Bewildering Stories discusses...

Hoping to Find a UFO

with Douglas Young

The author’s first novel, Deep in the Forest, examines how someone with a close encounter tries to understand his experience and move forward despite not knowing what really happened to him.

I would love to see a UFO up close, since I can’t imagine a more exhilarating experience. It might even be quasi-religious, surely way more exciting than your typical night out. Stories of people sighting strange spaceships or aliens combine wonder, excitement, and even humor as few other tales can. They appeal to our deepest curiosities and challenge arrogant assumptions about our little civilization being the only one in the universe.

Tom Deitz, perhaps Georgia’s most acclaimed fantasy novelist, said that in earlier, more religious times, unexplained phenomena were often believed to be angels. But in this most secular century, strange sightings are more often rationalized as aliens from outer space.

My favorite UFO film is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, largely because instead of its other-worldly visitors being constipated intragalactic imperialists — as in War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Independence Day, or Mars Attacks! — they are gentle and harmless, as in The Day the Earth Stood Still, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Abyss, and Contact. Though suspenseful, Close Encounters focuses on the mystery and awe of discovering our planet may have intelligent and friendly neighbors.

But not everyone welcomes such an encounter. Late one afternoon while growing up in Athens, Georgia, my family saw what we thought was a bona fide UFO hovering above our subdivision. It even had the same white light that seems de rigueur for UFOs. But while we were giddy, a couple of neighbors leaned against their pickup with shotguns aimed skyward. Some “Welcome to Earth” party they were. Alas, my excited call to a local radio station became a moment of quiet humiliation when told we had witnessed a real-life weather balloon.

Moonlit roads must entice UFOs, since there have been so many late evening sightings along lonely highways. Indeed, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi would drive all night up rural roadways after Saturday Night Live tapings to scour the heavens for unexpected company. I used to think that was so cool until someone suggested their heads may have already been in the clouds courtesy of certain earthly substances fueling their quest.

Two other famous countercultural UFO hunters were Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and country rock legend — and Waycross, Georgia native — Gram Parsons. In the early 1970s they would climb a rock formation in southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park to scan the sky for any alien traffic. Alas, though the large park has long been deemed a UFO “hot spot,” the credibility of any sightings claimed by Parsons and Richards is debatable considering the considerable amount of chemicals stimulating their mission.

As fun as it is to read about or watch a TV account of a UFO, it feels more real coming from a trusted confidant, like my brother. His college tennis team was returning from a match one night when the students saw a bright object close by on their right. It stayed just above the trees, paralleled Cory’s van’s every turn, and made no sound. Then, without warning, it vanished. The boys in the other van saw it, too.

I would treasure a designated UFO Alley where Trekkies could congregate, hoping for their big moment. At least it would be a hoot to see any Spock ears. Unfortunately, to witness UFOs, we have to gaze out the window cruising down Any Highway, USA. Meanwhile, if we want to grin at guys in green greasepaint, we go to Atlanta’s next Comic Con Convention.

Most UFO sightings seem to occur in isolated rural areas. So are city folks blinded by their own lights or do Aliens ‘R’ Us just prefer the down-home hospitality of the countryside? Or could we underestimate the attraction of universal sports like cow-tipping? This illustrates an endearing aspect of UFOs: you don’t have to be a celebrity or astronomer to have your own adventure with extraterrestrials. To its credit, Hollywood echoes this by consistently portraying Joe Sixpack as the protagonist in its “Guess Who’s Coming to Earth” pictures.

What if you unexpectedly played host to an earthly drop-in? While I want to believe I’d be honored and ecstatic, I might try to beam myself right out of Dodge at full light-speed. As fascinated as I am by alleged ghosts in my cousin Molly’s home in Wrens, Georgia, I’m tense just walking alone down its haunted hallway.

Ultimately, we ask if a single UFO ever contained beings from another world. After all the photos purporting to depict flying saucers — usually out-of-focus blobs of light — and allegedly secret government files supposedly revealing “the truth,” and sightings by credible people like many recent U.S. Navy pilots and even the future President Jimmy Carter in southwest Georgia’s tiny town of Leary in 1969 — though he also once claimed a close encounter with a killer rabbit — there’s still no clearly convincing evidence. Maybe the best argument for believing remains what my cousin-in-law Lex once told me: “Just look up at all those stars in a clear night sky and ask yourself what the odds are that we’re alone.”

