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“Emily! Emily!” My husband sounded frantic. “Come here quick, bring my phone!”
He pulled our barefoot son out the front door into the chilly nighttime air and called for our daughter.
“Look up there,” I heard him instruct, then he called to me, “Are you coming? Come on!” I ran through the house, searching for his phone.
Finally, I found it and ran out to the front door to join them, not stopping to find shoes.
“Do you see those lights?” he asked me. He pointed east. Leafless tree skeletons blocked my full view of the sky, but I saw a bright, orange light moving along the horizon, heading quickly north.
I have always, always wanted to see a UFO. On clear nights, my eyes search the sky for blinking saucers. Shows about eyewitness accounts of the unexplained fascinate me. Pre-DVR, I arranged my schedule so I could watch The X-Files. It’s not that I’m a diehard believer in visitors from another world, but I’m sure open to the possibility. I was anxious to see whatever it was that Thad had spotted.
I grabbed our barefoot daughter by the hand, and we ran down the middle of the street to get a clearer view of the pulsating orange lights.
A formation of three bright orange lights was in the lead, with a single similar light following some distance behind them.
I don’t usually try to decipher pinpoints of lights in the sky; it would take something more substantial to catch my attention. But my husband does. A residual of his short-lived pilot hobby, he points out aircraft, then explains what he knows about it from what he sees. They all have standardized lights — designed to give other pilots visual clues about the direction other air traffic is heading.
To me, the formation of three lights would have seemed strange, but I wouldn’t have thought too long about the bright orange color of the lights or the way they turned and zipped away into the distance. But Thad did. He advised his barefoot family, standing in the middle of the road on a 50-degree January night, that we were looking at something unusual.
“It’s a UFO,” I said to the kids. “We can’t identify what it is.”
“Are we being invaded?” Cooper asked, fear in his voice.
“Pick me up, mom, I want to see better!” Sylvia was excited.
Thad was way more impressed by our sighting than I was. I’d hoped to see a cigar-shaped craft with a cow trailing behind, caught in a tractor beam, with big-eyed, green beings waving out the window at us. The orange lights were underwhelming, but still kind of interesting.
We tiptoed back to the house, and I noted that I’d probably ruined my socks. Inside, my husband searched the web for similar sightings, finding a surprising number of reports, with no ready explanation.
“Should I report this on the MUFON site?” he asked me. MUFON is the Mutual UFO Network, a group that shares information of unusual lights and other sights in the sky.
“Oh, sure, why not?” I replied, half wondering if he was signing our family’s names right on the government’s special Wackadoo file, not really caring if he was.
Maybe we saw something unusual. Top secret test aircraft, or something from another galaxy. Maybe Marvin the Martian was taking a sightseeing tour over the Midwest.
I do know my children saw something. They saw parents who keep their minds open to possibility. They saw that you don’t have to outgrow curiosity. And they saw that some things — even just the possibility of those things — are worth a late-night barefoot run down the road in mid-January.
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