Words that Last Forever

We have no control over other people’s memories. We never know which of our actions and words, whether positive or negative, will have the biggest impact on people. Often it’s not the moments you expect. The closer you are to someone the more memories you have to choose from and therefore the more obscure the moment might be.

My grandmother is about to turn 95. When I think back on my memories of her, my mind always rests on the same moment first. It is a moment no one else would ever remember because it was so unimportant. I was probably around 20, riding in the backseat of the car while my mother was driving and my grandmother was the passenger in the front. We were on the highway, driving home, and it was late in the day. A flock of birds appeared over one of the farm fields and looped through the air. My grandmother called out with excitement, “Look at those birds! Just a ribbon of them!”

It’s so simple and inconsequential, yet it’s what I remember first. Her love of nature was encapsulated in that moment, but what really struck me was that I found it to be quite a poetic exclamation to be made on the spot. I was majoring in English at the time and therefore felt a special connection to people who could reveal the world to others in a more descriptive way. But there are two other traits she showed with that simple exclamation that I admire very much in people. One is to be able to be fascinated by the small things in life and find wonder in everyday objects. The other is to show enthusiasm—for anything at all, really. Seeing someone who is enthusiastic about something is to see someone who is in love with life.

I’m sure my mother has no recollection of this moment even though she was there. Neither would my grandmother if she were still able to think as clearly as she once could. But even at the time she would never have thought that those two sentences would be the memory that I forever connect to her when I think of her.

Sometimes the most easily recalled memory of someone is a good one. Sometimes it’s not. The best we can do is keep in mind that the times when we don’t realize people are even listening to us might be the moments they remember forever.

 

My grandma and me on my first birthday

Brace Yourself: Not for the Weak of Stomach

I was sitting on my bargain-outlet green couch in our apartment in Nashville, eating Cheetos and watching The Weather Channel. My husband was in the second bedroom, which we used as an office, poring over textbooks on ethics and constitutional law. As I swallowed my latest bite of Cheetos, I felt a bump in the roof of my mouth. I thought it was a piece of food that had somehow become suctioned to the roof of my mouth, so I tried to clear it away with my tongue. When that didn’t work I stuck my orange cheese-dusted finger into my mouth and picked at it with my fingernail, expecting it to spring free and give me relief. It didn’t budge. Something was wrong.

Growing worried now, I jumped up from the couch and ran into the bathroom. I tried to angle my head so that I could see the roof of my mouth, but in the end it required a combination of hand mirror stuck partway in my mouth reflecting onto the bathroom mirror in order for me to spy what the foreign object was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

It was a tooth.

The idea of a mutant tooth coming in through some random spot in the roof of my mouth threw me into a full-fledged panic. What was wrong with me? What was that tooth doing? I wanted it out now.

I ran to my husband and showed him my mouth that had turned into a freak show in the past few minutes, and he sat there bewildered. I’m sure he suggested something along the lines of going to the emergency room. He believes every physical event out of the norm, such as when he gets diarrhea, is a symptom of imminent death. He has so frequently said to me the words “I think I have a serious health condition” with all the somber gravity of someone delivering devastating news that it has become a joke. Whenever he starts to complain about anything, a headache or gas pains, I turn to him and say with alarm, “I think you have a serious health condition.”

So it’s fair to say that, as I was already worried about what on earth was going on in my mouth, I found no comfort in him. I called the dentist office to see how soon I could get in. The first thing she asked was if I was in pain, but I was not. She still managed to get me an appointment for the next day.

I’ve always thought I had pretty good teeth. Not perfect, but good enough that they didn’t need much work and I had been fortunate enough to avoid the horror of braces during those awkward teen years. It’s true that I knew that I still had two baby teeth in my mouth – my “fangs” – but I had them for so long at this point (age 23!) that I figured I was going to keep them for life. Previous dental x-rays in Wisconsin showed that my adult canine teeth were up there but not in the right locations. Nothing was ever done about this. Of course I blame my parents, who were in charge of my dental care as a child, for not addressing the issue until the financial burden was on me. Well played, mom and dad.

