It isn’t even that I have so much to do. The Six Pack is home for the funeral and some giddy electric energy seems to keep everything unreal, but moving forward. I have moments where everything seems fine. Then I'll think, I really need to call my dad and tell him about this...and realize, he's the news. My mind shorts out there, reminding me of the time travel theory that one can't run into one's self...
Dad's passing is such a shock to me, it overwhelms and slides right over me. I can’t seem to absorb it or move in it. It puts me in mind of being five years old and show and tell day is coming…
My dad was a sky watcher. But because he was searching for the unlikely, he saw a lot of the usually unnoticed and underappreciated: fragmented as well as double rainbows, interesting cloud formations, moon dogs, sun dogs, sun rises and
sunsets.
But the truth is, Dad's eyes traced the skies looking for UFO’s.
For many years, he traveled with a certain amount of camera equipment, along with a battleship gray box next to him on the front seat. About the size of a large lunchbox, it was a home-built UFO detector. Where he found the instructions to make it I could only guess. He told me how it worked, and at the time it wouldn’t have taken much to convince me. I was five.
I feel sure my dad took his fair share of ribbing for the interest he displayed about UFO’s, which were met with a great deal of skepticism in the late 60’s. My dad didn’t care much what people thought of him. He was a little like Noah when he made his mind up. If you gave him a hard time, he’d just talk to someone else and leave you out of it.
We were leaving my grandparent’s country ranch house, across from a pine tree encircled reservoir. It was late at night and the damp pine scented breeze whispered quietly through the needles. I might’ve been eight if I was there at all. So tired I would have fallen asleep. His super Eight was in the trunk and the grey box sat zoinking, or whatever UFO detectors do when they go off. He searched the sky and found what he was looking for and pulled out the camera .
I’ve seen the footage so many times, I have it memorized. A bright light hovers in the sky. It flashes, and three smaller lights fly out of it. They hover around as if saying their goodbyes. A few seconds later, each small light flies into a different direction and disappears. The larger light flashed again, it just flew in an erratic pattern, unlike anything I’d ever seen aircraft do up until then or quite a few years after.
My dad said he sent the foot age to a lab and had copies made, and he sent one of them to the government. He said a little while after that, he was followed by men in black sedans, and saw men in suits that he believed were followoing him. He was never called or questioned. And after a time, they also disappeared.
He was interested in the unidentified flight of objects for many years. I don’t remember when he stopped carrying the grey box. It seemed to have done the one thing it was supposed to do—it went off and he saw something that night.
And we’ve all been watching the sky ever since.
1 comment:
Somewhere in a dusty, half-forgotten file cabinet your dad has an entry in Project Blue Book. Pretty cool.
I watch the skies myself from time to time. I like quote -- sorry, don't remember it exactly -- from "Contact" by Carl Sagan: "If it is only us in the Universe, it would be an awful waste of space".
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