UFO run

Growing up in the 70s definitely had some advantages today’s kids don’t receive. You didn’t have to wear a seatbelt in the car, and you could pile into the bed of your uncle’s pickup with your cousins and hang out over the sides while your uncle drove like a madman and swerved left to right to make you squeal, and nobody ever considered accusing him of endangering the lives of minors.

On the other hand, if you wore sweat pants in public, it was presumed that you were heading off to a sporting event of some sort. That was a bummer. And there were only three channels on the television.

In general, though, the 70s were pretty fun. Lots of crazes swept the public. One of the biggest was the furor over UFOs. Loads of cheap paperbacks hit the shelves with true stories about UFO encounters and abductions, and “experts” in the field proving that aliens are among us. Connections were made with the Bermuda Triangle and the pyramids in Egypt (I’m sure further fueled by the discovery of Tut’s tomb). It was a great time to be a UFO fanatic.

My parents were swept up into the UFO craze. My mother and father read all the “important” books at the time, like “Chariots of the Gods.” My father even went so far as to buy a small plastic pyramid, under which he stored his razor. Experts were endlessly proclaiming the powerful and mystical properties of pyramids, and one of their promises was that if you stored your razor under a pyramid, it would never get dull. Dad never commented on it, but his pyramid disappeared in less than a month, I presume about the time he replaced the blade in his razor.

The disappointing results of the pyramid experiment did nothing to dull my parents’ interest in UFOs. Eventually, they joined financial forces with my aunt and uncle (the ones I talked about in Storm run), and bought a telescope so they could seek out the UFOs themselves.

Because we lived down in a holler, our view of the sky was practically nonexistent. My aunt and uncle, meanwhile, lived on top of a large hill, and had an excellent view of the sky. Therefore, the telescope was set up at my aunt and uncle’s house.

Once a week or so, Mom and Dad and I would head over to my aunt and uncle’s house to fiddle with the telescope and investigate any lights which might turn out to be UFOs wandering around the Ozarks. My cousins and I were never allowed to touch the telescope, though we were allowed to look through it every once in a while. Mostly, we just played in house while the folks tracked the skies from the patio, sipping Irish coffee. There was a significant amount of Irish coffee sipping.

They never saw much of anything to get excited about, except when Mom and Dad and I weren’t there. On many occasions, we would be at home in the evening when my aunt or uncle would call. It had happened. They had spotted a potential UFO, and it was of the utmost importance that we get to their house immediately, or risk missing the sighting of the century.

Unlike the storm runs, UFO runs didn’t happen in the middle of the night. My aunt and uncle generally went to bed at a decent hour, so the being dragged out of bed element was removed from these runs, as was the lightning, thunder and rain  (which I’m sure had a great deal to do with why mother never objected to the UFO runs). Still, it was fairly invigorating to be lounging about on the sofa watching “Little House on the Prairie,” and suddenly get a call to come see a UFO.

So off we’d go, everything we had been doing now forgotten, jogging to the car, careening out of the driveway, and speeding across town like maniacs. I presume the local cops either knew what we were up to, or just didn’t care that we were breaking the speed limit by 30 mph. It was like that in small towns back then. Everyone knew everyone, and you could get away with stuff you’d get seriously spanked for doing now.

The wheels churning up the gravel, we’d tear into my aunt and uncle’s driveway, then run to the patio. Of course, by the time we got there, the suspicious light in the sky would have invariably moved on only minutes before our arrival. We’d still hang out for awhile, though, since everything they saw had to be discussed and dissected for clues as to what kind of UFO it might have been.

Only once did we arrive and the UFO was still in the sky. It was a big light, easily seen without the telescope. I stood half in and half out of the house, ready to make a run to hide under my cousin’s bed if necessary. My parents and aunt and uncle watched the light moving right and then abruptly moving left across the sky. This was the moment they had been waiting for. A real UFO at last. Would they beam some of us up into the ship? I prayed not, as the thing moved stealthily closer and closer. It seemed to last for hours, though was probably only a few minutes. I wondered if the aliens would have googly eyes and scrawny arms like they always had in movies.

Alas, as it neared us, we began to hear a distinctive noise. We may have lived in a small town without an airport within 50 miles, but we still knew the sound of a helicopter when we heard it. No UFO. Just a helicopter.

It was a crushing disappointment, all the heart pounding and flushed faces, all for nothing. Time to whip out the Irish coffee.

That was one of the last UFO runs, perhaps because such excitement as they felt that evening was impossible to recapture on subsequent sightings, or maybe it was just because my dad hit the road to find gigs. Whatever it might have been, that telescope gathered a lot of dust until it was claimed by another cousin of mine and used for the purposes for which it was actually intended — star gazing.

I miss the UFO craze. I don’t miss the pyramid craze though. Now that was just silly.