As scary as “we’re not alone” is to timid souls, it’s much worse if we really are, because then what an incredible responsibility we have not to mess up this one nest of life. So, while hoping for an other-worldly encounter, let’s make sure our stewardship of this world is conducted as if it’s still the only one.

Thank you for the UFO enthusiasm, Douglas! Your “down home” atmosphere is received with a friendly smile. You’re right that country roads are the best places for UFO sightings. We may also infer that the space aliens — who, we suppose, occupy these flittering craft — feel vulnerable and want to keep our probing hands at a safe distance. That’s why we see no headlines about them landing in shopping malls in order to perform the abductions, etc. that some people have reported.

Lately, the term UFO — for “Unidentified Flying Object” — has been replaced by some with UAP, “Unexplained Aerial Phenomena.” The stately and traditional pronunciation U-F-O is replaced by an acronym that sounds like a child’s incomprehensible utterance: “you-whap.” And has the meaning changed? Microscopically, at most. Chalk it up to an excess of bureaucratese.

But such trifling with terminology may explain a more significant development. In 2001, the British Flying Saucer Society closed up shop. Its primary mission had been to record meticulously all reports of flying saucers or UFO’s. But no more sightings were being reported. Why? Officially, a shrug. Who knows?

Unofficially, one might surmise — especially with the coinage of UAP — that the space aliens have despaired of finding more than rudimentary intelligence on Earth. And they’ve packed up and gone home. Or gone looking for smarter beings elsewhere.

UFO’s emerged into public notice in about 1947. H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, which had famously aired on radio nine years earlier, was only incidentally about space aliens and spaceflight. It captured the spirit of the times in the year before the outbreak of WW II. Which just goes to show that literature is only and always about human beings.

And human beings squabble. The renowned Isaac Asimov expressed critical displeasure with the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. His reason: the plot relies on ipse dixit. Why does anything happen in the film? No reason; “just because.”

However, literature can promote peace while remaining fraught with conflict. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, released at the onset of the Cold War, a space alien lands his saucer in Washington, D.C.. He is greeted by the military and terrified troops. Fired upon, he retreats and ventures out at night to explore as a man named “Carpenter.” He converses with Einstein, performs miracles, and is eventually killed. Resurrected temporarily, he explains that humanity must not bring its warlike ways into the galaxy. And then he goes back to heaven, leaving as his followers the scientists of all nations.

Now that’s space travel with a real mission and purpose. Unfortunately, perhaps, most space aliens — including humans, in their turn — tend to incarnate one or more of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, disease, famine and death (see Space Aliens as Metaphor). And we await a convincing reason — something more than “’cuz I say so” — why human beings might occupy their own flying objects in outer space (see Space Colonies: the Dark Side).

Douglas Young's short and vibrant essay calls to mind Bertil Falk’s principal thema in his review of the Observations Trilogy.

Douglas concludes: “Let’s make sure our stewardship of this world is conducted as if it’s still the only one.” Voltaire’s exhausted Candide concludes: "Mais il faut cultiver notre jardin." And once the Domans have departed the Earth in mild despair, the finally liberated Toni Murano concludes: “I quite fancy gardening. Never tried it.”

Food for thought and discussion.

I’m with the late Stephen Hawking on this subject: “If aliens ever visited us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Hawking was following a line on interplanetary relations going back at least as far as H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds: Many of us can’t even get along with our human neighbors. What makes people think we’ll get along with a superior, highly advanced bunch of extra-terrestrials? At the end of Close Encounters I was laughing to myself while thinking of the Twilight Zone classic “To Serve Man.”

[Don W.] Gary, I think you have indirectly pointed out a justification for human space flight and for space habitats and planetary colonies. In short, it’s an answer — probably the answer — to “Space Colonies: the Dark Side.”

And it’s also an explanation for one of the most prominent tropes in science fiction. It can be found in early modern science fiction dating back almost 400 years and in the world’s ancient literatures since time immemorial.

Do we have any reason to think that we, as the subspecies homo sapiens, are the only ones in the universe whom we will deign to call “sentient,” i.e. who are capable of organized societies and even industrialization? Archeology and biology have shown that we are not even the only ones on planet Earth; all subspecies of homo fit the bill. And the more we learn about other forms of life, the more we realize they know more than we thought they did.

What, then, is humanity’s solution? Space flight and interplanetary colonization. What if we meet space aliens who are anything like us? We’ll want to meet them on neutral ground, out in space. Knowing ourselves, we will want to give Earth time to raise its defenses against other “constipated imperialists.”

Responses welcome!