Blogtrek

Close Encounters on the Highway

Lately I have been noticing more and more strange arrangements of lights on cars on the highway. For most of my life, cars had two headlights on their front, plus maybe orange parking lights, and two taillights. In the 1970's, I watched the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which extraterrestrials make a roundabout arrival to our planet. In one scene in the movie, someone driving on the road gets a tailgater, a car following too closely. There is nothing much you can do about this. You can keep your distance from the car following but you can't make the other guy behind you keep his distance. So the guy stops at a stop sign and motions for him to go around. The lights behind the vehicle then move to the right as the car goes around our hero's car. The same thing happens again; he gets another tailgater. Once again he stops at a stop sign and motions for him to go around. Instead, the lights go up! This is no ordinary car. It's an extraterrestrial visitor. Other car-like vehicles also appear, and some of these look weird with unusual patterns of lights.

And so do some of the cars I see on the highway today. The most common weird pattern seems to be four white headlights on front. That is not the usual pattern. There should be only two headlights. I suppose the extra two headlights, near the ground, are to cut through the fog, but they also make the vehicle look like something out of the movie. So I call them "close encounters". I have included this word on my nonword page. I also find them annoying, as close encounters are almost always too bright for my eyes. So I flick my brights at them to signal to them to turn off their close encounters lights. They may think their brights are on, but that is the only way I can signal them. So if you see someone flicking their brights at you, check to see if you have your brights on, but also check to see if you have close encounters lights on, and turn them off, for I don't want to think that you are from some galaxy far, far away.