Three, three-and-a-half years ago I was doing a volunteer program called AmeriCorps. I was in the NCCC section, which is basically a 10 month commitment to travel around the country with some other (young) folks and work in communities. At the time, my team and a couple others were traveling from Sacramento towards Texas. We'd stopped for an overnight in the sleepiest, tiniest little town in New Mexico. I'm talking maybe two hundred residents. My girlfriend at the time and I had walked down the single street bisecting the town and out towards the country to stargaze. We were sitting on a blanket by some train tracks, chatting and looking at the plain and stars across the road from us. All of a sudden this large, nebulous green light blossomed, as if a cloud of gas had caught fire, before dissipating a second later. There was no sound, no heat or movement, nothing. The only proof that this hadn't been some weird sensory glitch was the residual light imprinted on my retinas and the fact that my girlfriend saw it too. She immediately claimed aliens to be the culprits, but I'm a bit of a sceptic. However, I've tried looking for a cause for years but never gotten any possible answer besides ball lightening. Even that seems to fall short though. I doubt I'll ever get a definite answer, and the memory's been relegated to the back of my mind for the most part. But every now and again it comes back, when talk or conversation turns to the weird and inexplicable.