We’ve been lucky enough to see the Northern Lights from our home vantage points this past year, which was incredible. But there could be more unusual light sources lurking over our heads.
Let’s talk about life outside of us earthlings. Many cannot fathom this, but frankly the universe, being infinite, has surely produced other life forms. To think otherwise is to be a little self-absorbed, no?
I was sitting outside with my son the other week, enjoying a rare bout of sunshine, when an object akin to a flying saucer whizzed across the sky before us. We live high up, with a clear view across the water to downtown, so the sky is all around us.
“What in the space odyssey was that?” I peered up, one hand to my forehead to protect my eyes against the faint glow of the weak sun.
The hovering silver object flew behind the fir trees in a flash. It made a low whirring noise, like a hummingbird. It moved fast. We watched it soar again, this time cloud-level high in the sky, sweeping across so quickly that we could hardly keep track of it. I popped indoors and grabbed my binoculars.
“It’s a drone,” said my son witheringly.
He knows what I’m like. Any opportunity to see the Death Star would be a dream come true for me, being obsessed with anything out of the ordinary. Give me Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, even E.T. and I’m as content as Richard Dreyfuss building a weird sand dune in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Speaking of which, I occasionally get musical tinnitus. Think the first three notes of the Close Encounters alien call-out on repeat. It’s a sign.
I couldn’t catch it with my binoculars because the thing moved so fast, and then it disappeared in an instant. Come on. Drones can’t move across the whole sky in a split second, then disappear through a portal.
Despite the contempt of my family, the incident got me searching online for any other strange sightings around here. Admittedly I’d just watched the Investigation Alien documentary on Netflix (the one with the castrated bulls) so it might be just me being dramatic again. But extra-terrestrial life forms is a fascinating phenomenon, and it leads me to a question. Why are alien spaceships usually seen at night? Why shouldn’t they arrive in the middle of the afternoon, when one is sitting outside enjoying a spot of sun?
It turns out quite a few of us around here have had sightings of unidentified flying objects, or aerial phenomena as some call them. Apparently, only 10 per cent of Canadians believe that sightings are part of extraterrestrial activity, that we are not alone. The rest of us put it all down to lens refractions, hoaxes, meteors, photo tampering, satellites, and the amateur dramatics of people like me. They believe we are alone, as if that’s better.
I can’t help thinking of American Werewolf in London, that pub scene when they walk into the Slaughtered Lamb and the locals stop what they’re doing and stare. We don’t like what we don’t know.
The world has been skeptical about UFOs for decades, but now we can take videos and photos by whipping out our phones. We can throw them online, tag them, and start a conversation. There are many short clips posted by locals of the bizarre things they’ve witnessed: dancing shapes, lights in straight lines, floaty disc-shaped orbs behind the clouds. We have actual evidence now, to go with our incessant ramblings and musical tinnitus.
I like to think that aliens are simply monitoring us. If they have the intelligence to execute interstellar travel, then they could get rid of us in one zap. But we’re all still here, driving about in our gas-guzzling cars and mowing our mossy lawns. They probably feel sorry for us.
So, please keep a look out, especially when you’re camping this summer with that beautifully dark sky to watch. And if you see something out of the ordinary, take a snap or a video clip and show us all. Many will think you’re making it up, but I’ll believe you.
North Vancouver’s Jackie Bateman is an award-winning author, screenwriter, copywriter, and extremely nosy if you get too close. [email protected]
