ursangnome

On our way home from a pleasant party yestereve, my Lady and I realized that some dinner-related actions were in order. We thus began a short side-trek to the grocery for some thoroughly mundane hot dog buns.

This was just past sunset, with the sky still partially lit, streetlights and headlights starting to come on. Most of my mind was occupied with driving and chatting about the thoroughly mundane hot dog buns and the tasty yet narratively uninteresting hot dogs for which the buns will be purchased. A few of my neurons chose to take a path outlined by my monkey ancestry, and were paying attention to otherwise unrelated surroundings. They found soemthing worth bringing to my fore-brain's attention.

"Boss," they tell me, "there's something up there that ain't quite right. You might wanna look at it."

I glance up, and sure enough, there's a light in the sky that doesn't quite make sense. It isn't attached to a lamppost. A quick move of my head confirms that it isn't a reflection off my glasses or the windshield. It is only slowly moving compared to the distant background. Pearly white against the deepening blue sky, it had a classic shape familiar to genre fiction fans, and a few brighter points on it that occasionally blinked.

As I continued to drive, I pointed and asked simply, "Love, do you see that?" After a beat or two my Lady responded, "That saucer thing? Yes, what is is?"

Now, while I'm not the biggest aerospace aficonado such that I can identify airframes by their silhouettes, I can tell a thing with wings from a thing without. It was not a standard airplane or helicopter. Other than that, I could not say, and as it sank behind the roof line of a local Staples office supply store, I had to admit so. Technically, then, what we had was an Unidentified Flying Object.

Now, while my Lady and I probably both read more science fiction than is normally healthy, we are also both reasonably trained scientists. We recognize that what we saw was probably an oddly lit dirigible or other thoroughly mundane and narratively uninteresting object. Our subsequent failure to experience any of the other classic encounter symptoms like a malfunctioning radio, stalling car, or missing time, and this morning's new completely devoid of headlines that the Aliens Had Landed tend to back the boring hypothesis. However, I am left with two questions in my mind:

1)How many others in the bustling suburban area saw the thing and thought along the same lines we had?

2)What if? What if it wasn't a blimp, hot air balloon, or marsh gas reflecting light from Venus. What if, after writing this, a funny man in a dark suit comes to flashy-thing me?

This is why I don't use recreational pharmaceuticals. I don't need them to have my mind dwell on less than rational nonsense.