A New Reason to Watch the Skies?
The Fine Line Between What Israel and What Is Not
Keeping Tabs Weekly, Spring 2024
In 2015, a young Israeli woman was taken into custody pursuing what her family described to the media as a sightseeing photographic pilgrimage to the Makhtesh Ramon in the Negev desert.
Privately, however, they told a different story.
Keeping Tabs Weekly spoke this year with an anonymous family source who confirmed that the young woman has been in hiding for nearly a decade now. However, she will soon be ready to tell her story, the source revealed, and what she might describe could uncover an international secret.
According to an article in the English-language Jerusalem Post, at the time, officials from the Ramon Nature Reserve and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority chose not to comment further on the detainment of nineteen-year-old Sara Attias, who was described as “disoriented” when she and her personal drone were “rescued” from the desert.
“But she did not need to be ‘rescued,’” the anonymous family source said. “Sara knew what she was doing. She knew what she would see. And to this day, ten years later, they have not returned her drone. There is a cabal in the government that doesn’t want any of us to know the truth.”
That truth, according to the Attias family, was that Sara Attias went in search of the celestial bird Ziz, a mythological beast akin to a leviathan in the sky. Legends say that Ziz is so enormous, it blocks the very light of the sun with its wingspan and protects the land below from wind and weather. It featured in stories told thousands of years ago and has since become the subject of Israeli folklore, a guardian with fantastical capabilities.
On that sunny afternoon, Ziz, the family said, found Sara.
A year after the incident, a trio of still images sent from her drone to a laptop in her car was released to the media by Attias’s family, who insisted Sara was just “mapping” the region when her drone was attacked.
The first image shows a dazzling display of blinding colors, and in their midst is the recognizable shape of an enormous feather. The second image suggests the drone was attacked in midflight by a flying shape of unnatural proportions. By the third image, the sky has gone unnaturally dark, and after that, no further images were transmitted to the laptop.
“Ziz was taken by surprise,” the family source claimed. “The drone was unwelcome.”
Hikers later recovered a mysterious card along the flight trajectory of Attias’s drone. The card, which the hikers described as blank on one side with an odd pattern on the other, was taken as evidence by the Parks Authority. The Attias family, confirming that the card belongs to Sara, has since sued for its return, but the courts are slow. They refused to describe the card’s purpose or function.
“Sara has a story to tell about Ziz,” the family source promised. “When she is ready, everyone will be faced with a new reality. Legends live among us. You will see.”
Until then, Keeping Tabs Weekly will be standing by.
