather fast. I was surprised to see a battered rusty yellow Volkswagen Beetle coming up the old mining road. It was coming at a rate of speed I thought was far too fast for the rough, unpaved road. I was standing several hundred feet off the road and was well concealed in a thick grove of yucca plants and a variety of tall cacti.


The VW went by out on the road, trailed by an immense dust cloud. In the front seats were two men with long, dark-brown hair, who appeared to be in their early thirties. I watched the speeding yellow VW go far up into the mountains. The little car remained clearly in sight as it traveled up a broad alluvial fan at the foot of the high mountains.

I began watching the car with my binoculars. Eventually, the VW pulled up to an ancient, corrugated metal mining shack at the end of the road. The two men got out and spent fifteen or twenty minutes walking in and out and around the dilapidated metal shack. I watched them get back into their VW, and the car quickly resumed that reckless rate of speed back down the long, sloping hillside. A tremendous rooster tail of dust plumed skyward behind the little speck of yellow.

In minutes I lowered the binoculars, for the yellow car was now easily seen with the naked eye. I was growing uneasy, as I began to suspect that the two men were up to no good. I also knew that from the angle of their present location they could easily see my red pickup with its white camper shell. I was not prepared for what happened next.

The car, going at that breakneck speed, came hurtling down the hill. I could by then hear it as well as see it. The yellow car dipped down into a shallow gully, and for a moment I lost sight of it. I waited, watching. Several seconds went by while I stood looking and waiting for the little car and its two occupants to reappear at the top of the hill. But nothing happened. There was only silence. The mammoth dust cloud caught up to the shallow gully and began to slowly dissipate in the absolute silence of the desert.

A hundred thoughts raced through my mind. I became more and more confused as each minute went by. I knew that at the high speed the car was traveling, even if it had hit something or the driver had locked up the brakes, the momentum of the car would have carried it over the top of that hill. I started to experience panic. I decided they had seen my truck and had somehow stopped. Perhaps at that very moment they were stalking me thought the cactus in the growing darkness.

Fearful and confused, I did not sleep that night, but instead spent the night sitting on a hillside above my camper with my high-powered rifle across my knees. There was enough light that night so that I had a wide field of view. In the morning I cautiously made my way up to where I had last seen the car and its two occupants. I found nothing. There were no skidmarks, no wreckage, and no side roads where a vehicle could have turned off. Not only that, the banks at the side of the road at that spot were too high even for a four-wheel drive to cross.

I spent years relating that story to interested listeners in an effort to find anyone who might have a logical explanation. Now I am convinced that the incident was somehow UFO-related.

I have read of people in other places who have had similar unnerving sightings. It's quite an experience to witness something like that, especially alone in a desert twenty miles from the nearest telephone.
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From the book Alien Tide by Tom Dongo

Could it be the little VW went into another dimension? Or were they time travelers who had come back after something they left in the shack? Intriguing!