I also felt that somehow moving “down south,” especially into the foothills of Tennessee where jokes about bad teeth were part of the local lore, had jinxed me.

My dentist kindly reassured me the next day that it was not a big deal, and she gave me the name and number of an oral surgeon who could give me advice on what to do next.

The oral surgeon’s waiting room was beautiful, with a stately, marble-column-and-velvet-fabric aura. He x-rayed my mouth and declared that I should go see an orthodontist to get a recommendation and then the orthodontist would send me back to him to get the work started. So off I went again to the next expert, the orthodontist who told me that it should only take about a year and a half of braces to pull the two teeth into place. Perfect, I thought with complete naiveté. I had about a year and a half left in Nashville and then we would be moving back to Wisconsin. I could start the next phase of my life with my teeth in the shape they were meant to be. I decided to go ahead with the procedures.

The process would begin back at the oral surgeon’s office, where I was going to have my wisdom teeth pulled as long as I was there. My late-blooming adult teeth hiding under the roof of my mouth would be hooked up to chains so they would be ready to attach to braces and be dragged into place. It was about this time that I realized both evolution and the science of oral medicine had absolutely failed us. Is there anything more archaic than having metal wires hooked up to your mouth so that your teeth can be painfully pulled in one direction or the other as we suffer with the metal poking our mouths and putting ourselves on restrictive diets? I won’t even get into the indignity of being an adult with braces. It just seems that there must be a better way, and yet no one has come up with anything.

My husband came to sit in on my oral surgery. I gave him strict instructions to ask the doctor if it looked like my teeth would be able to be moved into place before they went ahead and yanked my baby fangs. I didn’t want to be toothless if moving the adult teeth was a long shot. He said nothing.

He did, however, really enjoy watching the procedure and then repeating the gruesome details to all our family and friends. “First they slice the roof of her mouth along the inside front of her teeth, and then they pull it back so that it was a flap hanging in her mouth. Then they could get to the adult teeth underneath and glue on the metal bracket and chain that would snake out from underneath the roof of her mouth after they put the flap back and sewed it up. And her baby teeth popped out like nothing! The wisdom teeth were a bit trickier. The doctor had to put his foot up on the armrest on the chair for one wisdom tooth in order to get the leverage to yank it out!”

I was asleep for all of this, of course. I never would have had to know the details of just how my mouth had been violated.

While I don’t remember anything during the surgery, the moments before and after it were less than ideal. I don’t respond well to anesthesia. The problem is not falling asleep. It puts me under just fine. In fact, I had been talking with coworkers about it before the appointment. One of my friends was saying she was terrified of the anesthesia because she thought she would die while she was under. Another friend said that she started laughing when she was put under for her wisdom teeth surgery because she knew she was about to fall asleep and somehow found that funny. I admit relating more to friend number one’s reaction than friend number two.

When they started the anesthesia my doctor asked if I was nervous, and I bravely said no. Then he said, “A lot of people don’t like it because they’re afraid they’re not going to wake up.” Nothing like just putting your fear right out there. I’m sure my eyes grew wide as he spoke the words that of course I was thinking. But then when he asked me to start counting backward, I remembered my giggly friend and smiled as I drifted off to dreamland.

Waking up was the hard part. I woke up and felt sick. I didn’t want to stand up. But I got the feeling that I had been taking up the chair longer than they expected. I felt bad and wanted to get in the car and go home. I also must have looked a mess. They decided to take me out the long way instead of through the waiting room. I would exit through a back door that would bring me to the outer hallway and then I’d walk past the doctor’s office door to the front door and never have to scare those waiting in the lobby for their appointment. It didn’t work.

