My husband finished eating and cleared his throat.

“I think I saw a rip in the matrix today.”

It had only been a few weeks since we had finally gotten around to renting a video of The Matrix, so we immediately grasped his point. We were intrigued by the concept that what we think of as reality is mere scenery placed between our eyes and some harsh, unthinkable landscape to keep us entertained and docile while nameless forces use us for unspeakable purposes.

It happened on his way to work. He enters an Interstate highway via a long ramp in fairly empty countryside. Just as he was beginning to pick up speed, he noticed a large, triangular shape on the right side of the ramp. Each side was twelve to fifteen feet long and it was bright yellow. It seemed to be standing a little above the grass, unsupported, near what he described as a “funny-looking bush.”

“It sounds as if it could have been a hang glider or a really big kite that was caught on the top wire of a fence,” I said.

 “I thought of that.” S___ shook his head. “I got a good enough look at it to see that it had no depth; no texture at all. It looked as if someone had taken an X-acto knife and sliced a triangular hole out of the scenery, exposing an expanse of flat color beneath.”

We could think of no response to this except to file it away for future reference. A few weeks later, school ended and our teenaged son began travelling with his dad to and from his summer job. It wasn’t long until he had a weird story of his own to relate at dinner.

“We had almost reached the exit ramp and I was looking out the window,” he said. “In a grove of trees, I saw what looked like two magnifying glass lenses standing, one above the other. The larger was on the bottom, and it was three or maybe even four feet in diameter. I could see the grass and trees through both ‘lenses,’ distorted.”

None of us could think of any explanation for this phenomenon, either.

A few weeks later, I was listening to Coast to Coast A.M. while at my job on graveyard shift. Mike Siegle was host and he took a call during an open lines segment from a man who sounded nervous. The caller admitted that he had been afraid to tell anyone about what he was about to say, for fear he would be ridiculed. After Mike reassured him, the man stated that he had had encounters with beings whose bodies were transparent. “Their bodies refract light just like a lens.”

I stopped typing and stared at the radio with my mouth wide open. “That sounds like what T___ saw!” After I repeated this story at the dinner table the following evening, we came up with a theory.

If you were going to establish an interdimensional portal on Earth, where would you place it? One good location might be near a busy highway interchange, where drivers would be preoccupied with watching high-speed traffic around them, rather than odd things standing still near the roadside. This particular interchange features long, gently curving ramps both on and off. I’ve seen it from the air and it looks quite distinctive. The “funny-looking bush” my husband mentioned was pointed out to me later. It is an Eastern Red Cedar that was cut about four feet above the ground--a juniper pruned by a rank amateur—again, distinctive enough to be used as a landmark, but not unusual enough in its surroundings to set off an alarm.

These strange sightings took place in the spring and summer of 2000. Since then, a church was built a few dozen yards from the spot where the triangle was seen. The funny-looking bush is no longer there. Since the point of land where it grew is too narrow to accommodate a building, it is a mystery why the bush was removed. When I use that entrance ramp, I recall the stories and look uphill at the new church, wondering if the presence of its congregation is repelling the otherworldly forces that may have been at work in that area, or if those same churchgoers have their own bizarre tales to tell by now. No one in our family has noticed any more oddities.

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