Journal of a UFO Investigator

THE UFO FELL FROM THE SKY ON THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 20, 1962, the week of my thirteenth birthday. The event itself, after more than three years, I recall with perfect clarity. Many of its circumstances, however, have blurred in my mind.

I can’t remember, for instance, where I’d been that evening. I was certainly coming home from somewhere, maybe a meeting of some sort. I see myself standing before the house, on the front lawn, just a little off the sidewalk, ready to go inside yet looking steadily into the sky. It was very cold, and it must have been late, certainly after 10:00 P.M. Orion was high in the southern sky over the house, Sirius not far below and to the east. All the stars were extraordinarily clear, their colors very marked. I could make out the red of Betelgeuse, the ice-blue, diamond-blue glitter of Sirius. There was no moon.

The object appeared in the east. I don’t know what called my attention to it. I was not surprised to see it. I’d been a UFO investigator for two months, since the fourth week in October. I knew such things were there in the skies, if only I was ready to look toward them.

It was a disk, glowing deep fluorescent red. Darker at the edges than near the center. Apparent size about twice what the full moon’s would have been if the moon had been visible. It moved westward at a leisurely pace, toward me, briefly obscuring the stars as it passed beneath.

My camera was in my bedroom, third dresser drawer. My father’s binoculars were on a shelf in his den. I was torn whether to run into the house to get them, knowing the thing might be gone when I came out. I suspected it wasn’t likely to register on film. While I stood trying to decide, it came to a dead stop over the house.

How long it stayed motionless, I don’t know. I didn’t think to look at my watch. Suddenly it began to flutter downward, in a classic falling leaf maneuver, as if to land or crash on top of me. I tried to run; my feet wouldn’t move. They tingled as if electricity were running through them, the way the body tingles when lightning’s about to strike. Or when a nightmare begins and I don’t yet know how it will end.

My legs crumpled. The frozen earth, its winter-brown grass red in the blood-colored light, slammed against my body. I lay in a twisted S, my face turned upward, the back of my head wedged against the ground. The disk—solid, heavy, bigger than a bus or even a boxcar—fell quivering a few hundred feet above me. Its crimson glare pulsated, darkening slowly, all at once brightening. It swallowed up the sky.

Not because of the Delta. It can’t have had that power. But after a few seconds I felt the gadget vibrate in my hand, and I knew: yes, this works, just as Jeff Stollard and I had planned. Another moment, and I might be crushed to death. But not in silence.

“No,” I lie. But it’s not quite a lie. I heard her knock but didn’t entirely hear it, just as I see her every day, but not entirely. Right now I hardly see her at all. My desk lamp is the only light I have on. Outside its circle, she’s in shadow.

I glance at the last words I’ve written—images or feelings perhaps, stimulated within my brain—and move my hand to cover the paper. A mistake; I’ve called her attention to it. I look at my watch. “About eleven thirty,” I say.

Oh, yes, don’t I know it? January once more. Wake with the alarm before it’s light, ride the school bus through the bitter gray morning. Try to do the reading I didn’t do last night. Then stagger from class to class, boredom to boredom, my eyes foggy with all the sleep I haven’t gotten. Eleventh grade now. I turned sixteen last month.

She stands beside me, resting her weight on the back of my chair, touching my shoulder with her fingers. I lean forward. It makes me nervous when my mother touches me. I smell the sour sickness of her body. I don’t turn around, but I can see her in my mind: spindly limbs, gaunt, peaky face. Her thick cat eyeglasses, the lenses like teardrops. I wear glasses too.

But this isn’t a story. And it has nothing to do with any English assignment. Writing a story, I know the twists and turns in advance. I know how it’s going to come out. This . . . journal, I guess, comes from a place I don’t yet know, and it unfolds itself inside me, bit by bit, so I can’t see beyond the next folding.

And not even out on dates, like a normal teenager. I know the way my father thinks. Sixteen; at that age I ought to go out with girls. I don’t; therefore I’m weird. Abnormal. Not really his son. I investigate UFOs; that makes me weird. I study the Bible too; that makes me weirder. He has no idea what I’m going through.

Neither does she, though most of the time she’s nicer about it. I touch my hand to my pants pocket; my wallet’s there. When she’s gone, I’ll take it out, look at the card.

I hear him grumble to himself. I hear everything that goes on in this house—this little matchbox the three of us live in, all the rooms jammed together, no doors except for the bedrooms and the bath. We moved here ten years ago, after the heart attack, because the house is all on one floor. My mother can’t climb stairs.

Does this story—journal, whatever—come from some UFO world? An alternate reality, where I’m still Danny Shapiro, and Jeff Stollard and Rosa Pagliano are still people who’ve been in my life? Where nevertheless we say things, do things, experience things that have a weight beyond ordinary reality?

It’s possible. I’ve read articles about automatic writing, ouija boards, communication through our souls from the beyond. Mostly I don’t believe those articles. They’re written by crackpots. I’m a scientific UFOlogist. If we’re to solve the mystery of the disks, as we surely will, if only we keep working at it, ignore the idiots who ridicule us, it will be through scientific research and analysis. Nothing else.

The images rose within me this afternoon, as I rode home on the school bus. It seemed half a dream, yet I know I was awake. The other kids’ songs, their teasing, their yelps of laughter at jokes I don’t quite understand washed around me like water around my bubble of air. It was like remembering things I’d known, but for years had barely thought of.