I groggily got to my feet and my husband supported me as we walked out through a different door and entered the outer hallway. Before I even passed the oral surgeon’s door I could feel that I was going to pass out or throw up; one of those things was going to happen if the other didn’t. My husband veered me right back into the main door and into the waiting room of the office, where the receptionist jumped up to help steer me back into my room as fast as possible. I could feel the cold sweat drenching my body as I lay back onto the chair I had been in two minutes ago. My doctor and nurse apologized but I closed my eyes and ignored all of them for another 10 minutes until I was finally strong enough to make it to the car. It was a torturous ride home. Even after we got back to the apartment and I was lying on the green couch (because I couldn’t make it all the way down the hall to the bedroom), my husband brought me a notepad and pen so I could talk with him and the first thing I wrote was “You shake floor.” Even his footsteps were making me queasy. And there is nothing you want less than to throw up when you have your mouth filled with bloody gauze.

The promise of braces for only a year and a half didn’t work out either. I came back to Wisconsin with my braces still intact and two teeth that were still firmly under the roof of my mouth. Then I found a new orthodontist and oral surgeon and dentist who had slightly different plans for me. We kept trying to pull the teeth in but eventually realized only one of them was going to make the journey. The other had to be pulled out and an implant was drilled into my jaw instead. So I went through different ugly duckling phases, from braces and missing teeth to braces and one missing tooth to a retainer with a fake tooth to finally getting all the metal pulled out of my head except for the part screwed into my skull that now held a perfect replica of what my tooth should have been. In the meantime, five years had passed and I had given birth to my first child.

Of course, if I knew then what I know now, I would have had them yank all four teeth and put in implants for both of those teeth. I would have been done in a few months as opposed to five years. Five years of pain, unattractiveness, and hefty medical bills. The last surgery, to attach the fake tooth to the metal implant after it had been given enough months to heal inside my skull so that it wouldn’t be dislodged when I bit down, was on my 28^th birthday. I told the receptionist this as I was scheduling and she offered to change it to a later date, but I couldn’t wait another day. It may have been an unpleasant birthday, but it was still a gift to myself, because I was finally done.

 

My million-dollar smile. Sorry about that college tuition, kids.

We Must Still Boldly Go

On January 28, 1986, I was in seventh grade science class when some classmates came in and told us the space shuttle carrying the teacher had exploded during launch. They had been listening to the launch on the radio in band class. My science teacher was a bit rattled and didn’t want to believe what the students were saying until an announcement came over the intercom confirming that it was true. We filed into the lunch room that day and televisions had been rolled into the cafeteria so we could watch the news. We saw the explosion replayed over and over and tracked the pieces of debris as they streamed downward and splashed into the Atlantic. On the news that night, every minute of the newscast was filled with Challenger coverage. Even the weather report had a little space shuttle figure showing what the winds were like in different levels of the atmosphere and discussing temperatures in Florida that day, wondering if any environmental issues could have played a role.

After we learned more about what happened that tragic day, my science teacher talked to us about how the compartment the astronauts were in was in free fall for two minutes and 45 seconds before impacting the ocean at a phenomenal speed. At least a few of the astronauts survived the initial explosion, because three of four emergency air packs found had been manually activated. My teacher wanted us all to imagine what that would have been like, the short yet extended period of knowing what had just happened and what was surely to come. My class of 28 students sat quietly in their seats facing the clock and my science teacher sat up front facing out at us. We started a moment of silence as the large institutional clock’s second hand swung up to 12 and started ticking off the seconds. We sat mute, unmoving, with our eyes on nothing but that second hand and our thoughts on nothing but the astronauts locked in their fate. My teacher turned around after about one minute and thirty seconds to watch the clock with us. At one minute and 45 seconds he exclaimed sadly, “That is a very long time.” A couple students pointed out to him that it had only been one minute and 45 seconds and not two minutes and 45 seconds. At first he didn’t believe us, but when he saw all our nodding heads, he realized that the torture lasted even longer than we could stand, sitting there contemplating the fate of people we had never met. One of the girls in the class got up to grab a tissue out of the box on the teacher’s desk to dry her tears, and then we moved on to our lesson about different types of energy.

