BUT FIRST, A BLAST FROM THE PAST TO SET THE TONE…
CLICK TO PLAY…
Mid-September, 1977, the Teachers’ Lounge…
Three or four of us were hunched over the far end of the lunch table. We’d been poring over the daily newspaper. They’d been checking out the local area high school football scores. Me, not so much. But anyway, after I folded the paper back into its original shape and arrangement, and laid it back down, front-page-up, I spotted that same news article that had caught my attention earlier, back at home during breakfast.
Me: “You guys see this one?”
One of Them: “What’s that?”
Me: “Steven Spielberg. Got a new flick coming out. Gotta say, I really like his stuff.”
One of Them: “Shark boy? What’s this one gonna be about? Killer whales?
Me: “UFOs.”
One of Them: “Well, that’s stupid.”
One of Them: Come on. Science Fiction? Really? That’s a ‘step down,” isn’t it?
Me: “Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, I just LOVED Duel. And… Sugarland Express was really good, too. The guy’s a movie maker’s movie maker.”
One of Them: “What’s it called?”
Me: “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
One of Them: “Well now, that’s a hell of a title. Wonder who came up with that clunker.”
Me: “It’s a technical Project Bluebook classification.”
One of Them: “Oh yeah? Well, of course… you’d know if anyone does.”
Me: “But here’s the thing.”
One of Them: “Yeah?”
Me: “Says that after this movie hits the screens, authorities’ phones all over will be ringing off the hook. UFO sightings’ll start going through the roof. A UFO movie like this, it says, could generate a lot of mass hysteria. You know, like everybody and his grandmother’ll probably start seeing ‘em and calling’em in.”
One of Them: “Hmm. No shit. Well, that’s all this country needs, isn’t it.”
One of Them: “Christ, I wouldn’t know who to call.”
Me: “Well, I mean, Jaws did that, sort of. I mean driving everybody nuts about sharks. Put the ol’ bullseye on’em, didn’t it. Put’em right on the ‘World’s Most Wanted List.’ Not Dead or Alive, either, just Dead. All sharks must die. They’re Public Enemy #1 right now, whereas before…”
One of Them: “Well… they are basically man-eaters, aren’t they.”
Me: “I know I’m in no hurry to go swimming in the ocean. But this article’s saying the movie’s basically about UFO abductions. So, maybe it’s Move Over Time for the sharks. Little green men are about to be climbing up the FBI’s Public Enemy List.”
One of Them: “Well. They sure as hell aren’t too likely to turn out like My Favorite Martian, are they.”
One of Them: “Christ, listen to yourself. They’re not likely to turn out to be anything, stupid.”
Me: Hell though, I still remember the nightmares from when I watched The Man from Planet X at age seven.”
One of Them: “I mean, little green men? That’s rubbish.”
One of Them: “You know, I wouldn’t mind seeing one of these UFOs your keep hearing about though. I just wouldn’t wanna meet the pilot and crew, is all.”
Me: Well, if quote-unquote “seeing” one of them does become all the rage, maybe you’ll see one too. Maybe we’ll all become victims of mass hysteria.”
One of Them: “Baloney!”
One of Them: “Whatever.”
Now although the timing couldn’t possibly have been more flukey, it was at this exact point of this discussion that the door to the lounge swung open and in strode math teacher, Jack Rogers. We each greeted him with our routine “Hi, Jack,” and “Mornin’, Jack!”
Jack, not saying Good morning back, marched straight over to our little group, not bothering to set his brief case down, take off his jacket, sit down, or anything. And he had the look of someone who hadn’t slept at all last night. He also had the look of a man on a mission because there he was, just standing there before us, kinda dazed-looking and staring down on all of us with the look of someone who’d just swallowed a June bug.
“Hey, guys,” he said, sounding like he was a little out of breath.
“So what’s up with you this morning,” someone asked.
“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head as if to clear away cobwebs. “Something happened last night.”
We waited. “O…kay?”
“AND…?”
