annarino writes

Before the world lit itself up like a Christmas tree on every corner we could stand in our backyards and view the Milky Way. Now, the stars are blocked, locked away behind the haze of nights ablaze in light. We can no longer mark our place in the universe, feel the smallness of our being, as we watch the movement of stars across the sky. We can no longer mark time throughout the night. I miss the stars. As a child I spent hours lying on my back in the grassy yard watching the stars move through the sky. We begged to be allowed to sleep outside on warm nights, stringing blankets like a tent over the clothes line. We seldom slept inside the tent. It was more for Mom’s benefit than our own.

I loved the sky, the way clouds moved across it. I sometimes let myself feel earth’s rotation through the passage of stars and clouds. I recognized that stars were fixtures, and it was I who was being moved about while standing on Earth’s surface. Such thoughts were dizzying, electric, compelling. One night, my Father and his brothers gathered all of us cousins in Uncle Frankie’s yard, out beyond any city lights that we might watch the passage of The United States’ first satellite Explorer 1, a year after Russia’s Sputnik 1. Its passage times were charted daily and printed in the newspaper. We stood in a single row with parents standing behind; children and adults both in awe. I was hooked. I was 8 years old. I am still hooked at 74.

Each autumn I made a leaf book. I collected the most beautiful and perfect leaves I could find from the trees along the neighborhood alleys and iron them between pages of wax paper to preserve their color and form, then sew together the pages into a book. I preferred to pull leaves from the tree before ground insects, soil and trampling feet marred their full beauty. The autumn I was 12 I was reaching up for a bright yellow oak leaf when I noticed an object brighter than any star in the afternoon sky. It was three times as high as the jet streaking across the sky, a tiny form one-tenth its size, far below. Such discrepancy in what I had ever seen in the sky startled me. I pointed it out to the neighbor children who were following my progress and searching for leaves. We stopped and simply watched in wonder for perhaps 30-40 minutes. For the first 30 minutes or more it did not move. It simply hung there, huge and brilliant in the sun reflecting off its surface. Everything else in the sky shifted as time passed. It stayed in place. That was confusing.

The shape was also confusing. It appeared as two curved plates turned toward each other, with a smaller curved plate in the center, below the main body of the object. It was a perfectly formed “flying saucer.” We could not believe what we were seeing. Yet, we could not take our eyes off the image. Suddenly, the object moved upward in a straight line faster than we had ever seen an object move in the sky. It was not flying at any speed we could comprehend. It lingered in its position for several moments then moved even more rapidly at a right angle directly right, stopped and immediately flew straight up again. We were not strangers to how planes or even helicopters flew. This was clearly neither one of those. We gasped at each strange move, entranced at its uniques pattern. Then whoosh! It flew so fast it literally disappeared from view. The breathless chatter of our group became a crescendo of need to know what it was we had witnessed. One friend, Paula, remembered a brochure in the box her telescope came in. It had a phone number we could call. She found the brochure and we read about Project Blue Book. It included a phone number. I called.

Project Blue Book was housed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in nearby Dayton, Ohio. An officer there took my call and said he would call back. My Mother was surprised the next day when she received a call from the officer to ask if she would allow me to meet with him and another officer at the Public Library the following day. She and Paula’s mother agreed we could meet. The two officers in military uniform met us and immediately separated us for interviews. I told my story, answered every question and drew photos to illustrate its form, position in the sky, altitude and movements. Then, I answered the questions a second time before the officers switched places. The interview resumed with repetitive questioning. At the close of the interview both officers sat with Paula and me and explained that were checking to see if our stories were consistent and true. They agreed we were truthful. They admitted we had seen what the Air Force called an unidentified flying object or UFO. The next step would take some time. More than 90% of such sightings turned out to be identifiable objects. They told us they would be checking for weather balloons, experimental flying objects of our country and of other nations.

Sometime later, the officer called to tell me what we had seen was a true UFO. They could find no explanation for what we had seen. He began sending me a monthly newsletter covering sightings around the country, some explainable, others not. I wish I had kept it. From that time on I paid attention to what we were putting up in our skies, and into outer space. I have watched the commercialization of space with concern, as the skies have become crowded without clear rules of operation worldwide. What goes up must come down and the duration of satellites and their eventual demise is a real concern for those of us on Earth below. The space race which began in 1957 has only picked up speed and, unfortunately, mass. Fortunately, NORAD, a joint effort by The United states and Canada, monitors those skies from the North Pole to Central America.

Events of the past week are not truly surprising. They are inevitable. The strategy behind the positioning of the Chinese spy balloon is interesting and worth considering. Unfortunately, Americans pay more attention to sci-fi thrillers than to facts and are more interested in movie scenarios than reality. The usual suspects are already claiming aliens are landing, one more group of “the other” to fear so white America votes hard right. Perhaps the Chinese strategy is not so inscrutable after all. Perhaps these events will awaken the world to the need to regulate the space where satellites and weather balloons claim dominance over those of us below. Keep looking up. There are challenges ahead and we must unleash imagination to meet those challenges. But, never fear. The best is yet to come.