I am in the front seat of the vibrating ribcage of a minibus. I check Google Maps and realise we are tearing through a highway that is not on the blue line I have been trusting. I lean forward and ask the driver if he can let me out. He pulls over onto the road’s shoulder. To my left is a crispy pork shop.
In the glass cabinet, rectangles of blistered pork belly hang from hooks. The skin is lacquered and bubbled. A woman stands behind the counter. She is wearing a PVC, red-and-white polka dot apron. She asks if I am alone and where I am trying to go.
“The dam.”
“No buses,” she replies.
I ask her if there are any songthaews (“two-bench” trucks, often red, used as public transportation in Thailand) that might pass. She shakes her head. So, I order her pork. It arrives in neat cubes alongside ten thick columns of cucumber, and a small ceramic bowl filled with a dark syrup. I dip a piece of pork into the sauce and press it against a slice of cucumber and place it in my mouth. It is a shock of heat and fat and sweetness, and the skin shatters under my teeth like stepping through a thin ice puddle.
I hear a truck pull up to the stand. A man, about my Dad’s age, enters. He is wearing an oyster-shell-white shirt tucked into dustcoloured pants. His pant legs have centre seams so violently ironed in they are holding him upright. I abandon my plate to ask him if he speaks English and if he knows how to get to the dam from here.
“Sure,” he says, “it’s easy. You just walk twenty metres, turn down that road, and then walk for five hours. Why do you want to go there?”
“There’s a UFO believers meet up today.”
“What? Tell me more. Let’s go.”
I eat my last two pieces of pork and cucumber in one oversized bite and wheel my suitcase (orange and pink, garish and teenage) over to him. His ute is black and glossy, like obsidian, and reflects the roadside weeds. On the passenger seat is a leather briefcase. He moves it to the back seat to make room for me.
On the twenty one kilometre drive, he asks how I found out about the UFOs here, and then mistakes the car for a confession booth – me for a Father, and today for Sunday – and begins unspooling the tragedy of his bloodline. His parents: how they lived in a Satanic cult in Germany. His brother: how he spent years plotting to kill their parents, and then did. I stare out the window at the blur of roadside trees and do what you have to do when you are in a car with a man you have just met. I agree: in nods, and other sounds of understanding (“Really? Wow. I’m so sorry”) and hope he is not feeling an urge to lock the doors and take a sharp left towards the jungle.
I ask to be dropped near a row of small bungalows I spot from the road. He obliges and promises to find me at the dam later. I negotiate the accommodation for the night down to 700 baht, and they show me to my room. Cream tiles, just mopped, with walls the colour of papaya flesh. I turn the air conditioning down to an indulgent 16 degrees and lie on the bed watching the tassels hanging from the bottom of the polyester curtains sway.
The walk to the dam is half an hour. There is no footpath, so I face the oncoming cars, and occasionally have to step backwards into the brittle edge of asphalt as pickup trucks whip around the corners. I pass a house made entirely of repurposed windows. Sweat slides down the seam of my spine.
The final stretch runs alongside a moat of still water, rimmed with frangipani trees in various states of bloom: some plush fresh white, some yellowing at the edges, and some already fallen onto the ground below like discarded high school dance corsages.
Then I see it, the dam, Khun Dan Prakan Chon. It is, I read last night, proudly “the world’s largest Rolled Compacted Concrete Dam” (whatever that means). It is two-and-a-half kilometres long and 93 metres high. The concrete is grey and streaked with darker mineral veins bleeding down. Its stepped façade ascends in narrow increments toward the sky where golf carts drive along its thin edge like ants along a ruler. The dam is releasing a steady stream of water into the reservoir. Someone, fully clothed, scrambles down the incline, past lily pads, into the water.
Scaffolding stands in cruciform shapes with floodlights strapped to them. I arrive at 3:35pm – the event begins at four. I duck under a barrier. I am the only one inside without a lanyard. In the centre is a metallic ‘UFO’. In front, a circle of thick-tripoded telescopes and their caregivers, all men. They adjust some dials and squint.
