I saw a UFO (Unidentified Flying Object) only once when a bug splattered on my car windshield and I pointed it to my wife, “Look, look, an alien spacecraft.”
My wife looked at the smudge, moved her head to get another perspective and then reached over and switched on the windshield wiper, and suddenly I couldn’t see the road ahead, that stretched for miles in the desert sands.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “We could have an accident.”
“There’s nobody on the road at this time,” she said. Stop seeing things. Maybe the heat is too much for you.”
Perfect for an UFO sighting
The empty desert sands I thought were perfect for an UFO sighting, but the aliens apparently prefer crowded places where there is a lot of military activity. And for some reason, the aliens are also curious about our passenger jets that transport people like overcrowded buses.
Maybe they find the planes comical because their spacecraft seem to move like lightening and can swerve and weave in the skies changing direction within seconds, and without making any sound.
The only supersonic passenger jet we ever had was the Concorde. It carried 98 passengers but it was discontinued due to its sonic boom that drove animals crazy and shattered windows in cities it flew over.
It was allowed only to fly at normal speeds over America and that made its operations very expensive.
I got into the Concorde when British Airways landed it in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The cockpit was like it was built for height challenged people and the captain gave me the menu card and a pen as souvenirs.
It was very cramped inside in the plane, much worse than the ‘cattle class’ we have in today’s planes, with barely any leg space. (Of course, in these pandemic times, you can hire space and take the two other seats next to you and keep away any infected humans).
A straight line in the dark sky
The only time I ever saw anything moving, far, far away up in the skies, was in my hometown and (there was not much light pollution then) it was a satellite, slowly moving in a straight line in the dark sky, unlike a shooting star that gives you a glimpse, and then vanishes.
My interest in aliens, extraterrestrials and space travel was kindled not by movies Star Wars or Men in Black, but by sci-fi writers, Carl Sagan (Contact), Issac Asimov (Foundation) and Arthur C. Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama).
People who believed in aliens and ‘flying saucers’ were always thought to be nut jobs, even though scientists concur that it is impossible that we humans can be the only ‘intelligent’ beings in the whole universe.
The Pentagon, the US Department of Defence has always rejected stories of alien sightings, until, suddenly, out of the blue, former president Barack Obama recently said in a TV interview, that “UFOs must be taken seriously.”
He said there is footage and records of the objects in the skies and noted, “We don’t know exactly what they are and we can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory.”
He believes that new faiths will pop up once the contact is made with the alien beings.
The US has set up a task force that will share data with the Congress the military has collected over the past decades. Some videos have been released from the US Navy that shows an UFO diving underwater, in 2019.
A fighter jet pilot said his squadron spotted several objects that flew around the restricted airspace every day, from the year 2015 to 2017.
Meanwhile, my wife is advising me to wear a mask in case I am abducted by aliens. “You don’t want to pass on our germs and viruses to the extraterrestrials and kill them,” she said.
Mahmood Saberi is a storyteller and blogger based in Bengaluru, India. Twitter: @mahmood_saberi
