
My camera phone is not very good at low-light shooting, but this is what I saw when I peeked out the from behind the curtain. Pulsing lights glowed from across the street.

These photos do no justice at all to the light show. In particular, they do not show the loud sounds, color changes, and what looked like flames periodically shooting out of the object. I thought possibly there was a "pop-up" nightclub or party going on out there, but there wasn't enough other traffic. A police car with lights blazing did come by, but it appears to have been an unrelated incident.
After observing the noisy light show for a while, I decided that it was no threat to me and was able to get some sleep after it quieted down. By light of day things were clarified somewhat, and on Saturday morning there was both enough light and enough quiet that I could get close enough to take a picture of what the source of the racket was.

Here's our Mystery Machine. From the signs, I'm going to speculate that this thing is going to head up to Black Rock City, Nevada in a couple of weeks, for a stint at Burning Man. (As usual, click through the photos above for some other shots.)
Living at the jumping-off point from the Interstate for the run up to Gerlach and to Burning Man, I've almost come to expect to see oddball vehicles. I only hope that whoever is building this thing is able to safely transport it the approximately 350 miles up to BRC later this month.