One Giant Leap for Mankind!

Before I had become acquainted with her, I had seen her on the T.V. She had been interviewed by some obscure reporter who was doing an expose’ on extra terrestrial experiences of the third kind, or maybe it was the forth kind. I cannot really remember. I never knew exactly what that meant, “the third kind”, but I do remember the movie with Richard Dreyfuss entitled, “Encounters of the Third Kind,” or something very much similar to that.

Her name was Beatrice VanDerkirk. She was a large and pudgy, two-breasted woman with the complexion of pie crust, before having been inserted into the oven. She was of some kind of Scandinavian decent but it had obviously been many years since she had been mistaken for a bombshell and more recently was more likely to have been mistaken for….well, frankly a ball of pie crust.

She sat on a wooden chair, in the middle of the exhibit, straddling the overstrained antique with her umbrella stand like legs. She wore a blue and white, faded, checkered dress which looked like a hand-me-down table cloth, the kind that grandma used to wear. She said nothing.

I had decided to go to a UFO convention with my friend Thomas. Thomas had seen much in his life as a Peace Corps volunteer, former science teacher and self taught computer wizard. One of the more positive things about Thomas was his open mind. Nevertheless, one of his greatest drawbacks was his open mind. I was intrigued at the thought of attending the UFO convention with Thomas who was plainly brighter than I. I should have, however, been more suspect when I learned the convention would be held in the commons area of a suburban mall.

There were thirty or forty so conventioneers in attendance and all looked like they had just gotten off work from their jobs at the local bowling alley. There was an array of displays of photos of UFOs with all the photos being very amateurish, out of focus or just plain unexplainable. One would think that with all these “scientists” in attendance, at least one of them could have taken a decent picture. I stood before one picture of a flying saucer and the description explained the nature of the structure and the probable use for the spoke-like attachments protruding from the center of the ship. The scale looked odd and against the trees in the background, one could not discern whether the UFO was very large or very tiny, housing little bitty folks from an entirely different universe than ours.

I had heard of the convention on the Art Bell radio program, a program one can only hear between midnight and six a.m. on the AM radio dial. Listeners from all over the country would call at all hours of the night and express their belief that life on other planets existed and that our sole purpose was to do whatever it took to make contact with them. These people never sounded any too bright though as Art had three phone numbers for the listeners to use, one for folks west of the Rockies, one for folks east of the Rockies and then the wild-card line. If you wanted to suffer the wrath of Art Bell, you damned well better NEVER use the west of the Rockies line if you lived east of the Rockies and vice-versa, nor versa-vice which is vice-versa, vice-versa. Not unexpectedly, it would happen that an east of the Rockies listener would call from the west side number and just get reamed by Art Bell. That was one of my favorite parts of the program.

So, the listeners and Art Bell would document extra terrestrial activity which for some reason tended to focus near the area of Roswell, New Mexico where there exists a large ancient crater created by some huge outer space object bashing into the Earth millions of years ago, or as Biblical purist would explain, last Friday at 3:45 p.m.

These same folks were most definitely anti-government wogs, which explains my friend Thomas’s affinity towards them, even though he was himself a career government employee. A U.S.A.F. caption beneath the flying saucer photo I described above claims the fuzzy photo is not that of a UFO, but it is in fact the photo of a hubcap from a 1958 Mercury Zephyr, a car which has never even existed. Thus, the government’s explanation only served to exacerbate the validity or lack thereof in the argument concerning the existence of UFOs. Additionally, the spoke-like objects in the photo were explained by the government to be exactly that. Spokes!

It was now time for the featured event of the convention, a discussion by Beatrice VanDerkirk of her abduction by outer space aliens. Ms. VanDerkirk explains it as follows:

“I was sitting on the back porch after dark. I had just put some pie into the oven. The crust was perfect! That’s when a large glowing disk-shaped object that looked like a hubcap descended over my back yard and hoooovered for about twenty minutes or so”. (“Hoooovered” is how Ms. Vanderkirk pronounced the word we would know as “hovered” and was probably the result of her assumed Scandinavian background or this author’s laziness in not using his computer’s spellcheck feature).

Ms. VanDerkirk continued, “…well, after awhile, some smallish aliens, which I call beings of another kind, came out of their ship, down a ladder and proceeded to come upon the porch where I was sitting. At first, I had assumed they had smelled the baking pie from their mother ship. But, after awhile, and without saying a word, about a dozen or so picked me up, chair and all, and took me aboard their ship. Then, they closed the door, and the ship took off. Before I knew it, we were in outer space.”

“The spaceship seemed much bigger on the inside”, iterated Ms. VanDerkirk, “and, in addition to myself and the aliens, there were about 8-10 head of cattle. No cattle mind you, just the heads. As I was saying, it’s a known fact that outer space aliens have been mutilating cattle for years and getting away with it. Had I the presence of mind, I would have started to take some notes at this point, but my mind was back home, concerned with my unattended pie and I had completely neglected to bring a pencil and notepad."

