It is one of the strangest things I have ever seen, and for a guy who grew up in Los Angeles, that’s saying a lot. Sure, you can find the same sort of things in YouTube videos and horror-films, but there’s a big difference between seeing something on screen and through the front wind-shield of your car.

I was in the Minnesota boondocks. While the ‘land of a thousand lakes’ may be pictured as some kind of polka-dot Vienna, it is actually more than 50% fields. In the summer, you can drive along the highways and backways for hours and there’ll be houses, silos, farm equipment, and the occasional old wreck at the head of some dirt road – but people? Not unless you’re lucky. Maybe Minnesotans turn themselves into starlings in the summer time. There were certainly plenty of those blue-black, yellow-eyed birds around.

But back to what happened. I had been in Minnesota for about four hours. The sky had grown slowly grey-blue in the East and red-pink in the West as the big sun sank behind a bank of clouds like fuzzy skyscrapers. I was driving through softly-rolling fields of summer-green crops. It was at a junction of railroad and highway that the strange event happened.

For a while, there had been trundling along behind me a dusty, navy-blue pick-up. As I neared the junction and braked for the stop-sign, I saw two people, one on either side of the highway.

The left one was a kid on a bike, wearing a yellow t-shirt and black soccer shorts. The right one was a man in jeans and a grey, Old Navy hoodie. The hood was up. When the kid on the bike saw me slow down, he started across. I stopped fully to reassure him I had no intention of running him over. The man in grey did not move.

A rubbery shriek slid through the air as the blue pick-up swerved around and past me. He must have had somewhere to be. The kid was directly in his path. There was no time to react on anyone’s part – or so you’d think.

Then it happened. My eyes had strayed to the man in grey, and just as the pick-up was about to plaster that kid all over the tracks, he moved. Well, not exactly. He didn’t move in the sense that he started walking or running. He didn’t start doing anything. One moment he was standing to the right and the next he was a streak of shadow which zipped across the highway, took the kid with it, and reappeared, completely stationary, on the safe side of the road.

The pick-up roared on. I stared through my window, asking myself if I had drunk anything and not realized it. Do Minnesotans put alcohol in their gas-station coffee? I later confirmed that they do not.

But somehow, that kid had been rescued from certain death, faster than light, and here’s the strangest thing.

The man in grey? Gone.