The first time I looked up and saw the night sky of New Mexico was back in the 1980s.  I was in an isolated area with no light and little air pollution and what I saw up there both awed and terrified me.  Of all the billions and billions of stars you used to hear Carl Sagan go on about, when you look up into a New Mexican sky, billions and billions seems like a low estimate. You are truly in a bowl of light and it’s all right in your face.

The first thing my husband, Grant, and I did when we moved into our house in Santa Fe in 2005 was to buy a couple of chaise lounges from a Lowe’s up in Espanola.  We needed something to lie down on to observe the majesty of the heavens over our sparsely-populated neighborhood.  We’re out in the desert, away from the city lights, so we had front-row seats to the greatest celestial show on Earth.

In spite of all the hoo-hah about alien spacecraft crashes and so on in Roswell and other places around the state (Dulce and Taos are also hot spots for alien activity), I never saw anything that had me believing that I was going to get beamed up to Probe City.  I was afraid of aliens when I was a child growing up in New York, but I got over it.  I mean, I figure I could scare them off with a bad standup routine – the same as with any other intruder. (An alien, a rabbi and a priest were sitting in a bar…)

So, when Grant and I were driving home from Albuquerque one night and saw what appeared to be a triangular aircraft surrounded in bright green lights silently crossing the Interstate at around a hundred miles per hour until it arced and disappeared, we nonchalantly asked each other, “What the hell was that?”  

We couldn’t identify it.  It was flying.  And, it was an object.  So, we figured we had a real, live UFO on our hands.  I contacted the director of the UFO National Reporting Center in Washington DC and, after ascertaining I wasn’t a prankster or whack job, he asked me to file a detailed report, send him a picture of the aircraft (I didn’t have a photograph, so I sent him a drawing) and urged me to report the sighting to my local newspaper. 

I didn’t contact the media, but I did report the sighting on Facebook to see if anyone else had seen what we had seen.  They had not.  Lots of people had seen lots of other UFOs all over the place but they were reticent to report their experiences.  Maybe they suspected that they wouldn’t be taken seriously or, in some cases (as with pilots), they were afraid they would lose their jobs.  The director of the UFO National Reporting Center was hoping that more people would come forward with their experiences because, with a paucity of hard evidence of alien activity, it was hard to know if the truth was really out there. 

Grant and I actually went to a UFO convention in Atlanta many years ago, just for the fun of it.  Some guy sat next to me that had to be a hybrid.  He was so bizarre-looking, I doubt he had fingerprints.  But now, I’m getting into an entirely different area – that of alien abductions. 

I was pretty sure I was being abducted from the age of twelve, or so, or, at least, visited. I was convinced that the water tower within clear view of my bedroom window was mission control for aliens.  I actually saw small, gray, big-eyed creatures approaching me in my room at night.  I was rendered paralyzed by their presence.  I couldn’t move and I couldn’t call out.  I don’t believe they injured me, unless they actually poached a few of my eggs. I believe this is called a close encounter of the fourth kind.  But, I never dwelled on it. After all, I’d gone through my life in pretty good shape, albeit with a few inexplicable, but not necessarily worrisome, health issues.  Has anyone ever seen physical evidence of “probing” from those claiming to be abductees?

Last night, I went running out to my backyard barefoot (in January) to take pictures of the evening sky.  It was just after dusk and the colors seemed unusual, even for Santa Fe. There were bright wisps of cloud against a muted blue-gray background.  The sun had gone down at 5:07.  It was now around 5:30 and I took several photos with my Canon.  I was in for a surprise when I put the pictures on my computer. 

As I shot into the northwest, there appeared a round transparent object that looked like a full moon without features.  It was too early for the moon to be up, especially that high, and there was not to be a full moon that night anyway.  I figured it had to be lens flare from the setting sun but the sun had already set and the sky was barely light enough for photography.  Plus, lens flare probably would have superimposed itself on top of the little piece of salmon cloud that was positioned in front of the object.  So – hmmm. This time, I sent pictures to both the UFO National Reporting Center and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) in New Mexico.

MUFON assigned an investigator to look into matters.  The investigator told me that the objects I saw were clearly not planes, helicopters or balloons.   At the present time, they are classifying the objects as “unknown.”  The theme from The Twilight Zone is now going off in my head.

I don’t doubt that there are aircraft up there that don’t belong to us.  I am curious about what they want and into what dimension they seem to disappear so quickly.  If the government knows something about alien life, I wish they would relieve us of our suspense and tell us about what they know.  Nobody’s tried to attack us yet and UFOs have been around for a long time.  I know there was supposedly mass panic over the War of the Worlds broadcast back in 1938, but I think we have much more credible threats to freak out about on Planet Earth these days.  So – show us an alien body, already. 

And, I ‘m going to go see if I have fingerprints!