Seventeen years and four days later, on February 1, 2003, I was sitting at my computer on a Saturday morning while my husband was at work and my young son played in the living room. I was instant messaging a friend who is also a stay-at-home mom whose husband was at work that morning. I had CNN on in the background and saw the usual program interrupted as the words “Shuttle explodes over Texas” appeared on the bottom of the screen. I had been waiting to watch the shuttle landing that would be aired on TV. By this time everyone knew the dangers of launches, but landings seemed like relatively safe, low-power descents where the craft glided through the atmosphere to its airplane-like landing. But on this day the TV screen was filled with an image that looked like a large bright meteor breaking up in the atmosphere as it streaked downward toward Earth.

This late January-early February window of bad luck for the space program began before I was born. On January 27, 1967, three astronauts died during a routine ground test in the Apollo capsule after an electrical spark ignited a fire.

This earliest tragedy occurred when humankind was getting ready to walk on the moon, 384,000 kilometers away. The shuttle tragedies occurred on liftoff and reentry from the space shuttle’s normal orbit of 320 kilometers off the Earth’s surface. But now there isn’t much of a space program left. While the space station still orbits above us with a crew of five, we must rely on other countries to get astronauts there and bring them home. All the space shuttles have been retired. There are no replacement vehicles in the works. The US’s space program is creeping backward. A Space.com poll on January 29 asked, “Is human spaceflight worth the risk?” A surely biased group of those who visit Space.com answered with a resounding YES, earning 94% of the vote. But the fact is that we have to continue to boldly go where no man has gone before and venture toward other planets and eventually other stellar systems. Because in the end, it’s mankind’s only option against extinction.

"Hey, have you read my book yet?"

I’m going to take a break from storytelling this week to concentrate on promotions. As I already have a children’s book published (Solar System Forecast), one novel published on Kindle (The Gathering Storm) with its sequel in the editing stage (Storm Damage), and another unrelated novel finished and ready for submission (Under a Different Sky), I need to take some time to brainstorm how to spread the word on my already-existing stories.

A website and blog are obvious choices for promotion, but then there’s the matter of how to drive traffic to your site, as well as not constantly bombarding people with your work and turning them off. I’ve announced my books on Facebook and Twitter, but after the initial sales, you can’t sell the same book to the same people.

When I meet new people, I try to work my books into conversation, which can be easy if someone simply asks me what my job is. I never force it; I let it come up organically. I suppose someone’s opening sentence could be, “Hey, have you read my book yet?” and there’s nothing wrong with being frank, but I’m not quite that aggressive. (This may also be the reason I’m mostly unknown.)

Another promotional idea came to me as I was browsing the internet. I saw the covers of classic books, such as The Great Gatsby, printed on t-shirts. I thought it would be a neat idea to get a shirt with one of my favorite books on it, but then I stopped and thought, why should I advertise a book everyone’s already heard of? So I went to a website that can print any photo onto totes, mugs, etc., and I had the cover of The Gathering Storm screen-printed onto a t-shirt. I haven’t worn it anywhere yet but I think at the very least it will make a good conversation piece.

I’ve spent way too much time on Pinterest lately, like the rest of the free world, and pinned my books onto a board of my favorite books. It was nice to see my books repined by others, but after pinning them once, there wasn’t much I could do unless I kept unpinning and repinning them and risk annoying everyone. Instead I thought it would be fun to make Pinterest pages for each of my books. While it may help generate interest, it’s also just a great way to visualize elements of my story, such as the characters and world they're living in. I’ve found amazing examples of tall, formal gardens with clipped hedges and blind pathways that Evelyn sneaks through as she hurries to her next illicit meeting with … well, you’ll have to read The Gathering Storm to see whom she meets.

Pinterest Page for The Gathering Storm

Pinterest Page for Under a Different Sky

 My friend gave me an additional idea that seems like it could be a lot of fun. I’m starting a Twitter account under my main character, Evelyn. Sometimes I’ll quote from the book and other times I’ll tweet from my character’s perspective.

Evelyn's Twitter Account

I’m also considering a Twitter account for my unpublished novel, but instead of quoting from that book or tweeting my character’s thoughts and giving too much away, it might be fun to tweet from before the book starts. Sort of a prequel Twitter feed of the book. Not only will it help future readers get to know my characters before they start the book, but it will also help me explore my characters further.

