Sep 29 2009
The Y Files
[Still in travel mode -- and so I offer something I wrote a few years ago, but never posted/published.]
The first time I encountered a UFO, I was fourteen years old. It came whizzing toward me fast and low and hit me in the knee. The collision with my knee brought the unidentified flying object to a dead halt. Unidentified it was no longer. I’m sad to report that it was not a Roswell weather balloon. That wouldn’t have hurt as much. When the tears cleared from my eyes, I discovered I had been struck by a Dr. Scholl’s wooden clog, size 7. It was my sister’s. The left shoe had been propelled at me by my younger brother, with whom I had been fighting.
My knee was bruised for weeks. UFOs can really be dangerous.
The second time I encountered a UFO I was on a backpacking trip in the mountains of Vermont. A friend of mine, Walt, and I were making our way along a soggy trail, deep in the forest. The trees were dripping, and the stones that punctuated the trail were damp and slippery. Walt had recently taken up the hobby of moss and fungi identification. As we walked he kept his eye out for new species.
Walt suddenly cried, “Oh my god!” He crept under pine limbs and knelt in a low spot beside the trail. I followed. With great excitement he took out his magnifying glass and examined the strange specimen. Over his shoulder I could see what he had exclaimed about. Although it was not a flying object–at least not at that moment–it was definitely unidentified. Walt said, “I have never seen anything like this!” He was almost afraid to touch the small, perfectly round lump that glowed an other-worldly green.
Then we were laughing. Walt had gently touched, then pulled from the muck, a half-buried tennis ball. We kept laughing as we continued our trek. But then, as we fell into a striding silence, questions surfaced. How had the ball gotten there? Could any human have hit a lob from the valley courts all the way up the mountain? Was it a sign?
The most recent time I encountered a UFO occurred where I now live, in Florida. I was at the kitchen sink when I heard a tremendous “ZAP” and the sky brightened. Then came a “POP” and the lights in the house dimmed. Out of the corner of my eye I witnessed something fall to earth.
I walked outside toward the telephone pole from which the object had fallen. Not far away I found something lying in the grass, tinged with burn marks. Smoke hung in the air. Although the creature was small, its eyes were large and black–a sure sign of an alien if ever there was one.
And then it moved. The creature lived. After a few stunned moments it got to its feet and hopped to the base of an oak tree. It climbed to a safe height, rested, then made its way into the canopy and out of sight.
Since then I’ve paid more attention to the startling number of creatures, just like the one that fell to earth, living in my trees. It seems they only come down to taste the scattered seeds beneath our bird feeders, and to dig in my wife’s flower gardens. Doing research, no doubt. When I walk outside to try to talk with them, they vanish. I don’t know if I’ll ever completely understand these semi-terrestrials, but we do share the same universe.
Lately all’s been fairly quiet on the UFO front. Eerily quiet.
Wait a minute, I spoke too soon. As if reading my mind, something just shot by my head and disappeared into the branches near the hammock upon which I am presently reclining. It was fast. And tiny. Have aliens mastered nano-technology? I think it wanted to communicate with me. I distinctly heard a “chirp, chirp.”
There are American goldfinch and Carolina wren in the area, but seeing it out of the corner of my eye as I did, it didn’t look like anything I recognize. It’s a mystery! Maybe, just maybe, I had an encounter with something seen never before: a titanium-billed Martian rockpecker.
Now that would be something.
