Journal of a UFO Investigator

by David Halperin

  . . . and very quiet, except for the phone on the kitchen wall, ringing loudly over and over. It had been ringing even as I opened the door. My watch read 11:37.

  “Hello?”

  “Danny! Are you all right?”

  Jeff Stollard. I pressed the receiver against my ear, breathing hard. “Damn near crushed me,” I said, as soon as I could speak.

  “What? What crushed you? What are you talking about?”

  My parents must not have been home. Lucky for me. I could almost hear my father: Don’t your friends know better than to phone you in the middle of the night? But he wasn’t around, nor my mother. Jeff and I could talk freely, as long as we needed. Like the summer before, between seventh and eighth grade, when one or two evenings a week we sailed off on our bikes into the softening light, and when tired of riding, we walked the bicycles, no parents to eavesdrop, until we’d talked through everything we cared to understand. Religion, mostly; how his being Baptist made him different from me, me different from almost everyone in our school. What happens to us, if anything, after we’re dead.

  “So you got the signal?” I said.

  “Told you it’d work.”

  My keys were still in my hand, the Delta Device attached. The Delta rested in my palm, a shadow among shadows. I ran my thumb over it. Two small triangles of sheet metal, their edges hammered into curves and soldered together, the wiring pressed inside. It pained me to feel the lumpy, splattery soldering, to remember how the gun had jumped and trembled in my hand. Jeff had done his better, smoother. In metal shop he always did better than I did.

  “But what was the emergency?” he said.

  I tried to tell him. My teeth chattered; I had to stop and take a few breaths before I could go on. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Are you trying to tell me this thing actually landed?”

  “No, it didn’t land! My God, if it had landed—”

  “I’m not your God, Danny.”

  “For God’s sake! I just meant—”

  “I just meant, don’t take the Lord’s name in vain!”

  “I’d have been squooshed like a bug!” I screamed, and felt my saliva spray over the receiver. I felt myself getting demerits, over the telephone wires, for being hysterical. “It was bearing down on top of me,” I said. “And—and—”

  “And?”

  “It spoke to me.”

  “Really? What did it say?”

  A serious question? Sarcastic? Jeff can be both, and you usually don’t know, even from his expression, until afterward.

  “ ‘Until the seeding,’”I said.

  “The seeding?”

  He spelled the word out, and I confirmed it. The seeding. Even as I wondered how I’d earlier lost the memory of what the disk said and why it just popped out now, talking with him.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

  I couldn’t tell whether he was going to laugh or have me exorcised, try once more to convert me so I won’t go to hell when I die. “Until the seeding,” I repeated, and felt the electric tingling shoot up through my legs, my thighs, the two currents meeting in my belly and running upward. My hand shook so I could barely hold the receiver.

  “It was heading westward,” I said. “Toward Braxton.”

  He didn’t answer, and I knew what he was thinking. Rosa Pagliano lives in Braxton. Would the disk stop over her house, as it had over mine? Descend to her, speak to her? Take her inside? I thought of how she’d smiled at me in music class, while everybody was singing that song “And I’ll not marry at all, at all, and I’ll not marry at all ...” And then I really began to shake.

  “Do you think—you know—I should phone Rosa? Let her know—to go outside—she might see it too—”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Jeff said.

  “Don’t be mad—”

  But he’d hung up. I stood, receiver in hand, and felt my heart going thumpa-thumpa-thump, the way it does in sentimental books. Only this was for real, very unpleasant, and I wanted it to stop, to be as I’d been before I saw the UFO, before I knew there were things in the sky besides moon and planets and stars, airplanes and birds, the ordinary stuff a little kid might know. Once or twice I heard my father yell, “Will you turn off that goddamn light and get to sleep?” It had to have been my imagination. My father wasn’t even home—I could not hear him mumbling in his sleep from the bed he’d set up for himself in the den, because he couldn’t stand lying next to my mother anymore—and besides I hadn’t turned on any light. I hung up the receiver. After a few minutes I lifted it again. With trembling fingers I dialed Rosa Pagliano’s telephone number.