“This is gonna sound weird, but… OK, here goes. So I was driving back from Portland last night, taking a shortcut over some back roads, when I noticed something in the sky, up and off to my left. A dim, flickering light.”
Right there, we all made eye-contact with each other. Deadpan eye-contact. But with raised eyebrows.
“And it was moving. Slowly. In the same direction as me. It was dark out, but I could still make out the tree lines off away on the horizon, and this… light… whatever it was, was above those. The thing was less than a quarter mile off to my left, and probably up, I dunno, maybe about 400 feet.”
“You telling us what we think you’re telling us?”
Jack nodded. “It’s like… it was like one of those UFOs you hear ab…”
We erupted in a thunderclap of raw, involuntary laughter!
Which was pretty unfortunate, as Jack looked like he’d just been bitch-slapped! His cheeks burned a feverish pink. He was hurt, and angry. And who could blame him? And I know I immediately felt pretty bad about it. I think we all did. But I mean, come on, what were the odds?“
{Just a couple of notes here: (1) “Jack” isn’t his real name of course, and (2) “Jack” hadn’t been diagnosed yet, but for quite some time he’d been exhibiting symptoms of sugar diabetes: a seemingly-forever constant thirst regardless of how much water he regularly consumed and (2) a very touchy disposition where he sometimes would lash out in anger at things that were irritating him.}
But before I could say, We’re so sorry, Jack, someone asked, “Did you by any chance read the paper this morning?”
“No! I didn’t as a matter of fact, OK?! I mean, after last night... Iyou know what? I wasn’t exactly in the mood!”
Oh yeah. He was really pissed.
“See, all I was in the mood for this morning… was to come in here and… try to… I dunno… screw it… try to talk to you guys! And…”
“Hey listen,” I said, “we are so, so sorry. We weren’t laughing at you. See, we…”
“Oh. Really? Had me fooled!”
“No, I swear! It’s just this article in the newspaper this morning. Here. Read it. You won’t belie…”
“Excuse me if maybe I don’t wanna read it. That OK with you?!”
“OK. That’s fair, Jack. But please. Just hear me out?”
I took his glaring silence as an OK. So I ran pell-mell through what the article had to say and asked him to try to imagine what the effect of his entrance, along with his so unfortunately coincidental… revelation, had had on us. “And I swear to God, Jack, if you had been in here… and in on this conversation and I, or any of us, had come walking in through that door and said exactly what you said… well… think about it. How would you have reacted?”
His glaring silence persisted. I got it. The sting of anybody getting targeted as the subject of a chorus of belly-laughs, like that one, would linger. “OK, but please, Jack. Just know that we really weren’t laughing at you. We were just… reacting to the un-frickin-believable coincidence of the whole thing. I mean, c’mon, what were the odds, right?”
He just said, “Hmmmm,” placed his briefcase down on the floor, hung up his coat, came back, and joined us at the table. “You guys can think what you want. But you weren’t there. And damn it, I know what I saw.”
“And I believe you. I’m sure we all do. People are seeing things like that all the time. Which is why they created Project Blue Book in the first place, to follow-up on the thousands of sightings. So please, I hope you can work on forgiving our unintentional… but still pretty rude and thoughtless reaction.”
Jack just nodded. But finally he said, “So, can I tell you about it then, or what?”
I said “Yes, of course!” and everybody chimed in on that sentiment. And somebody asked, “So what’d it look like?”
“Well, you see… that’s the thing. It wasn’t saucer-shaped. Or cigar-shaped either, like they usually say. This thing, well… it honestly looked like (and this is gonna sound weird, but it’s one of the things that makes this so perplexing for me…) like the top of a tower. Only floating.”
We were all duly puzzled. “Wait a minute. Like… whattaya mean, a tower?”
“I mean, you could see sort of a structure to it, even though the thing appeared kinda fuzzy for some reason. Sorta… shimmery. But I mean… so just try to imagine the top of a radio tower off in the distance, OK? Upright? Tapered at the top? Only this tower’s lower half was missing. And the thing was floating. It’s crazy I know.”
