I love a mystery.

When my sisters and I visited Charleston, S.C., one of the first activities we signed up for was the midnight walking ghost tour.

We looked in vain, but we didn’t see any ghosts staring out of windows or lurking in trees.

Likewise for touring The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, La. We searched for the ghost girl in the window and for strange etchings on a mirror, but we didn’t see anything unusual.

Despite not seeing anything that would even come close to being classified as paranormal, I always hoped I’d see something other worldly.

I might’ve gotten my wish.

My husband and I were heading to Louisiana for our Cajun Christmas with the Hebert family. We left the Houston area late in the day, so we were driving across the Atchafalaya Basin at night.

The Atchafalaya Basin is the nation’s largest river swamp covering over a million miles of hardwoods, waterways and inlets. The basin bridge is about 18 miles long and allows travelers to cross the basin on a raised highway.

As we were cruising along, I looked up and saw two bright lights in the sky. At first, I thought they were part of a water or cell phone tower because they were too far apart to belong to an airplane.

But I realized they were moving, and I knew cell phone tower lights didn’t move. About that time, I asked my husband if he saw the lights, and he said he’d been watching them for a while.

As the lights got closer, I could see a panel of lights in between the two headlights, and then the lights took a right-turn and disappeared.

“Did you see that?” we said at the same time.

I had my cell phone on my lap but didn’t think I could get a picture to come out at night through the windshield at 60 miles per hour.

As we were trying to figure out what we saw, two more sets of lights appeared to the north, traveling just as quickly as the first set of lights.

That’s when I realized we weren’t seeing an airplane, a weather balloon or a helicopter.

We were seeing a UFO.

We’d seen three unidentified flying objects. I didn’t say they were alien spacecraft – they were unidentified. They were flying and they were objects.

I checked social media to see if anyone had posted anything about seeing lights over the basin.

Nothing.

I checked the news stations.

Nothing.

My husband did a bit more in-depth checking the next morning and read that the state of Louisiana was trying out drones on the west side of Baton Rouge and over the Atchafalaya to check on traffic, but we saw these drones at night over the water.

Common sense tells me that we saw weather drones or aircraft being used by oil companies or the state. Common sense tells me that just because we saw some lights in the sky doesn’t mean there were aliens flying above us.

There’s no way secret activities were taking place late at night over a sparsely populated swamp area where nobody could see what the government was up to.

But the part of my brain that wants to believe in ghosts, haunted houses and unexplained phenomenon in this world wants to believe we saw a UFO.

So I’m calling it like I saw it – check “seeing a UFO” off the bucket list.

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.