  CHAPTER 2

  TWENTY-NINE DAYS LATER CAME THE BREAK-IN. IT WAS FRIDAY night, January 18, 1963. My parents and I had gone to Trenton, to my grandmother’s, to eat her dinner in honor of the Sabbath, which she had kept on observing in the religious way after my grandfather died, long after my father and even my mother had stopped doing that kind of thing. It’s a twenty-minute drive from Kellerfield, Pennsylvania, where we live.

  We got back after eleven. My father was the first one in the house.

  “All right,” he said. “Which of you two left the door hanging wide open, so anybody in the goddamn world can just walk in and help themselves?”

  It wasn’t me. When we left home, I’d helped my mother out to the car; she was bundled up against the frigid night in two sweaters and her heaviest winter coat and a blanket draped around her. I made sure she didn’t slip on the ice patches in the carport. My father locked up after us. Or, it seemed, didn’t lock up.

  I was about to point this out. But then my father switched on the kitchen light, and we had other things to think about besides whose fault it was.

  My mother took one look, let out a weak scream, and shuffled off as fast as she could move. “I can’t look!” I heard her say. The kitchen was ransacked. We didn’t dare see what they’d done in the living room. We followed her to her bedroom. It was the same there as in the kitchen: all the drawers open, contents dumped on the floor. She collapsed onto her bed, sobbing, wailing.

  “Don’t they know I’m sick?” she blurted out between sobs.

  Burglars should have known not to break into the home of a sick woman. My father stood looking at her, shaking his head, an expression of disgust on his smooth, handsome face, as if at a loss to imagine why having your house broken into should have that effect on anyone. Or maybe I was the one who felt disgusted. He hurried out to the kitchen to phone Sy Goldfarb, our family doctor, to find out what he should do in case this brought on another heart attack. Meanwhile I went to my own room to see what was gone from there. And, at first, was relieved.

  My drawers, like my mother’s, had been emptied onto the floor. Hardly anything, though, seemed to be missing. Later, when things calmed down, we did an inventory and found practically nothing had been stolen. The burglars had even left the TV in the living room, which surely any thief would have wanted. It wasn’t clear how they’d gotten in. My father insisted he’d locked the door, and no windows had been broken into.

  The only thing taken was my briefcase, out of my closet, with a chunk of my UFO files—my report on my sighting the month before, the first three chapters of the book Jeff Stollard and I were writing together—inside it.

  “So now they can read what you wrote about them,” Jeff said to me. He handed me a sheaf of crinkly, smeary onionskin papers with CHAPTER 3: THREE MEN IN BLACK typed at the top of the first page. I’d worked long and hard on that chapter; good thing I’d made a carbon copy, kept it separate from the original.

  “Jeff, I told you. It wasn’t the three men who broke into our house.”

  “Says you.”

  “Says the police.”

  Eight days had passed since the robbery. It was the last Saturday in January—sun just up, sky a flawless blue, yet windy and cold enough to freeze my fingers inside my gloves. Jeff and I were at the Kellerfield shopping center, on the bus about to leave for Philadelphia. The police inves
tigators had come to our house, dusted in vain for fingerprints, filled in their forms, and gone. My mother could again sleep most of the way through the night. “If it isn’t the Bobbsey twins back again,” the bus driver said as we climbed aboard, our dollar bills extended for change. “We’re not twins,” Jeff said. “Not even brothers.” The two of us do kind of look alike—same thick horn-rimmed glasses, same quiet, reserved air. But Jeff is a few months older and more sturdily built. His eyes are pale blue; mine are brown. My hair is darker than his too. He’s always made a lot of these differences.

  “The police told you it wasn’t the three men?” he said. “You asked them that, in so many words?”

  “No, of course not—”

  The driver put the bus in gear, and we were on our way. One more research trip to the microfilm archives in the Philadelphia library, just like its predecessors, only today with a difference I didn’t think I was very comfortable with. Or rather, that I knew I was damned uncomfortable with.

  “Jeff, you sure this stops in Braxton? It didn’t two weeks ago.”

