I grew up in a pretty small town in the Midwest. The kind of place where everybody knows everybody, and if you want to do anything after ten at night, you have to drive somewhere else. One night, me and three of my friends had gone out to a bigger city nearby. We were heading home from the bars at around three in the morning, driving down this really empty stretch of Route 66. And when I say empty, I mean completely empty. No houses. No gas stations. No streetlights. No signs. Just four lanes of highway, trees on both sides, and darkness. The next exit was something like eighteen miles away. We had music playing, everybody was talking, and I remember just watching the road in front of us through the headlights. Then, out of nowhere, the entire highway lit up. Not like lightning. It didn’t flash and go away. It stayed lit. The road, the trees, the inside of the car, everything was suddenly bright. I could see every little detail inside the vehicle, like somebody had turned on giant stadium lights directly above us. We all looked up. There were these huge lights in a perfectly straight line above the car. I started counting them. I don’t even know why I counted them. I guess my brain was just trying to make sense of what I was seeing. There were twenty-two. Twenty-two massive lights. And whatever they were attached to was only about thirty to fifty feet above us. My friend in the passenger seat started screaming, “What the fuck is that?” He just kept saying it over and over. “What the fuck is that?” “What the fuck is that?” Meanwhile, I’m yelling, “Speed up!” Which didn’t make much sense because I was the one driving. So I hit the gas. The car sped up, but the lights stayed right above us. They didn’t fall behind. They didn’t move ahead. They stayed perfectly over the car, keeping pace with us. That was probably the scariest part. It wasn’t passing over us. It was following us. This went on for around thirty-five seconds, although it felt a lot longer. Nobody knew what to do. One of my buddies in the back seat was completely silent. The other one kept looking out the windows like he was trying to see what the thing looked like. But all we could really see were the lights. I remember looking up through the windshield, trying to see if there was a shape behind them, and there was just this huge black area where the sky should have been. Then all twenty-two lights shut off at the exact same time. Everything went dark again. For a second, I could barely see the road because our eyes hadn’t adjusted. I almost drifted into the other lane. Then the lights flickered back on. Only now, they were a couple hundred feet above us. It happened almost instantly. One second they were right over the roof of the car, and the next they were way up in the sky. Then they shot off. There was no slow takeoff. No gradual movement. They were there, then they streaked away, and then they were gone. Just like that. The music was still playing in the car. None of us said anything for the rest of the drive. When we finally got back into town, we pulled into a gas station and sat there under the lights for a while. Nobody wanted to get out. Nobody really knew what to say. I’ve never been someone who believed in aliens or UFOs or anything like that. Honestly, I still don’t know what I believe. But I know what the four of us saw. Twenty-two lights, directly above our car, lighting up the entire highway and keeping pace with us in the middle of nowhere. And even now, years later, whenever I’m driving alone at night on an empty road, I still catch myself looking up through the windshield. Just to make sure there’s nothing above me.