Shatner Says He Followed A Figure In Silver To A Road

The dirt bike dropped into the trench and William Shatner, the Star Trek actor, went down with it. He lay pinned under 100 to 150 pounds of metal while the rest of the group rode on without noticing.

Shatner had become a devoted weekend dirt-bike rider, trucking bikes out to Palmdale and the dry mountains 40 or 50 miles outside Los Angeles. Those hills were pocked with old prospector diggings, trenches about three feet wide and six feet long cut by men searching for gold.

Riders had an understood rule, he said: each person watched the rider behind him, so no one was left alone. The man ahead of Shatner did not look back, and the group disappeared into the desert, leaving him stranded in heavy leathers, gloves, and a helmet in 90 to 100 degree sun.

He wrestled the bike upright, only to find that it would not start. He said he could not think clearly, caught between keeping the leathers on and risking heat sickness, and taking them off and risking sunburn.

Then he looked up and saw a man dressed in silver going over the ridge. Shatner pushed his dead bike through the sand and followed for about half an hour, in heat he later put at over 100 degrees, until he reached a road.

He got on the bike, coasted about a mile to a gasoline station, and a man at the station fixed a wire and got it running. Shatner said he never saw the silver-clad man again, saying, "That guy didn't have wings, but he was dressed in silver."

In his 2008 memoir, Shatner wrote that the man in silver was a part he had made up for television and had been trying to take back ever since. He told the desert story with the silver figure in it anyway.