If you have any unorthodox promotional ideas to share, tweet me or add them in the comments section below.

 

5 Ways to Annoy an Astronomer

Astronomers. They’re a pretty friendly bunch. They like nothing more than to share the wonders of the universe and the beauty of the night sky with others. Whether it’s someone who studies astronomy for a living or someone who indulges as a hobby, they’re usually a pretty amiable lot.

But if you want to see them get perturbed and a bit red in the face, there are a few sure-fire ways to achieve this. Certainly if you asked each individual, they could probably come up with more than five, but these five seem to be universal. And now, in reverse order:

Number 5: Use lights at a star party. Arrive after it’s completely dark. Pull your car up to the group with their telescopes all set up and shine your bright headlights right into their faces until you can actually see their pupils lose dilation. After you get out of your car, walk onto the field with your deer-spotting hand lamp and shine it around until you find a good place to stand. Then when you’re all set up and don’t need your lights anymore to see the way, shoot off some fireworks to liven up the party a little bit.

Number 4: Buy a star. Contact one of the many “star registries” to purchase the pretend naming rights to a random star in the sky that is too faint to see. Then try to find your name on any official star map to show your astronomy friends. Or better yet, send me your fifty bucks and I’ll print out my own star chart with the real name of a star photo-shopped out and your name there instead, as official as any of the “professional” naming companies. Polaris? Not anymore. Now it’s the Jimbo Star.

Number 3: Claim the moon landing was faked. This one is really about the “debunker” and his or her discomfort with the advancement of science and technology. Which probably means they’re not all that comfortable around people who see back in time with their telescopes or who study the big bang genesis of the universe 13 billion years ago. Any easy way to slip in this pet peeve is anytime someone says, “If they can put a man on the moon...” interrupt them and say, “That never really happened.” This might also get you a job at Fox Television.

Number 2: Talk about aliens and UFOs. Discuss the strange lights you have seen in the sky: the blinking noisy craft that move overhead, the non-blinking tiny lights that soar smoothly from horizon to horizon, and the waving and shimmering bands of light you sometimes see invading the north. Ask to look through their telescope so you can find evidence of little green men on Mars. See if they’d like to hop the fence with you at Area 51 and “check things out.”

And Number 1: Confuse astrology and astronomy. Enough said.



 We landed here once. Really.

I Hate Santa

What is the point of Santa? I really don’t get it. My husband and I were never much on pushing this idea on our kids. When my son was two, I remember my sister saying something to him about Santa, and I had to reply that he didn’t really know who that was. This didn’t last long. Christmas is inundated with images of the red-suited fellow, and as soon as my son started preschool it was Santa, Santa, everywhere. So we went along with the lie because if your kid ruins it for other people’s children, you will be ostracized. So Santa became a “real” thing and therefore our next child believed in Santa too, although we still never made it much of an issue.

Sure, Santa can be used to enforce the creepy “he’s watching you so be good or you won’t get presents” theme, but I’d just as soon have my child do the right thing because it is the right thing and not because he thinks he’s on some sort of surveillance camera.

I just don’t see the benefit of lying to our kids. When my friends’ kids discovered that Santa was not real, they didn’t take it well. In some cases it even ruined Christmas for them. I remember one of my own friends from grade school sobbing uncontrollably for a full day when she realized that not only was Santa not real, but neither was the Tooth Fairy nor the Easter Bunny.

Again, what’s with all the lies? Is this really more fun for kids? Would the holidays have been less fun had they just celebrated them as they were? I probably have a slanted opinion on this for a few reasons. One reason is that I can’t recall ever believing in Santa. And guess what? I don’t feel the least bit cheated. Yes, that’s right, I didn’t believe in Santa and yet I loved Christmas as much as the next kid. I still got to eat chocolate schaum torte pie and krumkake and marshmallow cornflake wreaths dyed green; I still got to have a party with my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins; I still got dressed up in a pretty red velvet dress and shiny black patent shoes and sang carols at Christmas mass; and I still dreamt of the untold wonders that could be in those gaily colored packages under the Christmas tree.

