Summer                                                New (First Harvest) Moon

66 years ago today news began to leak out about an incident at Roswell, New Mexico.  Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF).  The UFO incident and later reporting of more and more sightings has never fully abated.  Classed with conspiracy theorists and aluminum foil hat guys for most of that time, there has nonetheless been widespread public interest as signified by the number of Hollywood movies on the theme:  Close Encounters, E.T. and many, many others.

Even Carl Jung wrote a small book on the UFO phenomenon, characterizing it as a contemporary search for the numinous, a spiritual yearning at its heart.

It struck me today because, well, I’m 66.  That means the UFO story and I share a common chronology.  It even got intertwined when in 1957, at the age of 10, my friend Mike Hines (mentioned earlier in regard to explosions) looked up in the sky one clear August evening, we were standing in my backyard on Monroe Street, and saw three cigar shaped objects in the sky.  Sure, cigar shaped objects were popular then, exactly the same of passenger planes, still pretty uncommon at the time.  But here’s what got Mike and I reported in state and national newspapers:  we saw these cigar shaped objects go behind the moon.  And come out the other side!  And yes, in retrospect, I can see it still.  The blue dark sky, the full moon, the objects slowly moving toward the moon, then disappearing, only to reappear a bit later.

Here’s something else.  My life span also covers the golden age of space travel, when men dared for the first time to fly in rockets out of the atmosphere, when they orbited the earth and eventually both went to the moon and landed on it.  That time is in the past now with space travel reduced to expensive rocket-powered trucks delivering and retrieving guests from an international space hotel.