“Well, that is sort of hard to imagine”
“Well, not for me anymore. Hey, gimme that piece of paper over there. I’ll draw you a picture of it.” Jack plucked a pencil from off the lunch table and went to work. It didn’t take him long. And this is what he showed us:
The four of us pored over it. Someone said, “Shit, that don’t look like any normal ufo.”
“That’s what I was saying!”
And then, seemingly right out of the blue, the first bell was ringing and all of us had to haul ourselves out of our chairs, gather up our things, and head for our respective classrooms.
End of discussion.
But it had been an interesting morning, to say the least.
And I still felt bad for Jack.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
That Evening, 5:30-ish:
A cool autumn evening with the darkness threatening to settle in. We were seated around the dinner table, our family, partaking of the typical evening meal. Suddenly, a knock at the front door!
None of us was expecting anybody. “I’ll get it,” I said, rising from my chair and heading out through the living room.
I was totally surprised to find Jack standing on the other side of the screen door.
“Hey, Tom.”
“Jack. Hi. This is a surprise. C’mon in.” I stepped aside and he stepped into the entryway.
“Who is it?” Phyllis calls from the kitchen.
“Jack. Jack Rogers!”
“Oh.”
“What’s up, Jack?” I couldn’t help but notice that he was appearing somewhat antsy.
“You busy right now? Or having dinner? I don’t wanna interrupt your meal.”
“No problem. Just finishing up. Maybe three or four French fries left. Why? You wanna talk, I take it?”
“Yeah that, plus I wanted to know if you’d be willing to take a ride with me.”
“A ride? What, right now? Where to?”
“Look,” he shrugs, “First, I apologize for how upset I got this morning, OK? But it’s just… this whole thing’s driving me crazy, alright? I mean, still.”
“You don’t need to apologize. I…”
“But I know what I saw, OK!?”
“Sure. Look, I know you saw something… something unidentifiable. I don’t doubt that for a minute.”
“Well, if you’d’a been there, you’d sure as hell’ve seen something too, damnit! And then…”
“I’m sure I would have. Look, Jack, I believe you, OK? I have no doubt in my mind you saw something, alright? Something weird. But listen, if anyone needs to apologize… well, it’s me. And I do. Again. And sincerely. I’m honestly sorry we all laughed. It was just… a gut reaction to the bad timing of that whole damn thing. I’m serious. Look, if you’d been in our shoes, you’d see that.”
“Yeah. So you guys all said. And yeah, I do get that now.”
“I hope so. It was just a bad… one hell of an unfortunate coincidence. I mean, there we were reading that very article, talking about it and everything… and in you come…”
“Yeah. OK. Whatever. I get it.”
“It was like some slapstick scene right outta a sit-com, you know?”
“Yeah yeah yeah. So anyway… you got time to take a ride with me, or what? Right now? I just really need to go back there. And have a look. It’s driving me nuts!”
“Well, sure. OK. I’m in. But honestly? You gotta realize that whatever it was you saw is more than unlikely to still be there. Right?”
“I know. Yeah. But I still wanna go out there. And just take a look-see. I just feel I gotta go back and… I dunno what!”
“Got it.”
“And I really just don’t wanna go by myself. Because on the off-chance there is something to see out there tonight, I don’t wanna be the only one. I want a witness.”
“OK, Jack. I mean this sounds like an adventure. I’ll get my jacket.”
As I lifted my jacket off the hook in the rear hallway, I stuck my head around the corner into the kitchen to say goodbye to Phyllis. “Remember I told you this morning, Jack told us he’d seen a ufo last night? Well… I’m going for a ride with him to check out the area. And who knows, maybe I’ll be abducted. Probably be back in an hour or so…”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
It seriously did feel adventure-like to me though, cruising on a UFO quest through downtown Rumford in Jack’s Jeep with the doors removed and the cool, rushing air breezing all through the cab! There was something wild and crazy about it. And right up my alley.
Then the town limits were behind us and we were tooling out into the woods on back roads growing spookily darker by the mile, what with the leafy branches from both sides of the road entwining themselves together and forming a canopy of even greater darkness over our heads.
