My Close-ish Encounter With a UFO
One event and two takes on it, still worlds apart
During the week, when our parents went back to the city, my younger brother and I were on our own at our family’s small rented cottage in Bridgehampton, out on the east end of Long Island. It was the summer of 1968, well before the farmland was razed and cantilevered glass-box McMansions sprouted up instead of potatoes and corn crops.
Our little home-away-from-home was across from one of the endless potato fields in the area, a few miles from the ocean.
My brother Eric and I biked to the beach most days or hitched a ride, because back then you could be pretty sure you wouldn’t end up dead in someone’s basement. In our mid-teens, we were too baby-faced to lie our way into clubs at night. We couldn’t get to them anyway. We didn’t have licenses, let alone a car.
What we did have was our nightly ritual.
Eric would snatch the high-beam flashlight and a chocolate Ring-Ding, I’d grab a coffee No-Cal soda, and a permanently grass-stained sheet, and we’d head outside.
That night, I shook out the sheet, making it go snap, and smoothed it over the spongy grass we hadn’t mowed because we’d been too busy fighting over who’d do it. We flopped down under the blue-black sky pocked with stars, crickets’ chirps pulsating against the quiet, our sunburns eased by the cool air.
Stretched out on the sheet, we watched for constellations and late-summer shooting stars. We were bummed about going back to school, worried about where our cat had wandered, and if the clear sky meant good beach weather the next day.
My brother saw it first.
“What the fuck.”
It was as if a brimmed hat with a gently rounded crown had been rendered in silvery, heavy metal. Green, red, and white lights were spaced along the brim. The craft hovered in the sky out over the acres of potatoes. It didn’t spin. It sat. It darted left. Sped right. Shot straight up, and straight down.
We were on our feet, mouths agape like fish on a hook.
“Holy shit,” I said. “It’s like it’s showing off for us.”
I was perfectly content to just stand there gazing in wonderment. Eric apparently thought it would be a better idea to make contact, and flashed improvised Morse code at the UFO.
That was my cue.
“I’m outta here.”
And I was, racing away from my brother, the sheet, the flashlight, away from the damn crickets, scrambling like the Roadrunner chased by Wile E. Coyote across a lawn that seemed to go on forever, stumbling up three steps into the cottage, Eric bumping up behind me. The door slammed shut and we did what any scared, exhilarated teenagers would do. We called Mommy and Daddy.
Our parents may have considered the possibility that their little darlings were high (not a certainty just yet). Since I was an excitable type, I did most of the blathering as we crouched in the dark, peeking through the blinds, one slat lifted but revealing nothing but that star-pocked sky.
We must have gone to bed at some point. Eric would have been the one to fall asleep.
The next morning, the headline of the local paper debunked new reports of UFO sightings, attributing them to nothing more than marsh gas.
Right.
I spent the remains of the summer making a series of paintings — my cosmic period — and being weirded out over whether I’d been drugged and probed by little green whatevers who’d obliterated my memory of their experiments. Or was it a top-secret military operation, explained away by the editor of a small local paper, whose choice was a comfy life reporting on the annual 4H pig race or “We could tell you, but we’d have to kill you.”
Meanwhile, Eric practiced guitar and learned to drive.
The last weekend, we helped Mom and Dad pack up and said goodbye to the cottage and the beach and all that pesky “marsh gas.”
My brother shrugs off the whole UFO episode.
I still wonder.
We’ve always been different that way.
Many thanks for reading!
