Good Enough for Hawking

Perhaps you will think me unhinged, if you don’t already, but I assure you, there is no hyperbole in this post.

This is a story I thought only I knew, until rather recently when my BFF from grade school told me that I had whispered it to her at the time. Thank goodness.

It was dark, a very warm night in the summer of 1960 or 1961. I was about eleven or twelve. I stood under the street lamp on the corner of my suburban block. I was waiting for my best friend’s parents to pick me up in their car to go somewhere special, perhaps to a drive-in movie. She lived only two blocks away and, as a matter of course, we visited each other almost daily. As I stood watching the insects flutter and buzz about in the stream of light, I saw a large flat thing hovering above me with many colored lights. It was triangularly shaped and about the size of the bottom of a whole house. It was low because I could see the sharply molded details in it and the multi-colored lights on the bottom were clear and bright. They blinked on and off a bit, just a little bit. I thought it might be about three house heights above me. It was not far off, not at all. I was mesmerized. After quite a while, in the blink of an eye, it was gone.

I stared, expecting it to reappear but there was nothing. When my friend’s parents arrived soon afterwards, I got into their car. I never told anyone, or so I thought, until I mentioned it to my same friend about five years ago. She remembered that night vividly. She said I had climbed into the back seat next to her and had been very quiet, subdued. She asked me what was wrong and I whispered to her what I had seen. I told her not to tell anyone. I was sure no one would believe me.

I did not remember that I had told her at all. It wasn’t until many years later that it dawned on me that there were no sounds from the thing at all, either while I looked at it or when it disappeared. Stillness.

So there you have it. I saw one.

Last night, I watched Part One of Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking. He spoke about the likelihood of aliens, and the distinct possibility that they could be in our midst already. Call me cuckoo but at least the world’s most noted cosmologist wouldn’t snigger.