Aliens Among Us?
October 16, 2005

Kai saw a UFO last night. That is what she says. She came to the door of the cottage rather excited and described an object that she had seen go by below the almost full moon. It was close to two-thirds the size of the moon.

This morning I looked out and she was looking up into the sky. A flock of about a hundred birds had flown over our house. She pointed them out to me in the distance. Large bird flocks are rare here. But that wasn't a UFO.

Last winter we were sitting in the van in our driveway watching an eclipse of the moon. Kai heard a noise and asked me what it was. I heard it too but not as loud as she did. It was on her side of the van. I had assumed it was something in the distance. But as we listened, it sounded as though it were just outside the van, right next to where Kai was sitting.

It sounded like a motor of some kind, but we couldn't figure out what it was or where it was coming from. Kai said that it must be an alien. I was inclined to think there must be some other explanation. It sounded like a drill maybe. I wondered if somebody could be under the van, maybe attaching something to the van with a drill. It was very strange. We did not feel inclined to go outside the van and see. I thought that I would start the motor and back up to see if there was then anything on the ground in front of us.

But we were not sure if that was the best plan. There must be an explanation, I thought, but it was a total mystery. Maybe somebody was planting a bomb under our van.

I went through everything in my mind that could possibly make such a sound. Was there any sort of motor on the passenger's side of the van that could be running? A heater fan maybe? There should be nothing running for the key was shut off. Let's eliminate all the possibilities. Let me look at all the switches to jog my mind about some kind of a motor on that side of the van. Was there some kind of a switch on the armrest maybe? Where my elbow was? I moved my elbow and the noise stopped. Crazy! My elbow, the whole time, had been resting on the remote mirror-adjusting switch. The mirror had traveled to its full extent in one direction, but the motor inside the mirror was still humming.

Mystery solved. Kai was very relieved that it wasn't an alien. Amazing that we were puzzling, somewhat fearfully, over this problem for over 20 minutes. Kai was fearful anyway, but I was actually very macho and brave, more or less, sort of, kind of like anyway.