Food stalls and emergency bunkers line the edges. Pad kaprow, and coconuts; cans of Coca-Cola bobbing in inflatable pools of ice. I catch a lungful of fish sauce and charred sugar, and lime juice hitting crushed chilli. Cold oil meets a hot wok with a pissed-off hiss.
Like any well-organised gathering, there is a first aid tent. A woman with eyelash extensions and painted freckles stands over an industrial air-cooling unit. She slits open a bag of ice and pours it into a tray at the base. I have seen these machines before: the warm air of the world is pulled in from behind, dragged over the ice, and released at the front. She lets me stand beside her and share the cold air. Her navy scrubs are embroidered with ‘EMT’. Behind a clear plastic sheet lies her patient: a silicon alien figure, on a hospital bed, attached to an IV drip.
I clock three people wearing silver metallic spandex. One in the bodycon dress that I swear I begged my Mother for, at 14, from Supré. I count two graphic tees printed with Agent Fox Mulder’s UFO poster in The X-Files “I Want to Believe”.
Most people, however, are not in galactic costume. Two teenage girls with long hair and blush pink shirts tell me they came here straight from school. They have secured their outpost for the evening, lying down at the reservoir’s edge, looking up.
A woman walks up to me and presses an A4 photo frame into my hands. Under glass is an over-Xeroxed black-and-white image. It is of a body on its back, arms splayed out, eyes closed (sunbathing? sleeping? crucified? dead?). Each hand has four long fingers.
She tells me she has seen UFOs here many times.
“Because this is Thailand’s Area 51?” I ask.
“Yes!” she says.
The surrounding mountains of Khao Kala cup the dam, creating a backdrop for the “mysterious objects” reported hovering overthe water or slipping between the ridgelines. This spot is known as “Area 51 of Thailand” and first made headlines in 1997 through the accounts of Sergeant Major Cherd Chuensamnaun. He believed that aliens use this hill as a “portal.”
The Thai government decided to pour money into this subculture by funding this believers’ meetup, for the first time, including, yes, building that metal UFO. I need confirmation on this fact, and I ask the woman where the UFO came from.
“The government built it.”
“A government-funded UFO?” I ask.
“Yes. Constance, why did you come all this way?”
I want to tell her about my devotion to the peripheries. Attending and competing in long hair competitions in Lithuania, and living in a medieval village where no one wore clothes in rural Spain. About how I am drawn to people who believe in something a little too much. That I needed to see, with my own eyes, how a state might fund a UFO-seeking subculture. How the miraculous can become a line item in a national budget…
Instead, I answer, “I wanted to see if something would happen.”
A man slices a mango for me. He moves his knife through its skin, then body, and it lands on a white polystyrene tray. I ask for prik glua (salt, pounded dried chilli, sugar) to dip each piece in. He presses a toothpick into one of the cubes and hands it over. There is a tower of plastic stools in the colours of mandarin, clear sky, and omelette. I choose the blue to sit on.
The band is about to go on stage. They “make music for the aliens.” One plays a reed flute. He tells me about the keynote speaker (a former Thai romantic drama star, turned Formula One driver, turned UFO YouTuber) and points out other Thai UFO influencers whose social media presence is dedicated to documenting and analysing sightings.
I follow the scent of popcorn to a stall. Two scoops go into a container with a drop of green food colouring; a quick shake, and it’s poured into a paper bag. A girl with long acrylic nails sidles up beside me. I ask her what she has on her lips. They are red and glossy like the strawberry tanghulu I had seen on the streets of Chengdu. She pulls out a small glass bottle full of blood-red liquid.
“Uthaitip! You can get it at any pharmacy.”
She says that outside this subculture, “most Thai people have no idea the event is happening, but our community have been dreaming of this for years.”
Her head snaps toward the stage as a woman from the tourism board appears. She is wearing a black lamé cape draped around her shoulders, and her hair is set in a precise, sugar-spun helmet. Her voice booms through a speaker.
My phone screen is glowing with the jagged real-time translation
[8:59 PM]: YOU HAVE COME HERE
[8:59 PM]: BECAUSE YOU BELIEVE.