I was not raised without a Santa by design. The way my mom tells the story, I was four years old and sitting in my room talking with my eight-year-old sister Kris. My sister said how one Christmas Eve she woke up and heard bells and then peeked outside and saw a red light in the sky and decided it must be Santa and his sleigh with the reindeer, including Rudolph’s red nose shining through the night. After hearing this story I went to my mother and said, “I know Santa’s not real, but don’t tell Kris, because I think she still believes.”

Another issue I have with Santa is that he sounds a lot like God. He knows what you’re doing when no one else is watching, you can ask him to give you things, and he is a benevolent old man who rewards the good and punishes the bad. Who wouldn’t want someone like that watching over them? Santa is for children, and God is the adult’s Santa Claus. Now if you want your children to believe in God, I wouldn’t push the Santa idea too hard. Because once they realize Santa’s fictional, isn’t it a small step to think the same of God?

I want my kids to know that real money goes into the gifts they get, and that money was earned by real work. I want them to understand that giving gifts is a shared activity; that it’s not just about receiving. It’s a time to donate to those less fortunate than you and to get together with family, sometimes the only time of the year that you see certain people. And, if you are religious, you have your own reason for the season, and there are other religions celebrating their own important events that time of year as well.

Why force your kids to believe a myth? Why knowingly lie to them? Do you really get pleasure out of having to wrap presents in certain paper that they won’t identify and disguise your handwriting so they won’t recognize it? Why let them believe that there are some instances when it’s okay to carry on for years with a lie and keep secrets? In what way whatsoever does the idea of Santa benefit anyone?

It’s not fun, it’s stupid. It’s not beneficial, it’s harmful. And the fact that I have to lie to my kids when they’re young because I’m afraid they’ll “ruin it” for other people’s children is maddening. The first kid who tells the other kids at school that Santa isn’t real is looked at by the parents as being naughty and from some kind of undisciplined household.

No, my kids are not the ones who “spilled the beans”. My daughter was never very taken by the myth, and over the last couple years she said she’d “outgrown Santa,” as if he were a Disney princess or Dora and Boots. I’ll admit I quite like her perspective of the situation.

My son has known for a very long time but has never discussed it for fear of not getting gifts anymore. Though he did say once that he can’t understand why parents buy themselves presents, meaning that nonbelievers shouldn’t get gifts. One parent I know told her kids that “you have to believe to receive.” I’ll be damned if I can see the logic behind that. When they are old enough to know better, why do they still have to act like children? Yes, Santa Claus is a tradition, but one without any worthwhile value.

The anti-Santa attitude isn’t one that I’ve run across much … or ever. I think most people would conclude that I am a fervent Christian who is unhappy with Santa usurping Jesus’s rightful place. But the fact is that I’m not religious. My husband is not religious either. We were both raised as Christians and celebrated Christmas and we continue the tradition with our kids for various reasons, ranging from family expectations to the joy of giving. We keep the traditions that make sense to us and discard the worthless ones. We also believe in freedom of religion, and that includes our children’s decision to one day pick a religion for themselves. Therefore they know the real story of Christmas, just as they know about the eight nights of Hanukkah and the scientific reason for the winter solstice.

What the Santa issue comes down to for me, ultimately, is that I have to lie to my kids because you lie to your kids. I think that’s bullshit. It’s not like I treat my kids like little adults and let them watch horrible news stories or fill their vocabulary with curse words. But the blatant lying to our children for no useful reason is completely ridiculous to me.

Do I expect anyone to agree with me? No. Do I expect anyone to start acting differently? No. Am I just venting? Pretty much.

If I ever write my own fictional Christmas story, it will go something like this: “’Twas the night before Christmas , the date children like best, when kind old Santa stopped and clutched at his chest. He dropped to his knees, his skin paler than snow, and knew that at last it was his time to go….”

I’m still working on it.

 

RIP Santa

My Close Encounter of the UFO Kind

As a science writer and hardened skeptic, I don’t take much stock in UFO stories. (Although I am apparently folksy enough to use the phrase “don’t take much stock”.) As an adult I find stories of “paranormal” events to be humorous and entertaining. But I was not so amused back in 1985 on the side of a dark country road as a UFO hovered overhead.

