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.