They were silent, about the size of a VW Bug, and moved steadily, smoothly. The one behind sped up then matched speed with the front one. There was a third, then we turned south.
In the 1950s and 1960s we sat in quiet homes that received, at best, 3 TV channels and radio, and we heard about UFO flaps from word-of-mouth as often as via media. Local newspapers, which we all read, occasionally carried an article about something mysterious seen in the sky.
The odd mass market paperback might make its way into the homes, but usually it was magazines, there were many back then, and quite a few covered UFOs.
We experienced things, though. We saw lights in the sky and machines. We heard metallic thrumming and odd pulses, electronic throbbing. We glimpsed small creatures on the lawns at night. Sometimes they came to peer into the windows. Sometimes they entered the room through no apparent portal.
Our lives remained small. We lived in woods like fawns in the nest awaiting the doe’s return, the buck off earning itself. We were cozy in the dark back then. Night didn’t frighten us. Back then, we enjoyed being alone, and crickets lulled us.
Now we know better. Now we hear encoded chirps, metallic whirling, and distant diesel throbs that insinuate into our thoughts. The patterns of our pulses change. We react now, responding to unseen touchers of our lives. Paranoia is rational now, as madmen stalk any good thing they can destroy, all good things they can poison. Everything is channeled through fear. Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” represents our id now, our badge of terror.
Our innocence, so soothing to remember, too tempting for us to resist were it available again, can be analyzed as our ignorance. We know when they came back. We know they are the Other. We do not know if they’re of us, of Earth, or ET. Are they an advanced culture that grew apart from most of mankind, to live mostly unnoticed among us, screened or hidden in some way perhaps, glimpsed rarely? Are they the cosmos reaching down to touch us some more, or just nightmares somehow made physical, the tulpa manifestation of our insecurities, of our certainty of doom?
Go ahead, watch the skies, as long as you realize they’re just as likely to spring from the ground, step out from behind a rock or tree, or manifest by sidling around a shadow in our minds. They do as they wish, and we wish they were known, but they’re not. They’re Other.
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