  “They’ve added a stop. Improved service. Look, you can ask him”—he gestured toward the driver—“if you don’t believe me.” But the driver was bending over the wheel, swinging the bus onto the Philadelphia highway. I opened my new leather briefcase, replacement for the one they’d stolen, and slipped the Three Men in Black chapter into it.

  Jeff sat in front of me. We each had a full seat; hardly anyone else was on the bus. Soon, when we reached Braxton, he wouldn’t be alone in his seat. I, unfortunately, would. “I’m through with this too,” he said, passing me a slim gray book with Flying Saucers and the Three Men—Albert K. Bender printed on the cover. “Didn’t believe a word.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Yes, I gathered,” he said, and grinned, as if I’d done something funny. I flipped through the pages, filled with my marginal notes. This was Albert Bender’s tell-all book, just published. Only what it told was mostly nonsense. As far as I was concerned, the book was itself part of the cover-up.

  For there really had been three men in black suits; that much was documented. They’d first appeared in 1953, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Bender, an internationally known UFO researcher, had stumbled on the secret of the flying disks and was about to reveal it. The three men came knocking at his door. They left him too sick to eat, too scared to speak.

  “And now they’ve come for you,” said Jeff.

  “It wasn’t them. The police told us. They think it was teenagers, probably from Braxton”—because Braxton was an older town, a poorer town, that had been here sixty years before anyone thought of putting up a suburban development called Kellerfield. Yet Rosa Pagliano, lovely and smart, like the rose in Spanish Harlem in the song, was from there. “That coed didn’t have anything to do with it either. She probably was a Temple University student, just like she said.”

  “A likely story.”

  Jeff wasn’t serious. He didn’t really believe Bender’s three men had burgled our house, any more than he believed a UFO had dropped from heaven and said to me, “Until the seeding.” He’d have laughed if I’d told him how I’d taken to scanning our street through the early winter dusk for a strange car with three riders, coming back to our home to finish what they’d left undone. I imagined them slender and impossibly tall, like shadows at sunset.

  “If that girl was really from the college,” said Jeff, “how come she didn’t give her name?”

  “She did. My mother couldn’t remember, is all.”

  “We’re getting into Braxton,” said Jeff.

  I looked out the window. He was right; we’d left the highway. Must be a new stop along the Philadelphia route. Peeling weather-beaten houses stood on either side of the road. The sidewalks were broken and dirty.

  “The break-in was twenty-nine days,” I said, “after the night of my UFO.”

  “So?”

  “That’s almost exactly a lunar month.”

  “So?”

  Tell him about the phone call I’d received? For the dozenth time I decided: better not. The bus slowed. A tingling, mostly unpleasant, spread upward from my lower abdomen. “There she is,” Jeff said.

  There she was. Standing beside a grimy, graffiti-spattered bus stop sign, wrapped in a gray coat that looked as if it hadn’t been bought for her—the girl Jeff and I both were crazy about. Rosa.

  “Scoot over, will you?” she said to Jeff.

  The driver pulled away from the Braxton stop, as if in a hurry. My heart, which had begun its damned thumpa-thumpa-thump the instant I saw her at the bus stop, began to calm down. She turned in her seat, gave me a smile, and it started up all over again.

  Rosa liked me. We’d been friends since seventh grade, when she was the cute, petite girl sharing a desk with me in social studies class. In eighth grade she was still petite but had blossomed. I don’t have to explain what I mean by “blossomed.” Jeff noticed it, though, before I did. Her brown eyes were huge, her lips full, yet her face overall put me in mind of a kitten. Maybe it was her cheekbones. Her honey-blond hair tumbled in curls around her cheeks. She wouldn’t wear a hat, cold as it was. Or maybe she didn’t have one.

  “Brrr, it’s cold! How much longer, huh, guys?”

  “How much longer what?” Jeff said to her.

  “Having to take these stupid buses.”

  There were places she wanted to go, Rosa told me once, that couldn’t be reached by local bus. The tickets couldn’t be paid for out of babysitting money. Jeff started to talk about getting our driver’s licenses in another three years, but she wasn’t interested. What she wanted was for us to make our own UFO to travel in. Now.

