Unidentified Flying Objects

by Patti

When I was a kid, I went through a period where I was pretty sure I was going to get sucked up by a U.F.O. I didn’t fear the “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” kind of encounter where these adorable little aliens would waddle down a ramp and shyly shake my hand upon meeting me; I was more concerned about the type of encounter where I would be walking down the street, minding my own business, and then suddenly get zapped up into a flying saucer without warning and find myself lying on a table with 3-foot needles in my body and creepy, hollow-eyed aliens hovering over me. Because of this, I will admit I didn’t ride my bike outside by myself for, oh, at least a year. Somehow I felt that if I was with somebody else, the aliens might feel outnumbered and leave me alone.

The other night, those feelings all came back to me. I was on my back deck folding some pool towels and emptying out the recycling bin when suddenly, something caught my eye. I looked toward the sky and saw this amazing glowing, flame-like light floating by. It was unmistakably ethereal; it looked like a fireball with angel wings. I can’t even begin to describe it; I only know that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. It was pretty high up in the sky, as high as a plane might be, but it was very obviously NOT a plane. In the back of my mind I heard the voices of countless farmers-gone-by, “It was this big, I swear! And it just floated there, I tell ya, it did! And then, dag-nabbit, if it didn’t just land right thar in front of me!”

I felt myself wanting to call M out onto the porch, but I was sort of just stuck there, unable to move, unable to form words. I just knew I was about to finally get zapped up, those long-ago childhood fears finally confirmed. Yet, I couldn’t save my own life. I watched it float over the neighbor’s house and behind a tree, and I finally realized I had to have M see this, too. I snapped awake and flung open the sliding glass door to call him off of the couch. “Come! Hurry! You HAVE to see this!” He must have sensed the urgency in my voice, because rather than continue to wallow in his ManCold, he jumped off the couch and ran outside. By the time he got there, I was already around to the front of the house, chasing the floating flame-light. He caught up to me and saw it just in time. The light seemed to hover for a moment, as if to give both of us the opportunity to take it in, to believe it was real. And then it started moving again, away from us.

At that moment, I heard M exclaim, “Look! There are two more!” and sure enough, coming from the same direction as the first flame-light had come, two more were indeed floating our way. The first one has been a fiery red-orange; these were white and pure red. They both danced the same way as the first, and had that ethereal appearance. “What IS that?” I wondered out loud to M, full-well knowing what they were. “They have to be balloons or something,” he said, satisfied with that reasoning.

But I knew: They weren’t balloons. Or airplanes. Or anything else that could be reasonably explained. We stood there for a while, watching the lights flicker and float and dance, until they finally drifted out of sight. As we walked back into the house, I looked back up to the sky and silently thanked the aliens for sparing me yet again.