—images or feelings perhaps, stimulated within my brain. And while I tasted the relief that I wasn’t going to be squashed after all, at the same time pondering how remarkable it was that this disk, this alien craft, should descend over me like a spider on its thread and speak to me mind to mind—

—the object pulled up, lifted back into the sky, shrank to the apparent size of a silver dollar held at arm’s length. Then a quarter. Then a dime. It moved away, continuing its interrupted path westward, until it vanished in the distance—

My hand stops writing. All on its own; my brain just watches what’s happening, perplexed, marveling. I lay my pen down. I know I can’t force this. I pull my wallet from my pocket, and there’s the card, hidden behind the driving learner’s permit that arrived yesterday in the mail.

The first phone number was mine. The second—“ORegon 8-0496”—was Jeff Stollard’s. Still is, though now they’ve made it all numbers. In eighth grade, and the summer before that, Jeff and I were best friends. That fall we wrote our science paper on UFOs together; we got all excited, agreed we’d keep on until we found the truth, write a book about it. What are UFOs? Where are they from? Do they come to help us or to conquer and destroy? I still search for answers. Jeff no longer cares.

Christmas vacation of eighth grade—just before New Year’s 1963. I walked the mile and a half to Jeff’s house. There’d been snow, but the weather had turned sunny, a bit warmer, the sidewalks awash with the melt. Jeff and I ran off the cards on his toy printing press, and in homeroom after vacation we announced our club. Rosa Pagliano came up right away and told me she wanted to join. Me. Not Jeff.

But I have mine, softened and worn from three years in my wallet. On the back is the heart I drew, pierced with an arrow, DS & RP written inside. This time, I told myself, I’ll turn it over, look at the heart, bring back my old dreams. I can’t. It hurts too much.

The A is for Asher, my mother’s grandfather, who died in the old country. That’s why I read the Bible, so I can understand the old man I never met and know the reason his name is in mine. I don’t believe in God. I pray when I’m desperate, Please, dear Lord, let it not be too late for me. Too late—to be normal. To be invited to parties, have friends and girlfriends; the feeling deep in my soul says I was half, now I’m whole. No more hunger and thirst . . .

My father sounds louder now, and angrier. How would it be to live in a house that’s dark and quiet sometimes, where parents go out together and I can be alone? But my mother’s too sick. We go out only as a family, to visit my grandmother for the Jewish holidays. Until the break-in we hardly even locked our door. My mother was—she is—always home.

And only now have I picked up my pen. I should begin to be frightened. Not of his walloping me when he comes storming in; he’s never done that. But of the tidal wave blindness of his rage, the bitter words that burn like lava, that will leave me scorched and desolate and sleepless afterward as I struggle to swallow what the three of us spend our lives pretending isn’t so. Namely, that he hates me and everything I am.

It’ll be a lot more than a minute. I can’t help myself. It’s flowing again, pouring through my pen, and will take me, if only I can follow, toward the place of truth, the heart of all secrets—

Shivering—from the chill, from the terror of the death that had hovered above me and now was gone, at least for now—I pulled myself up from the ground. I brushed bits of dirt and grass from my heavy coat. I felt in my pocket for my keys and let myself into the house.

My parents must not have been home. Lucky for me. I could almost hear my father: Don’t your friends know better than to phone you in the middle of the night? But he wasn’t around, nor my mother. Jeff and I could talk freely, as long as we needed. Like the summer before, between seventh and eighth grade, when one or two evenings a week we sailed off on our bikes into the softening light, and when tired of riding, we walked the bicycles, no parents to eavesdrop, until we’d talked through everything we cared to understand. Religion, mostly; how his being Baptist made him different from me, me different from almost everyone in our school. What happens to us, if anything, after we’re dead.

My keys were still in my hand, the Delta Device attached. The Delta rested in my palm, a shadow among shadows. I ran my thumb over it. Two small triangles of sheet metal, their edges hammered into curves and soldered together, the wiring pressed inside. It pained me to feel the lumpy, splattery soldering, to remember how the gun had jumped and trembled in my hand. Jeff had done his better, smoother. In metal shop he always did better than I did.

I tried to tell him. My teeth chattered; I had to stop and take a few breaths before I could go on. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me this thing actually landed?”

“I’d have been squooshed like a bug!” I screamed, and felt my saliva spray over the receiver. I felt myself getting demerits, over the telephone wires, for being hysterical. “It was bearing down on top of me,” I said. “And—and—”

He spelled the word out, and I confirmed it. The seeding. Even as I wondered how I’d earlier lost the memory of what the disk said and why it just popped out now, talking with him.

I couldn’t tell whether he was going to laugh or have me exorcised, try once more to convert me so I won’t go to hell when I die. “Until the seeding,” I repeated, and felt the electric tingling shoot up through my legs, my thighs, the two currents meeting in my belly and running upward. My hand shook so I could barely hold the receiver.

He didn’t answer, and I knew what he was thinking. Rosa Pagliano lives in Braxton. Would the disk stop over her house, as it had over mine? Descend to her, speak to her? Take her inside? I thought of how she’d smiled at me in music class, while everybody was singing that song “And I’ll not marry at all, at all, and I’ll not marry at all ...” And then I really began to shake.

But he’d hung up. I stood, receiver in hand, and felt my heart going thumpa-thumpa-thump, the way it does in sentimental books. Only this was for real, very unpleasant, and I wanted it to stop, to be as I’d been before I saw the UFO, before I knew there were things in the sky besides moon and planets and stars, airplanes and birds, the ordinary stuff a little kid might know. Once or twice I heard my father yell, “Will you turn off that goddamn light and get to sleep?” It had to have been my imagination. My father wasn’t even home—I could not hear him mumbling in his sleep from the bed he’d set up for himself in the den, because he couldn’t stand lying next to my mother anymore—and besides I hadn’t turned on any light. I hung up the receiver. After a few minutes I lifted it again. With trembling fingers I dialed Rosa Pagliano’s telephone number.