I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to catch up on the latest news. After Jake filled my tank with gas, I went inside and picked up a couple cans of soup and some bread. Mister Johnson was out working, but Hermann Spencer and my friend Bob Havershold were taking up space over by the pot belly stove. When I walked over to join them, Bob held up a print out he had made from his computer and asked if I had heard about the new version of flying saucer.
There was a time when flying saucers were a big deal. If I remember correctly, it was a couple of Air Force jet jockeys who first spotted a group of saucers up in the northwest part of the country just after World War II. They reported saucer shaped flying craft that could maneuver about in the skies at speeds no man made craft could approach. When word got out, suddenly everybody across the country was seeing flying saucers up in the sky. If my memory serves me well there were even sightings around Corinth in the early seventies. It was a cultural epidemic.
The Air Force conducted an official investigation into the sightings and, after years of talking to almost everyone who had claimed to have made a sighting, gave out word there was no such thing as flying saucers. People who claimed to have seen them were either cranks or deluded victims of off course weather balloons or swamp gas. Officially flying saucers did not exist, had never existed, and would never exist in the future. Eventually people stopped seeing flying saucers or, if they saw one, they kept their mouths shut. I have never seen one myself, though I have often thought I might like to sometime. I do not have much opinion if such things actually exist nor do I necessarily believe everyone who claims to have seen one is a deluded crank. I just do not have enough convincing evidence at hand to become a convert one way or another.
But it turns out the flying saucer enthusiasts have not gone away. They and their subculture have simply gone underground. There exists a whole alternate universe of flying saucer enthusiasts who get together at conventions to discuss flying saucers, publish books and magazines on the subject and generally keep the faith of flying saucers alive. These enthusiasts seem to fall into two camps. One believes flying saucers are piloted by little green men while the other group believes saucers are top secret governmental high tech air craft. There was a very popular television series a few years back that was apparently inspired by the flying saucer subculture and over several seasons built a complicated mythology involving flying saucers, government cover-ups and alien invasions. I am something of a late coming fan of the series, though I never saw it in original broadcast. The main problem I have with government conspiracies and cover-ups in real life is I have trouble believing the government is all that competent to keep secrets over the long haul. I mean the Clinton administration could not even keep the tawdry little sexual affair of a President and a White House intern secret. How is the government going to keep secret international plans for a world wide alien invasion? On the other hand, the Bush administration has shown the capacity to keep relatively tight lipped on subjects they consider worth the effort. So there appears just enough evidence of possible government conspiracies to keep the flying saucer myth alive.
What Bob was holding out was a printout he had made from a news item in the internet that claims there has been a recent revival of sightings of flying saucers in the northeast part of the country. The rub on these sightings is that this generation of saucers are actually not saucers at all but triangular shaped craft. Apparently a woman had seen one of the things and described it to her husband who is a commercial artist and the husband had created an illustration from her description. A print of the drawing accompanied the article. The thing that struck me about the drawing was that the flying triangle looked very similar to the mystery flying craft that had appeared in the popular X-files television series.
The article appeared to side with those who are convinced the flying saucers or, in this case, flying triangles, are super secret military craft piloted by human military test pilots, not by little green men from Mars. The article printout did not have the hysteria of a supermarket tabloid piece, but appeared more objective and level headed. Bob and Hermann had been talking about the printout for some time before I came in. Bob is more given to scientific flights of fancy and tended to take the story at face value. Hermann is more down to earth. Like me, if Hermann ever had a flying saucer land and park in his front yard, he might become a convert. Until that happy day arrives, Hermann views all flying saucer and flying triangle reports with a very large grain of salt.
I am reminded of an article I read in a sci-fi magazine in my college days. The article, printed as fact, told the story of a woman we shall call Mary who was kidnapped by a flying saucer and held for some time before being returned to earth. Reporting to the authorities, she drew a configuration of stars to show the star the flying saucer had originated from. There was no such star configuration in the sky. However, with later improved telescopes, the unidentified star configuration was revealed. That story sounded pretty impressive to my young mind at the time. Next issue, another article on the same abduction insisted there are so many stars in the visible sky a person can pretty much draw any star configuration he imagines off the top of his head and it can be matched up someplace in the night sky.
I decided to add a gallon of milk to my little group of items and I left Bob and Hermann speculating on flying triangles in the northwest night skies and drove home.
END
