Member-only story
My Close Encounters with UFOs
Imagine a starry night, so many diamonds sparkling in the blackness. Your soul reaches out to them. You wonder what’s out there. The billions of galaxies, planets, the vastness. There must be other intelligent life, and you wonder if UFOs are real and aliens are here, today, watching us.
Ever since second grade I’ve wondered.
I remember seeing this movie with huge Martian goons controlled by a head in a bowl with tentacles. It was creepy. In fifth grade, I made a paper model of Explorer One, the first American satellite. Its picture and dimensions were reported in our Weekly Reader, so I was able to scale it to actual size. They hung it at the school entrance, and I was chosen to be on a kid’s radio show during which I said that someday I was going to the moon. I got an ice cream cone too, for answering a question about the solar system.
A year later, after reading Willy Ley’s Rockets, Missiles and Moons, which discussed life on other planets, I passed a shop on a side street near my home. In the display window was Space Age magazine. It looked perfect for my scrapbook of missiles and satellites, its photos even better than those in Life magazine. In college, I wrote my…
