UFOs

When I was a kid, maybe 8 or 9, I lived in a house in a kind of rural part of Ohio. The house backed up to a lake where many weird things happened. The two things that made the papers were when these kids played dungeons and dragons in the woods around the lake, and one ended up committing suicide (James Dallas Egbert), and when we had a flash flood, causing some kids who had taken shelter in a culvert to get caught in the flood waters. One 16 year old girl's body was found in a tree when the waters receded, only 4 houses down from where I lived. Something about the lake always seemed a little off.


One night my dad was out on the back patio looking at stars when he noticed a strange light over the lake. My dad is an engineer, and designs planes for a living. He knew it was something other than a known aircraft. He ran into the house and got us kids, and the video camera. He filmed the light as we watched it hover over the lake. Then the light suddenly started coming right towards us. My dad told us to run into the house, and when we looked out back a few minutes later, the light was gone.


I used to show the movie to friends because it was kind of cool. Then, in 1993, I was working for 6 months at New Mexico State University Physical Science Lab. There was a bunch of cutting edge technology being used in the labs, including software to do video analysis on images. I had told one of the researchers about the video, and he asked me if I could get a copy of it for him to look at. My dad sent the tape, which was in 8mm format, and the guy did some analysis on it. He couldn't figure out what it was either. Then he submitted it to some UFO group where it was put in their archives. After I finished my work there I lost touch with him, in part because I kissed him at a party one night, and then decided I didn't like him anymore, so I don't know what, if any, further conclusions were drawn about the video by the UFO group.


Fast forward to 1997. I was working on a project with this woman named Rita. I never paid much attention to her until she invited me out to a happy hour. I was the only one that showed up, and we became instant friends that night. It was the kind of friendship where you feel like you known that person forever. Rita took care of me during that time, when I was being pretty self destructive. I would go out and party all night, get a few hours of sleep, and then roll into work. She would "kidnap" me and make me spend the weekend at her house, away from the various male detritus that I was hanging out with. She would feed me and make me sleep.



We decided to go on vacation to St. Maarten together, one of my favorite places. This was about 6 months into our friendship, and is the trip where I got a concussion from falling off a toilet seat (http://frankiflowers.blogspot.com/2007/02/commodal-concussion.html). One night we were sitting on the beach, and I was telling Rita how great it was to have her as a friend, and that it was strange to me since I don't normally buddy up with women (mostly because they are jealous, lying, PMSing bitches who will dump you as a friend the second some guy with a semi hard cock takes an interest in them). Then I said I felt like I had known her all my life.

She turned to me and said "I think we met before". I was like "where?" and she said "on a UFO".

Then she proceeded to tell me about how, one morning driving into work, she and a co-worker she commuted with saw a bright light in the sky. They were in light rush hour traffic, and cars along that stretch of road were slowing down and pulling over to look at the light. Rita remembered the radio turning to static, and reaching down to adjust the knob. The next thing she remembered was sitting on the side of the road, and the engine of the car being off. About 5 minutes had elapsed. She and her co-worker were sure they had been abducted by the UFO (for the record, the UFO sighting was written up in an article in the Washington Post, which I wasn't able to locate on the web in the few seconds I just spent looking).

People at work knew about my UFO sighting because I had brought the film in to have it put on a CD (since lost in one of my moves, but I should see if my brothers have a copy and I'll post it on the blog). Also, at the time Rita and I were working on a declassification project for the government, and one of the things we were declassifying was Project Blue Book. I don't believe Rita and I met on a UFO, but I did think it was an interesting thing to say.

Rita ended our friendship in 2003. She had been dating this guy for a while, and he didn't like me very much (maybe because I did things like get Rita really drunk in the middle of the afternoon, or maybe because Rita and I would pretend to make out in bars to fuck with guys, or maybe because I once fell over a sofa in their house while holding a mixed drink that had something red in it, and the sofa was white, and they couldn't get the stain out). They got married, and I wasn't invited to the wedding. I started seeing less and less of Rita.

One evening I showed up for a work happy hour, after driving in traffic for 2 1/2 hours, and Rita started screaming and yelling at me for no reason that I could figure out other than she was pissed at me for existing. Her husband walked with me as I left the bar and headed to my car, since I had also just broken up with a guy I had been seeing that I thought was "the one", and was in no mood to be around someone who was trying to make me feel worse than I already did.

Her husband said he didn't know why she was suddenly so mad at me, and that I should "just give her some time". I waited and waited for her to email or call me, but she never did. After four months I sent her an email, but she never responded back.

And that, as they say, was the end of that.