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The Silver Alien Craft By Joe R. Lansdale Karen and I were young and we hadn’t been married long, but I knew we would
be together forever. I had been married before, too young, and briefly, and
that didn’t turn out so well. This felt much better and quite different. We were outside, happy as
always to be together, on our way to milk the goats. We were selling goat milk
then, as well as drinking it. There is a myth that goat milk is bad, but it
isn’t. It is only bad if you let the goats eat sour weeds and the like. It’s
the same with cows. If they are fed well the milk is good. I liked goat milk
better than cow’s milk. Some other folks liked it, too, and we scalded jars and
filled them with milk and sold it to regular customers, which were not many. It was for us then a nice
life. So, we weren’t thinking about
anything but that right then. Going out to the shed to milk the goats and
starting our day working on our garden, or perhaps we were working in the rose
fields that day. I don’t remember. But I remember this clearly: On
our way out to the goat shed, it was early morning, but still dark, and the
light was beginning to change, rising tangerine sunlight eating some of the
shadow out of the sky. As the light became brighter,
we looked up, and above us, shaped like a triangle, was a great, silver ship.
It was enormous and shiny, and in that moment, I knew we were seeing some sort
of alien craft, and it was not that high over our property – close enough I
thought we might be sucked up inside, our asses spread with salad spoons and
probes sent into them for investigation. We both gasped and pointed. My perspective on the
universe changed in that instant. There were, in fact, aliens from other worlds
who came here in odd space-traveling vehicles, and they were visiting the
earth. In fact, they were visiting us, or at least flying above our
house. And then the light shifted. The sky was kind of pink now,
and all the night was drained out of it. The silver craft became a series of
silver crafts. And they were little crafts. They were insects. The way the
light was when we first looked up, when it first cracked through the dying
night, they had all seemed as one: silver against the rising day. Now we could
see they were many flying close together, and if I remember right, it was their
wings that were silver, or had been much more so when the light first hit them. We watched the insects for as
long as we could until they were gone. In that moment I learned a great lesson:
Don’t always believe what you see, and question things that are unlikely.
Something seen in the sky that you can’t identify doesn’t mean it’s aliens. It may be an unidentified flying object, but
making the jump to aliens is irresponsible. Could it be aliens? Could be.
Likely not. I swear to you, had the light not changed after we looked up, or
had our timing been slightly different, I would be writing an article today
about how my wife and I know aliens exist because we saw one of their flying
machines and it was large and white-silver. And we would have been wrong.
But we wouldn’t have known we were wrong. In that moment, our experience was
that we had seen an alien craft. But it wasn’t. It’s like a shadow in the
woods is less likely to be Bigfoot than to be Bigfoot. Something seen out of
the corner of your eye is probably not a ghost. The eye certainly sends
messages to the brain, to let you know what you’re looking at, but sometimes
the brain sends messages to the eye. And sometimes the brain makes
leaps of logic that are in truth not so logical. Perhaps aliens exist. It
wouldn’t surprise me. But that morning was when I gained my skeptic
credentials. I’ve maintained them until
this day. The logical thing to do would be to return here Thursday, April
3, for another dose of vitamin Mojo! "The Silver Alien Craft" originally appeared on
Joe R. Lansdale’s Facebook page, on November 24, 2022. " The Silver Alien
Craft " © 2022 By Bizarre hands, LLC. All Rights Reserved. |
