March 19, 2011 I took a late night drive with three high school friends. We were bored and felt restless. We drove from Modesto, where we all lived, to Knights Ferry, about 27 miles east. Knights Ferry is a tiny little village in the foothills where the Central Valley meets the Sierra Nevada's. Really cute little gold rush era town - during the day, that is. We arrived around 11pm, and found the place eerily desolate. The purpose of the outing was just for the drive itself, so we weren’t surprised to find nothing going on at that hour, but we did get sort of creeped out by the stillness. It’s cliche, but the place was a total ghost town. There aren’t even street lights along the main road so it's just a bunch of dark, shut up buildings, but there was a super bright full moon shining overhead and illuminated everything. We parked at the end of the Main Street near an abandoned mill from the 19th century. Anyone interested in the exact spot for reference can paste (37.8203405,-120.6653513) into google. The driver friend, F and I decided to get out there and get a better view of the open sky and take in the quiet night. Our other two friends, J and K, stayed in the car. They were freaked out by the quiet, dark, isolated setting. The road is a bit elevated above the mill and the adjacent recreation area along the Stanislaus River. F and I walked to the edge of the road. When we reached the waist high wooden guard rail we saw two figures standing nearby, probably 30-40 feet away near the mill building. These figures were slender, featureless, and solid gray, it was as if they were wearing those skin tight colored body suits you can get at a costume store. They had no faces, no identifiable marks, appeared to have no clothes on, no genitalia or breasts, no hair, nothing. Just a head, torso, arms, and legs, and about the size an average adult human. And I can’t attribute their lack of features to darkness because the moon was brightly shining down on them, they were completely exposed in the clearing with no shadows obscuring them. We could see them plain as day, and they almost seemed like they were slightly glowing. I don’t know if that was just an illusion from their light color reflecting moonlight, or if my eyes were playing tricks on me. But just as we laid eyes on them they turned toward us. they had been facing each other but made a quarter pivot in their standing position towards us, and they did it in perfect unison, like they had been in conversation but then noticed our presence at the same as we noticed them. Even though they had no eyes or face, we could feel they were looking at us. We looked back at them for what was probably less than 4 seconds, before F and I looked at each other. Adrenaline kicked in and both instinctively turned and ran back to the car. We jumped in and peeled out of there, scaring J and K in the process. From their position in the car they were unable to see the figures. F and I recalled to them what we had seen as we sped out of town and had identical descriptions. We both saw the same physical characteristics, movements, and strange glow. We debated back and forth for a long time trying to rationalize what they were, but could never feel totally convinced by any of conclusions. I later fell into an internet rabbit hole about paranormal experiences and found posts from other people that had seen UFOs over Knights Ferry over the years, so now I lovingly refer to the experience as my first alien encounter. I don’t know if that’s definitively what we saw, and there’s no way to ever know. But they did feel or appear to be extraterrestrial. Perhaps they were something else, I truly don't know. Every once in a while I check in with F to make sure I didn't imagine the whole thing but to this day he is as strong in his convictions as I am about what we saw.