UFOs

It was 1974 and I was living the LA suburban dream. I had a house with a pool near the foothills of Glendora. I had a 22 foot trailerable sailboat in the drive and a Norton Commando in the attached garage. There was a few notable things missing however namely my wife of twelve years who had moved out with literally without any warning with our five year old son. But I was, as they say, moving on with my life.

My friend Denny Moore had come over one evening to sample some of the wine I had just made. We were standing at my front door saying our good byes when it flashed by. It was a distinct round disk of light. It was not blurry and did not leave a trail like an incoming meteorite would do. I was six years out of the Navy and had spent many many hours tracking aircraft as the gun director officer at condition three off of the coast of Vietnam. Condition three on a ship is relaxed General Quarters. It is three sections of four hour watches which means I spent usually ten hours a day tracking targets. I had radar range and bearing indicators up in the director so I had sharpened my aircraft sighting skills. I determined that the disk of light was no more than three miles away and was moving well over the speed of sound and made no engine sounds. It went into the foothills and there was no report, no bang or boom. It just disappeared. I said to Denny something like holy crap, did you see that? Of course he hadn’t he had his back to the thing.

I am convinced to this day that I actually saw a UFO. OK now that I am a believer, I need some answers. Particularly like where in the hell did it come from? Assuming that Albert Einstein is correct, a very safe conclusion, and the speed of light  which is 186,000 miles per second and the nearest star system is forty light years away, things just didn’t add up. I couldn’t  fathom some intelligent being sitting in his spacecraft for forty years just to come us on Earth staying around for a few months and spending another forty years traveling back again even assuming that the little green man could actually travel at 186,000 miles per second. Which is debatable.

I kicked around this notion for a few years until the answer came to me from the most unlikely source. From the comic strip Brenhilda in The Sunday LA Times. In the strip the owl, naturally he is the smart one, says to another character as they are strolling along “You know some people believe that these aliens are not from another planet. They believe that they are from Earth but from another time.”  Eureka! That was the answer.  That I could buy.

If you hear enough tales of UFO encounters, all of the sighters describe the same thing. Two arms and two legs. A head with twp eyes a nose below the eyes and a mouth under the nose. The are human beings. The likelihood of such similarities of beings from another planet are too far fetched. They don’t have three eyes or four nostrils. They all have two. It is all too much coincidental. This gives me hope that we probably won’t blow us all up in some nuclear mushroom cloud.

The next probable event is contact. Are you ready to meet these folks? I’m not so sure I am ready for that. Besides which, what if they are Democrats or here to sell us some Amway?