  “Come on, guys! We can do it. So I won’t freeze my poor hiney off at bus stops.”

  I may have blushed at the mention of her hiney. She may have noticed me blushing. One time, in seventh grade, she’d pulled up her dress halfway when the social studies teacher wasn’t looking, to show me—But these were painful thoughts. Dirty ones too, and I didn’t want to think them. “Brrr, I’m cold!” she said again. Jeff put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her to him.

  Surely I’d turned redder than Rudolph’s nose. I looked out the window so Rosa wouldn’t see . . . and wondered once more whether the busy signal I got when I phoned her, the night of my UFO, had been Jeff calling her up.

  I never knew. I couldn’t bring myself to ask. For all I know it was Rosa’s mother on the line with one of her alcoholic “suitors,” complaining about the latest child support payment that hadn’t arrived.

  Probably, though, it was Jeff.

  What did he say to her that night? I’ve lain awake, sometimes for hours, imagining. Danny’s seen a flying saucer!—he must have begun. Poor old Danny—in and out of his dreams. Hardly even knows what’s dream and what’s real! Then his smug chuckle; and Rosa would have laughed with him.

  Or maybe not. She’s stood up for me more than once when the kids made fun—of my wearing glasses, dreaming my way through gym class, missing school for Jewish holidays. But how can I know?

  From the seat in front of me I heard what I thought was a kiss. I willed my head not to turn, my eyes to stay focused on Braxton’s unappealing sights. I wondered what these streets would look like if there’d been war last October. If the Russians hadn’t backed down and pulled their missiles out of Cuba.

  I kind of almost wished it had happened, so none of us would be here. I wished I were somewhere else. Just where, I couldn’t have said. Only not here, not with these people. Not on this bus.

  The Monday before our break-in, a girl knocked on our door. I was at school, my father at work, my mother just up from the bed rest she needs to digest her lunch. “Zaftig,” my mother described the girl. Pretty; or she might have been if not for her ugly thick glasses. Studious, my mother called her. A bookworm—well, like me.

  She told my mother she was a sociology major at Temple, doing fieldwork for a class project on the postwar suburbs. My mo
ther gave her tea. They sat and talked.

  That Friday night the burglary. Coincidence? I couldn’t decide.

  “All right, Danny,” I heard Rosa say. “Hand over that book.”

  The semiurban winter landscape, built up yet desolate, whizzed by outside the bus window. Flying Saucers and the Three Men lay on my lap. “I told her about it over the phone last night,” Jeff said, grinning.

  They’d chatted for hours, no doubt. Jealousy, sick and ugly, filled my mind; I willed it away. Jeff’s fingers played with one of Rosa’s curls. She looked like she enjoyed the touch yet moved herself apart from him, very slightly. I gave her Flying Saucers and the Three Men. She opened it, began tearing through it, one page after another, until I wondered if she was going to read the whole book right there on the bus.

  “ ‘Preliminary evaluation,’ ” she read from the handwritten note on the back page. “ ‘Account is a hoax.’ Don’t need to know more than that, do we? Two whole paragraphs proving it’s a hoax. Signed with initials: DAS. What’s the A stand for, Danny?”

  “Asher,” I said.

  “It was his great-grandfather back in Poland, or Russia, or something,” said Jeff.

  “Lithuania,” I said. “But, guys—”

  “Your great-grandfather was a rabbi, wasn’t he?” said Jeff. He smiled his tight little needle-Danny smile, as when he makes some joke like that my eyes are brown because I’m full of shit up to my eyeballs. “And your grandfather’s a rabbi too. Isn’t he?”

  “Was,” I said. “He died when I was four.”

  I remembered my mother’s father, though. A gentle old man, sitting on the porch of the big old house in Trenton where we lived until after my mother’s heart attack, reading yellowed and crackly old books in Hebrew. “And he wasn’t a rabbi,” I said. “Just a sort of Bible scholar”—as if it made a difference, as if a Bible scholar’s grandson would somehow be less alien in Rosa’s eyes than a rabbi’s. “Now, come on, guys. Please . . .”