Please Don't Take Me

Okay, I'll admit it: I've seen 'em. It was a cold, pre-dawn winter morning, and I was a boy delivering newspapers on my bicycle. My delivery area was the northwest quadrant of town, and I had reached the last residential street there. As I was moving to the west, I glanced at the woods and the horizon to my right. "Oh, a Christmas tree," I said to myself, "it wasn't there yesterday. Somebody's lucky." A Christmas tree isn't a decorated festive fir but an oil well whose lights placed up and down its edges make it look in the dark like the outline of a real yuletide tree. The lights numbered only three, though---round, white, and bright and in a triangle arrangement.

My bike and I rolled two or three more blocks to the west, then turned a block south. It was then that my eyes were drawn upward. They were not that far away---difficult to judge, but I approximated two football fields high---three round, white, bright lights moving right to left in a straight line. Not a sound came from them in the quietness of the chilly air, even though they were not farther away than, say, a distant helicopter. Despite their fair proximity, they were not moving fast, and they emitted no sound. One trailed the other, as the first one passed just above the star in the far background and the other two passed just under it. "Hey, wait a minute!" the thought hit me, "these lights look familiar. I glanced back east and toward the horizon. The Christmas trees lights, which looked exactly like the ones now above me, were gone from the horizon. Hmm, these three lights overhead had moved very quickly to where they were now. The lights continued to move slowly and noiselessly toward the north, gradually disappearing into the pre-dawn fuzziness.

My two local newspapers of the following day did not report any such lights. My parents' call to my uncle, a scientist who worked with climate and agriculture in the area, yielded no report of any weather balloon nor pre-Sputnik aircraft in the sky. Did I see U.F.O.s? Surely. Flying saucers? No way to tell---they simply were "unidentified flying objects." Nothing otherwise unusual happened---unless I count the fact that for the next two weeks my entire bike faintly glowed in the dark. Hey, Greenies, thanks for the safety aid! That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

-Old Doc