I was 12 years old and despite this being the only “close encounter” of my life, I cannot remember seeing the Unidentified Flying Object at all. I was in the backseat of the car coming back from seeing a movie with my parents and their friends. It was summertime and already dark but not yet 10 p.m.

We were well into the countryside when someone mentioned a strange light moving above us. We turned off the highway onto a deserted country road. My parents and their friends were growing excited now, and they pulled over onto the gravel shoulder to get out and take a better look.

What I remember of the event was the adults standing on the road, filled with agitation and excitement, chattering and pointing upward. And I remember myself, huddling in the far corner of the car, terrified. I felt like I was under a spotlight, beckoning the aliens to me, because the only light for miles on this country road was the one coming from the dome in the car. My parents had left their doors open and a dinging noise kept repeating this fact, drawing more attention to me in my bright cocoon. The car, parked on the side of the road, leaned toward the ditch and I allowed gravity to pull me as far from the open doors as possible, hoping that I would not be visible to any beings that were joyriding above us.

Eventually my parents returned to the car where they saw me squished into the crack between the seat and door. My mother burst out laughing.

Twenty years later I would stumble across a report of this UFO sighting, which allowed me to fill in some of the blanks.

In 2005, I bought a book called The W-Files: True Reports of Wisconsin’s Unexplained Phenomena by Jay Rath. At the time I was researching any and all minutiae about Wisconsin for a trivia and puzzle book I was writing (Badger Brain Twisters) and not even thinking of my own close encounter when I came upon the following.

The entry for August 2, 1985, begins, “Around 9:45 p.m., 10 people, in a region that spreads from Cross Plains to Blue Mounds, saw a UFO moving slowly eastward. It was white, brighter than a star and ... projected a beam of light that ‘moved back and forth like a searchlight.’”

One of the witnesses was Rogers Keene. Keene, a teacher at Wisconsin Heights Junior High School, was walking his dog around his rural home, five miles north of Black Earth. The car in which I was “hiding” during this time would have been parked on the shoulder of the road a mere two miles east of Keene.

I don’t know what subject Keene taught at Wisconsin Heights Junior High, but he analyzed the situation like an astronomer, noting that the object was about 75 degrees above the horizon and appeared to be the size of his thumb when his arm was stretched away from his body. He watched it for two minutes as it swept a beam of light across the ground. It then hovered and zig-zagged slowly downward until it was only 20 degrees above the horizon. The light then shrank until it disappeared.

Madison’s airport and NWS radar did not detect this object. And, even more strangely, on the same night, at the same time, witnesses in six other Midwestern states reported similar sightings.

So was it a UFO? Sure, in that no one has explained it. It remains unidentified. But was it an alien spacecraft? I think it’s fair to say that’s highly unlikely.

Yes, there are scientists who study “aliens”. However, they are not out tracking UFOs. They are working on projects such as SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and analyzing the statistical possibility of extraterrestrial life with mathematical tools such as the Drake Equation.

One of my favorite stories concerns the physicist Enrico Fermi. One day he was having lunch with colleagues and they were discussing that if Earth is typical for a planet and the sun is a typical star, then life should also be a commonplace occurrence in the Universe. This is when Fermi famously blurted out, “Where are they?” Meaning, if extraterrestrial life is so abundant, shouldn’t we know of their existence? Many scientists and authors have tried to answer this question, and Stephen Webb did a great job of it in his book If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … Where Is Everybody? But Fermi’s Paradox remains unanswered.

I have my own answer to the question, which plays a small part in a novel I wrote that is on my next-to-be-edited list. Perhaps someday soon I will finally finish editing my apocalyptic young adult book and it will find a home at some publishing company. In the meantime, I continue to write my astronomy articles, columns, and blogs for various media, occasionally explaining bright or flickering lights and helping to make more of the night sky identifiable to all.

Nothing "unidentified" here. The moon with Venus, Jupiter, and the Hyades Cluster in Taurus.