UFO Mania

Flying saucers are totally cool. The people that see them are not. Of course I think it would be sort of awesome to make a living as a UFO "expert." I mean how hard can it be? I have watched those guys on the History Channel (I kind of hate admitting that) and their job is pretty nifty! They go around the country trying to determine which UFO sightings are real and which are hoaxes or some natural phenomena. If as a kid I had told my parents I wanted to be a Ufologist they would have gone berserk, who knew it could be a viable career.

Actually I probably am qualified to be an Ufologist. You see as a child I was an accomplished liar. My best whopper was convincing the neighborhood kids that I actually had been abducted by a UFO! It must have been a good story because they all believed it. I cannot recall any of the details of the story. I know I enhanced it's creditability by feigning something that could only be called, PTUFOAD (Post Traumatic UFO Abduction Disorder). I bet those guys on the History Channel start using this term! The symptoms of PTUFOAD involved shivering and then entering a trance state where events were both re experienced and described in a robotic monotone.

Once as a teenager a friend and I were convinced we were about to have a close encounter of the second kind, that's when you see something that's scary as hell but don't get probed (ouch!). We were out for a walk, since we were too young to drive. It was a quiet night in suburbia, we were frustrated by the lack of drama in our lives. Unexpectedly we encountered an eerie blue-green glow emanating through the planks of somebody's backyard fencing. We were shocked and awed! Our jaws dropped, a wavering glow was pulsating from a backyard in our neighborhood. We knew there was only one possible explanation, FLYING SAUCER! We gingerly stepped closer and closer toward that fence, torn between rushing to it or instead getting the hell out of there. We held our breath. As we got closer we heard a low hum and intermittent gulping noises that had a creepy gastric quality to them. We haltingly peered between the slats of the fence expecting to see something either horrible or perhaps wonderful but certainly fantastic!

It turned out to be an illuminated swimming pool with a gorgeous blond in a bikini swimming laps. We were let down about not seeing a flying saucer but on the other hand we did find a bikini clad blond and she was pretty! Not being too perverted we crept away post haste. We wound up feeling foolish and laughing at ourselves.

Still I think UFOs may be real. Or at least I think it is possible some superior entity could be watching us without our ever knowing it. I learned of these tiny snails that live on the boulders along Galveston's Seawall. One day I was looking at about one square foot of surface area on one these rocks. There were hundreds of these tiny black snails covering the rock's surface. It was like a whole snail civilization. They were completely unaware of me but I was amazed by them. I picked a few of them up with caring gentleness and then put them back reasonably close to where they came from. For them it could have felt like a UFO abduction. Why would we be anymore aware of a being equally superior to us?

Oh yeah about the lying I did as a kid. The neighborhood children (despite my warnings not to do this) told their parents about my fantastic experiences. It was humiliating when they confronted me en masse and called me a liar. I quit telling whoppers. A few days later the kids asked (pretty much begged) me to tell them some more UFO stories. I of course refused. I warned them not to talk to their parents about it.

Russell