LITTLE GREEN MEN

I saw a UFO.

There, I said it. I said it and I meant it. What I saw was undoubtedly an object, it was unquestionably flying, and I have no idea what it actually was, so it was definitely a Unidentified Flying Object. Oh, and it was, like, almost 40 years ago because I was about 11 years old at the time.

I have come out of this particular closet before. “I saw a UFO when I was a kid” was one of the top 5 things I listed on “20 Random Things About Me” back when I joined Facebook sometime during the last decade. I have brought it up a few times in casual conversation, too. Over the years, though, I have learned that if you’re at a cocktail party, for instance, and you start a story, “I once woke up in an ATM in Mount Vernon after we went to a Grace Jones concert and bought a whole bunch of ‘ludes from this guy named Disco Donny,” people will laugh and think you’re urbane and sophisticated. But if you start a story by saying, “I saw a UFO once,” people will just think you’re crazy or some kind of conspiracy theorist. Well, maybe that’s actually more a function of the kind of cocktail parties I go to. At any rate, once they learn that it happened when you were a kid, they think you just made the whole thing up anyway.

So I am “coming out” again as Someone Who Saw a UFO. Now, don’t assume that I think that the object was being piloted by little green men. I don’t know that. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anything at all about that darned UFO except for what I remember about seeing it.

What I remember is this: It was during the school year, because I remember that very day, we had learned in science class about the life of stars. What I remembered was the Supernova, which is the last explosion of brilliance from a dying star just before it goes out, kind of like the old tube TV sets that were around when I was a kid. When you switched them off, the screen would collapse down into one tiny spot of light at the center of the screen, which would hang there for a moment before finally blinking off.

Now, when you’re a kid, you really don’t know whether the neighborhood you’re growing up in is a good neighborhood or a bad neighborhood. It’s really the only neighborhood you know, so you don’t really know or even realize whether another neighborhood might be a better place to grow up in. For myself, though, as the years have gone by, I have been able to look back and reflect, and come to realize that the place I grew up in was a pretty great place to be a kid. We lived in a little subdivision called Villa Nova, a sweet, tidy little neighborhood of quirky mid-century style homes plopped right down next to Tudor Revival, brick Colonial, and all kinds of other styles of homes. The yards were well maintained and big enough to play in, and there were plenty of other kids around for playmates. Our house was only the second house in from an intersection, and on the other side of the intersection our street only continued for a few dozen more yards before ending at a dead end. The dead end was long enough for five or six houses on each side, and at the end of the road was a small, privately owned farm named Pahl’s Farm which covered maybe 40 or 50 acres. Since cars rarely had any cause to drive up the dead end side of the street, the neighborhood kids would often congregate there to play Capture the Flag or some other game, or just to hang out. Cleverly, we called it The Dead End, as in, “Ma! We’re going up to the Dead End!”

So, one night, we were up at the Dead End just hanging out. It was already dark. I’m not sure how many of us were there. My brother was there, I think, “Robbie” Landau might have been there, and I do remember my friend Chris Rehm being there. He lived right across the street from Robbie and his parents spoke German. I seem to remember some girls being there, but for the life of me I can’t remember who they might have been. All tolled, I think it was about six or eight of us. Now, at the far side of Pahl’s Farm, at the horizon, was a neatly planted little grove of pine trees, which we kids shrewdly used to call “The Pine Trees”. This was where a lot of teenagers would go to make out and smoke “grass”. I was too young for either of those things at the time. Anyway, we looked out to the horizon, and we noticed a really bright white light, just sort of suspended over the Pine Trees. By age 11 I had already grown into my lifetime role as “Know-It-All”, so as we stood there staring at this bright white light off in the distance, I announced that we were indeed looking at a Supernova. Thankfully, nobody paid me much attention.

Then, it appeared that the Supernova began to rise. That was a trick of perspective, because the light was actually moving towards us. I don’t remember how long it took, but we all stood there, watching, until whatever it was flew right over our heads. The way I remember it, the “Supernova” turned out to be a very bright light in the front of the “craft”, which was diamond-shaped. At each of the other corners of the diamond was a single light, each in a different color. I don’t exactly remember what colors they were or how they were arranged, but somehow, the primary colors of red, blue, and yellow seem correct to me. I’ve always been a terrible judge of distance and dimension, but I can say that it was pretty big, maybe 150 to 200 feet from the light in the front to the light in the back. It flew right over our heads, not much higher than the treetops, maybe 100 or 150 feet in the air, completely silent. The only other thing I remember is Mr. Pahl, who owned the farm at the end of the road, being there for some reason, looking up and saying, “What the hell…?”; and I thought to myself that if a grown-up didn’t know what this was, than it must be something extraordinary.

So, Chris Rehm and I ran down to our house, and asked my mom to turn on the radio. We had this very mid-century split-level house, and the radio was built into the kitchen wall as part of the ultra-modern, ultra-convenient intercom system which never really worked right. We tuned in to WBAL AM60, pretty much the only radio station I knew existed. I imagine after a while of listening to hits of the day like “Theme from The Sting” and “Winchester Cathedral” when no newsflash about Unidentified Flying Objects over Baltimore came, we probably got bored and went back up to the Dead End to hang out.

I waited, over the next few days, to hear something in the news or read something in the paper about what we had seen that night, but nothing ever came of it. So, over time, life went on and the memory was filed away, overtaken by concerns like math tests and projects for Social Studies.

So, where does this leave me? Oddly enough, what I end up taking away most from the whole experience has been an open mind. I have never taken anybody’s word for it when I have been told that certain things don’t exist or other things are “impossible”. To paraphrase the Bard, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your Philosophy. I have never really made up my mind about what it is I saw. It was probably not little green men, but I won’t say for sure that it wasn’t.

At this point in my life, the other thing I take away from this experience mostly, is questions. And they have nothing to do, really, with UFOs. My questions are about my own memories. I ask myself, when my mind wanders to that night, whether my memories are correct, or sometimes even real. Did I just watch an airplane fly overhead and project a fantasy onto it? Were there really other kids around? Did it happen the way I remember it happening? Did it happen at all? These are hard questions to ask yourself, because if you start questioning your own memory, your own life experience, then you have to start questioning your own perception and the picture of the world which you have drawn for yourself. Thoughts like that come perilously close to staring into the abyss.

Therefore, I have to accept that my memories are correct. I have had this memory ever since that night. That is to say, it’s not like I forgot about it and then one day recovered this suppressed memory when I was 25. So I know that it didn’t come to me in a dream or anything like that. So I accept that this happened to me. And in some small way, the experience of that evening, those 5 or 10 minutes of my childhood, has helped to shape me into the somewhat wacky person I have become. The guy who hasn’t completely written off the little green men.