But it was invigorating to be outside. Certainly better than watching the 6:00 news on the living room sofa.
Jack was detouring circuitously around, so that we’d be traveling down the road in the same direction he’d been traveling the previous night. “I know we’re not gonna see anything,” he bemoaned. “But I’ve just gotta go back there and be sure. I just can’t stop thinking about it. All the time.”
“Yeah. I get it. But it would be amazing, really too much to ask, to be treated to the same sighting two days and a row. Too good to be true, most likely. But I swear on a stack of Bibles, Jack, I totally believe you. Actually, I just wish I’d gotten to see it.
The whole thought of it felt pretty exciting, in a goose-bumpy sort of way.”
And soon we were rolling down the road in the exact area where he’d first noticed the thing in the sky. There were acres of flat fields of grasses on either side, checkered with bales of hay lying in loose rows.
“Yeah see, it was right up over there,” he told me, with an index finger pointing at the horizon off on one side of the road. “Just a damn, dim, flickering thing, crawling right along up there low in the sky in the same direction as me.
And see, that’s the thing too: what you so often hear about UFOs is that they’re usually bright, not dim. And strobing, not… just barely flickering. But it was weird just the same.”
We rode along for a minute or two in silence. You could now see some of the stars coming out, glinting overhead. But nothing other-worldly. Finally, I asked him, “So whattaya wanna do now? Throw in the towel, or wait awhile longer?”
“Not ready to throw in the towel just yet, even though I’m pretty much positive we’re never gonna see what I wanna see. It’s just that about a mile up ahead is the turn-off, where I had to go right to head home and the thing… just continuing heading off and away in a straight line. Last I saw of it anyway.”
It was a crossroads where Jack finally let us roll to a slow stop. “Yeah. This is it. Where I had to turn off.”
“Whoa. You forgot to tell me there was a graveyard right here.” There actually was.
“Honestly, I never even noticed it myself. It was dark, and I was keeping my eyes glued to the sky.”
We climbed out of the Jeep, walked around to the front of it, and leisurely leaned our butts up against the grille and the front of the hood. The stars were pretty and bright. But the dim UFO was nowhere to be seen. “The graveyard’s kinda spooky though.”
“Hey. Sorry I dragged you all the way out here.”
“Not at all. It’s all good. I enjoyed the ride and the fresh air. So much more exhilarating than scoring the stack of essays I brought home with me this afternoon.”
“I just wish I knew something… anything I could do to get this… anxiety out of my head!”
“Well, I dunno if, or how, it might help, but see that big barn over there’s some guy over there leaning in under the hood of his pick-up. Working on his truck’s engine. We could just head over there and ask him if he saw anything last night. Worth a shot.”
That gave Jack a little boost. “Good idea. Let’s do that.”
A minute later we rolled up into the guy’s driveway and climbed out. Right away the guy looked up and started giving us the hairy eyeball. I didn’t blame him. Two guys pull up in my driveway that time of night way out in the willy-wags, I’d have felt very wary myself. Jack called out a friendly “Hello!”
I noticed in the light hanging above him that the guy picked up what looked like a foot-and-a-half long wrench. He certainly didn’t look too happy to see us. “Whatta you two want?”
“Sorry to bother you,” Jack said, “Just have a question. See, I was driving down this road here last night, ust about this time actually, and I happened to notice a… well, a dim, flickering light in the sky right up about there,” he said, pointing. “No idea what the darn thing was, but it was moving at a pretty good clip. It’s been driving me crazy ever since trying to figure out what it might have been though.”
The guy just stood there staring at us, stock-still by the open hood of the truck, silent, waiting. For more of the story maybe? Jack went on.
“So I was just wondering. If you saw anything like that. Last night? Or any night, for that matter.”
The guy didn’t seem to like that question. “That, Mister,” he said, “is none of my business!”
I felt Jack’s body stiffen, saw his face flash to anger! This morning he’d suffered the indignity of being laughed at by his peers in the faculty lounge. And his day apparently hadn’t been going so well since then.
