Starry Nights for UFOs

As a child of the 1960s I lived in the suburbs south of Boston. Summer nights were filled with silence; no cars, no voices, no music. Every house was a tomb and I would steal from the house to our back yard. The grass was shorn short by constant mowing. The stubs were painful to my feet, but I would spread a blanket on the ground, strip off my pajamas and lie on the lawn, looking to the sky.

My soul sought not the mystery of God in the celestial night, but an aberration in the galactic traffic.

"Oh, Mr. Spaceman, won't you please take me away."

Alien abduction was a better fate than suffering pubescence in the suburbs, yet no flying saucers snatched my body. I was stranded on Earth along with billions of other humans. None of us were going to the stars, for our solar system is located on the most remote edge of the Milky Way.

Think as distant from New York as Great Slave Lake.

Spaceships warp past Earth without deccelerting. Our planet isn't on the Inter-Galactic Guide. A cosmic billboard on the Moon WINE AND DINE AT EARTH might help trade with the passing aliens, however Earthlings are stuck on the planet, especially after President Nixon had NASA abandon a Mars landing, colonization of the Moon, or a permanent orbital station in favor of Space Shuttles.

From that moment on I felt we were alone, despite claims to the contrary by Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell that UFOs regularly visit this blue planet and not only the cow-mutilators of Wyoming.

His conversations with old-timers from Roswell strengthened his own experiences in Space and Edgar Mitchell was convinced that NASA and the Pentagon have been vigorously prevented the truth from reaching a public more interested in potato chips than UFOs.

"Is there life outside of Earth?"

The Colonel thought so, although my late father considered billions spent on NASA a waste. He was an electrical engineer. He loved my mother. She only wanted to go to Cape Cod in the summer and that desitnation was good enough for him as well.

"There's nothing out there?"

No go-go bars for sure or romantic lakes or no marching bands.

Tubas take up too much room in a spaceship, although I once saw a tuba on a Star Trek episode.

The former astronaut also says that the three crafts once hovering over Phoenix were not ours. They were from another planet and not Mars either. Someplace much farther away and we can't even estimate that distance with our pea brains, but I no longer want to go to the stars.

I have four kids.

A three loving daughters and two busy boys.

Plus two grandchildren.

Those are my aliens, for ET are us.

Children from future.

Next Year Andromeda

THe planet Earth is located on the farthest edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. The barred spiral of Andromeda is the closest galaxy to our Solar System crowded with over a trillion stars. The seemingly impossible distance between the two nebulae of approximately 2.57 ± 0.06 million light-years failed to deter Marvel Comics from publishing a cover spanned by NEXT YEAR ANDROMEDA and I dreamed of leaving my hometown on the South Shore to travel the stars.

The Space Race of the early 1960s intensified my desire and on summer nights I laid on the back lawn of our split-level reading MYSTERIES IN SPACE in the moonlight. I prayed for aliens to abduct me. While I saw the Sputnik crossing the sky, bats were the only silhouettes in the night and an unworldly Dracula never controlled their search for insects.

I researched the boundaries of the universe at the town library supplemented by comic books purchased with tip money from my paper boy route. They cost ten cents. My father considered them trash along with the Three Stooges. He was an electrical engineer and believed in the beauty of Math.

The 1962 film THREE STOOGES IN ORBIT didn't change his opinion of Moe, Larry, adn Curly Joe. His hatred for comics was manifested by ripping them out of my hands and tearing them to shreds.

> The USSR and USA battled on the edge of the Cosmos for an empire beyond Earth. "This not a time for frivolity." My father had served in the Army Air Force during WWII, testing radar in B-25s. The fatality rates at his Kentucky air base were around 20% and that was without anyone shooting at their aircrafts. I hid my comics under my mattress, but laid under the stars until the mid-60s.

July 20, 1969 US astronauts landed on the moon around 8:07 PM. I was at my girlfriend's house. We saw none of the it, lost in the aether of teenage love.

President Nixon saw little value in the Space Race since our country was fighting a war in Southeast Asia. NASA's budget shrunk by billions. Our only ventures into Outer Space were satellites.

Voyager 2 is now traveling more than 11.6 billion miles (18.8 billion km) from Earth and will transmit reading from the heliosphere until 2025.

Amazing, but some people still dream of Andromeda. Two weeks ago the Billionaire Bezos set off in the rocket to achieve the height of sixty-two miles, achieving weightlessness for a matter of minutes, before falling back to Earth like a used condom. No way in an atheist's hell with the Blue Origin ever break Terra's confines.

Amazon's autocrat was no spaceman.

Conversely Virgin's overlord Richard Branson launched from his New Mexican Spaceport a week before Bezos.

The VSS UNITY soared fifty miles above the planet surface and glided back the spaceport.

Style Yes. Class Yes. Speed. Not a chance.

The UNITY barely topped Mach 3 and all the fingers in the world could not calculate how long Branson's flying machine would take to reach Andromeda, so until humans invent space warp vessels, I will lie in my friends' backyards awaiting the elevating light to attain one with the universe. I could only be so lucky. THey'll get me to Andromeda.

One way or the other.

Defend Earth Women

Beware of the Martians.

They are only after one thing.

And it isn't KFC.

We Are Not Alone

Last week the National UFO ALERT Rating System has been updated April 4, 2013, with California, Florida, New York and Texas moving to a UFO Alert 3 as the highest reporting states during the month of March 2013, filed with the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) according to Huffington Post. California had 59 sightings in March. New York had 30. I've never seen a UFO and I have looked for space ships since my youth. Sometimes I would lay on the back lawn. The grass wasn't as thick as the front yard, however our house shielded me from curious eyes and I watched the skies for any signs of extraterrestrial traffic. I was praying an alien might take me to Space. It had to be more interesting than my suburban hometown south of Boston. One night my father came out of the house. "What are you doing?" "Looking at the sky." "There are a lot of stars up there. No one knows how many?" "No one?" I thought Klattu and his robot Gort from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL might have a good idea. "No one." My father believed in infinite space. "Not even God." I was only saying that to camouflage my puerile atheism "Maybe Him." My father reached down and lifted me to my feet. "Go to bed. If the Martians come, we'll hear their death rays." "Okay." I walked inside the house up to my bedroom. My brother was asleep. I laid in bed and joined him, dreaming of the stars. One day they would be mine.