Tuesday, March 30, 2004
The Dutiful Me spent much of last night worrying at yesterday's display of bitterness in this journal. How entirely, perfectly, distastefully gauche of me, that I scolded, again and again and again. I considered deleting the entry, but The Other Me intervened, reminding me that the original goal of this blog, beyond promoting my work and hopefully increasing sales, was to show readers what it's like to live and work as an author. At least, what it's like for me to live and work as an author. At least, the fraction of the story that I can tell without alienating readers, publishers, agents, and editors. So, in theory, honesty is important. There are lies here, but they are generally lies of omission, all the things that professional etiquette forbids me to include. Bitterness is a grey area, so long as names are not named. It might not be pretty, and may not endear me to you or you or someone else, but it's very much at the core of what I do. Any depiction of my life as an author without bitterness would be (plucking a convenient simile from the air) like explaining sashimi to someone who's never encountered it, but neglecting to mention that it generally involves raw fish.
Which is to say, The Other Me wins. Yesterday's entry stays, for better or, more likely, for worse.
I promised that today I would tell the story of the UFO sighting Spooky and I had in Piedmont Park on Sunday afternoon. Note that I use the acronym "UFO" literally, to mean "unidentified flying object," not as a synonym for "extraterrestrial spacecraft" (see "On The Road to Jefferson" for my thoughts thereof). So, what I am saying is that Spooky and I saw an airborne object that we have been unable to classify, not that we saw a flying saucer.
We were lying on the side of a hill near a very large live oak, on the side of the park that abuts Tenth St. NE., and Lake Clara Meer (home of Cujo the giant goldfish) lay downhill to our immediate north. There were a great number of other people nearby. We'd been lying there for some time, enjoying the sun, paying no particular attention to anything. Earlier, I'd pointed the silvery half-moon out to Spooky; it was still in the eastern sky, but rising fast. About 4:30 p.m., Spooky pointed at the sky and said something to the effect of "That airplane is very high. And there's another one even higher." Not particularly interested in passing airplanes, I glanced at the sky directly overhead and noted a long contrail (NE to SW). The plane appeared to be a large jet at cruising altitude (so I'm guessing 30K-35K feet). I didn't see any evidence of a second plane and said as much.
"It's right there," Spooky said, "on the other side of the contrail."
I stared and stared and finally, as the wind (from the SE) broke apart the contrail, I spotted the second "airplane." Without my glasses, it appeared to be a reddish-brown dot. And the first thing that I noticed was that it didn't appear to be moving. I told Spooky that I didn't think it was an airplane, and we watched it for a while. I borrowed her glasses (we have almost the same prescription) for a better look, beginning to regret that the binoculars were not in the car. With her glasses, I could see the object better. Lying there, I described it to her as "something like a grain of rice." It appeared to be oblong, but I'm not absolutely sure of this. It's color changed constantly from brown to red-brown to white, and I suggested this was largely a result of sunlight reflecting off an object that was not exactly static. For the first five or ten minutes, the object didn't move, but remained exactly where she'd first spotted it. Holding my hand up about a foot from my face and using my thumb and index finger as a gauge, the object seemed to be four inches west of the moon.
"Could it be a planet?" Spooky asked. "Could it be Venus?" I said that seemed unlikely and suggested that it might be a satellite in orbit (though, in fact, I have no idea how a satellite, seen by daylight, would appear to the naked eye).
Then the object began to move, drifting a short distance west, where it was still again. By this time, I was genuinely intrigued and continued to peer at the thing. We passed Spooky's glasses back and forth (I'd left mine at home, expecting to need only my sunglasses). At this point, I felt it was safe to rule out both Venus and satellites as potential candidates. After a few more minutes, the object began to drift to the northeast, and then it turned and drifted to the southeast, back towards the moon, having traced a rough sort of triangular path. Occasionally, planes passed during the sighting, both military and commercial jets, as well as a bright yellow biplane. The only other "objects" in the sky was a small patch of wispy cumulus clouds. At the start of the sighting, the clouds were well to the south of the UFO, but the wind eventually carried them between us and it, and then away to the NW. After maybe twenty minutes, the object suddenly began moving very fast, in a southeasterly direction. At this point, I began having trouble keeping up with it, though Spooky only lost sight of it for a few seconds. As it streaked "towards" the moon, I lost it for good, and she spent maybe five minutes or so trying to point out where it was.
A man and a woman on a blanket behind us had noticed us watching the sky and had also sighted the object. The man wondered aloud if it might be a satellite.
Perhaps half an hour after she'd first spotted the thing, Spooky said that it seemed to be growing smaller, which we both interpreted as it gaining altitude. Shortly thereafter, she lost sight of it and the object did not reappear, though, frankly, I was a little unnerved and suggested that we stop staring at the sky.
If asked to describe the object, I would stick to my original opinion that it resembled a grain of rice. There was no evidence that it left any sort of contrail. It did not appear to have lights. It's color alternated from brown to reddish-brown to white; it did not seem to me to be metallic. Though we heard passing planes, there was never any evidence that the object produced an audible sound. If we're even remotely correct about it's altitude, that it was located higher than the cruising jetliners, it must have been very large, considerably larger than, say, a Boeing 747. It didn't behave like a plane or a helicopter or a glider. At times, it was clearly moving, sometimes at great speed, against the wind, which seems to rule out a non-powered object such as a balloon. More than that, I can't say. As with the handful of other UFO sighting I've had during my life, I have no satisfactory explanation for what the object might have been, but I do welcome suggestions. I am not an expert in avionics or meteorology, and I'm well aware that what we think we see is not always what we actually see. Spooky had never before seen anything which she would classify as a UFO.
I tried to work on the Lovecraft essay yesterday, but my addled brain refused to cooperate. I wrote not a word on it. Spooky and I read through "Andromeda Among the Stones," which is being reprinted in Stephen Jones' Mammoth Book of Terror (coming later this year, I think). I found an enormous number of typographical and grammatical errors which had somehow made it into the story's original printing. I corrected them, and, in the evening, Jennifer looked at some dubious commas for me. So, now it's ready to go away to Steve in London (I wish that I were going with it). Sadly, that was the most productive part of yesterday. As for today, it's still too early to tell.
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