“What did you just say to me?”!
Oh great— those were fighting words.
“I think you heard me,” the man snapped back.
For a second, I don’t know why, but I felt sure Jack was going to try to jump the guy. The guy with the big steel wrench. In my mind I could imagine hearing a couple of duelling banjos starting to pick out “Yankee Doodle.”
“Take it easy, Jackie. Please. And… time to go., right? Let’s just get outta here…”
“Hey, you! All I did was ask you a simple, friendly question. A simple yes, or no question! And You? You…”
“Jackie! Come on!” I urged. “Let’s go!”
“OK,” said the Man with the Wrench. “Let me point you in the direction of somebody you should be asking that question! All right? Now, you see that white farmhouse right down that road there?” He nodded toward it, over his shoulder. “Next one down? They’re the ones you need to ask! Not me or anybody else. Because. As. I. Said. It’s none of my business.”
“So… let’s go. Let’s go do what the man said, OK Jackie?”
“Jesus!” Jack growled. But he did back away and, thank God, slammed himself back into the Jeep.
But… I was wondering, what in the hell is going on here? What were we getting ourselves into? And more than that even, Did I really know anything at all about Jack? “You know…” I told him as we went barreling down the little dirt road spitting rocks out from under the tires toward the white farmstead, “we really don’t have to go to this place, though, do we?”
I never got an answer.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
In no time, we had mounted the little front porch of the main house, and Jack was banging his fist on the front door. He’d begun with a knock, but since we could see some of the windows were blazing with light while no one was deigning to answer the door, he’d started banging on it.
After a while, the door cracked open a little. A crack no more than five inches wide. And peeking out through the crack was a nervous little boy’s face. A boy maybe four feet tall, plus or minus.
“Hello?” he asked.
“Hi,” Jack replied. “Could I speak with one, or both, of your parents please?”
The door opened to about a foot wide now. Swallowing noticeably, the boy said, “Uhhmm, they’re not home right now.”
“Oh. OK then, I guess I’ll hafta talk to you. So anyway… last night I was driving down the road back there and I saw something up in the sky. I guess I’ll hafta call it a unidentified flying object since I sure as hell couldn’t identify whatever the hell it was. You ever see one of those around here, up in the air at night?”
“No sir. Never.”
“It was giving off a flickering light and it was moving, traveling, right in the same direction as me… and it’s been driving me crazy ever since because… all I wanna know is what the hell it was. OK? Because it was disturbing, you know? And then, on top of that, this guy and me here? We just stopped up the road at your not-too-friendly neighbors’ place and asked him the same question. And you know what? He got all pissed off and said if I wanted to know what it was, I should come over here and ask you folks. So. OK. Here I am. And I’m asking. What exactly was it I saw last night, Huh?”
It took a moment before the boy, looking down at his toes, pretty much whispered a meek, “I don’t know.”
Once again I sensed Jack doing a double-take. “Well, I’m sorry, kid. But I think you do know. And I can’t imagine why you would, but I think you’re lying to me. Because that guy back there, your Mister Greenjeans from hell? Hesaid you people would have the answer!”
“Jackie, would you please take it easy? You’re scaring the kid. Cmon. Let’s go home.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be sounding so scary, kid, if you’d just own up to whatever this is, all right? I mean I didn’t drive all the way out here just to be lied to. OK? So let’s have it. What was it I saw last night?! What’s going on here?”
Silence.
“Well? I want an answer.”
The boy looked at him with imploring eyes, and then his gaze dropped back down to the toes of his shoes again. And then, in the saddest, softest little voice you could ever imagine, confessed.
“Uhmmm… we’re not allowed to talk about it…”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
You’ve just finished reading my true story, “Rumford Roswell Part I.” Part II will be following close on the heels of this one. Watch for it to find out about The Aftermath of Part I.
In the meantime, below is a little smile for you in the form of a short little YouTube video. Enjoy.
Please feel free to leave me a comment, below, if the spirit moves you.
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