1971

After we moved back to SoCal after two years in Cleveland we rented a house in Glendora. We ended up buying the house across the street. I was looking for a house to buy instead of renting. I found a small tract of new houses partway up the foothills but they were too rich for me. I told the neighbors across the street about the houses and they ended up buying one. The builder of the tract took the neighbor’s house as a trade in. The sale of their house was taken over by a neighborhood realtor and they were bound by contract to sell it for the FHA appraisal. We played bridge and had cocktails at the neighbor’s house at least once a week and while over one evening Ken my neighbor told me that the appraisal came in at $24,000. This was in 1971 before the real estate market went crazy. I called the listing agent at the realtor’s and told her I wanted to buy the house. She told me that it wasn’t on the market yet. I asked her what that meant and she told me it hadn’t been on the agent’s tour yet. I told her that I had been in the house probably over one hundred times and I knew the FHA appraised value, which I thought was fair, and to bring the papers over for me to sign.

She said she had to wait until it was “on the market”. I said OK and hung up. I counted to ten and called the realtor’s office back and asked for the sales manager. I told the guy that I wanted to buy the house and Helen wouldn’t sell it to me. He asked why not and I told him because “it wasn’t on the market yet. He asked me to hold on a minute and I heard a lot of hollering in the background. He got back on the phone and told me that she’ll be right over with the paperwork. And so we bought a house in California. It was a nice house in a good neighborhood. It had three bedrooms and a bath and a half.

Back in the day, when I was selling real estate there was this witticism that if you were showing a house in an expensive  neighborhood, people would ask “Where is the pool?”  If  the neighborhood was a step down, people would ask “Does it have a pool?” If it was in a seedy neighborhood, people would say “It has a pool?” Well our house was in a nice neighborhood and it did indeed have a pool. Life was good there. We not only had a pool, we also has a 22 foot trailerable sailboat,  a German Shepard and I had a motorcycle. A fast as hell Kawasaki Mach 3. It was advertised as the fastest thing with wheels to come out of a factory.

One nice balmy day, we were sitting around the pool when we heard a huge boom. It was very large and we could tell it was the sound of something very bad. We looked all around but didn’t see any smoke or any thing so we didn’t give it any more thought.

That evening we heard what the loud boom was. A Marine Corps Phantom jet had collided with a Air West DC-9 over the nearby mountains. Everyone one the DC-9 died and one of the two  Marines  in the Phantom survived. He ejected and floated down to earth without a scratch.

Also in the same timeframe, I was talking to a friend of mine who lived nearby one evening. All of a sudden, this whit disc in the sky  went streaking by. This was after I was out of the Navy for about three years. Being I spent ten hours a day sitting in the gun director radar tracking airplanes and became pretty accomplished at estimating their range and speed. This disc was distinctly round and did not leave a fiery streak  behind it as a meteorite would. I estimated it to be less than five miles away and going faster than sound without any sonic boom. It streaked into the foot hills and made no crashing sound(s). No bangs or booms, nothing.

I still believe to this day hat I saw a UFO. I became an immediate believer in UFOs. The problem is the nearest habitable planet to earth is about forty light years away. If the “aliens” were moving at the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second, which is hard for me to believe, it take a minimum of eighty years to make a round trip. I don’t think any being of superior intelligence would care to be locked up with a few copies of Playboy to read and take an eighty year trip. Possible, I suppose. Probable, I don’t think so. One Sunday while reading Brunhilda on the comic’s page, I read that Gaylord Buzzard is telling Irwin Troll as they are walking along that “Some people don’t think that the aliens are from another planet. They think that they are from Earth but another time.”  This I could buy. There have been many reports of “alien” abductions and practically all of the abductees describe the same things. The creatures have two arms and two legs. They also have two eyes in their heads with two ears and a nose with two nostrils. They look too much like humans who no longer do any heavy lifting.

THINK ABOUT IT.