“The ship was stocked with T.V. dinners and obviously the creatures had planned on a long voyage. Also, their food wasn’t exactly like ours, but that could have been a result of the meals having spent a long time in the freezer. The aliens were very accommodating with their food and being much smaller than most Earthlings, well, at least smaller than I, they possibly didn’t need the same calorie intake.”

“ While I was eating some frozen pork fritters, or the space version thereof, the ship zipped off and upwards into the sky above the weather. For awhile, I could look down and see some of the more identifiable landmarks on the ground such as Orville Johnson’s Country Buffetteria. Then it faded from sight. In no time at all we were passing by other planets and universes. Then, it happened. I started to feel woozy and became very sleepy. I think my hosts slipped me a mickey, although I never have been quite sure just what a mickey was. Anyway, shortly thereafter, I lost consciousness. And was neither able to rationalize on a high level, nor cipher without using my digits as place holders.”

“Several hours later, I awoke. Once I regained my faculties, I realized what they had done to me. Yes, they had had their way with me in the Biblical sense. SEX! It was a strange sensation. For, they did not have regular sex with me…not the kind we’re used to…I mean the kind I used to be used to. Once upon a time I mean. No, they had DIGITAL SEX with me. It was very highly advanced. Version 2.0…I believe. Anyway, they burned it to a disk and I’ve never made it public. In fact, I’ve even been afraid to watch it myself. Many months later, after returning to Earth, I offered the disk to the government for research purposes. They said they didn’t want it, that they didn’t really believe it. And besides, they didn’t even have computers yet that would read CDs. I’ve thought Nixon was an idiot ever since and it will be a cold day in hell before I’ll ever vote for another Quaker. Ultimately, I mailed the disk to L. Ron Hubbard and have never seen nor heard anything about it since."

“Anyway, I started to digress. I could tell the alien had an eye for me, although I retained some concern in that given he had three eyes, the other two appeared to roam. After our carnal encounter, of the third kind, we shared a smoke and a cup of coffee. It was freeze dried coffee, yes, I believe that’s what they must use in outer space. Folger’s it was I believe.”

The dialog of Ms. VanDerkirk seemed to have started to ramble and we in the crowd started to sense that we may just be dealing with a complete lunatic here. I observed one of the bowlers in the audience begin to scratch his arm pit beneath his bowling shirt with a bit of a frenzy…so much the pack of Camels he had rolled into his shirt sleeve fell upon the floor, dislodging the cigarettes from within the pack. Several others in the crowd scrambled for a free smoke, aggravating the man even more. He began to sputter and quiver a bit as I heard him shout to the lady, “ F-f-f-folger’s you say, Folger’s? And, where pray tell do aliens buy Folger’s in outer space I must ask?”

The look on Ms. VanDerkirk’s face at once became stoic. Her attempting to process what he was thinking and at the same time trying to formulate a believable answer caused her to freeze in time. She could sense she was about to be outed as a pasty old fraud. There had been no aliens, there had been no freeze dried Folgers and in fact, there had been no digital sex!

“I brought my children here to find out about the truth and all I got was a pack of lies about freeze dried coffee and digital pornography. I think you have some explaining to do you fat old bore!” shouted the soccer mom.

It was about this time mob rule was nearing a take over of the New Centre Mall when my friend Thomas who had wondered away from the seminar blurted out the statement that nearly caused a riot. Thomas had become weary of the old woman and had ambled over to a display of pen and ink sketches which had been put on display by the convention sponsors. These of course were really amateurish renditions of the imaginations of fools. All of the drawings showed aliens to have had two legs, two arms and one head, much like Earth people except some had three eyes or fingers. Why pray tell would beings who had evolved in completely differing environments and different sets of circumstances look so similar in nature to us? Bears and whales and bugs are Earth creatures. Yet, they are not like us so why a being from a zillion light years away would look so similar to us was perplexing. Well, leave it to Thomas to notice one glaring and distinct difference. He blurted out loudly, “Why do none of the aliens have any genitals?”

Parents herded their children. They shot daggers at Thomas with their looks, some even giving him the stink eye. Within a few moments, a public service announcement came over the mall’s intercom system insisting that all patrons of the mall exit the premises at once. Closing time was 45 minutes away. Crowd control must have been the answer. It was the only logical answer. Why close so early?

And so it was. We drove back to our homes in the city, saying not one word to each other. That was over a dozen years ago. I have not seen Thomas since our drive home that night. We simply lost interests in each other’s interests. Although before the drive was over, I had glanced out the passenger window of his ragged old Buick and peered into the night sky. I don’t know for sure what it was that went zipping by at a hypersonic speed, but it looked for all the world like the hubcap from a 1958 Mercury Zephyr, a car that did not exist, followed closely by an Air Force plane. To our left was a field with several headless cattle. The smell of freshly baked pie permeated the air. Still…… Thomas and I said nothing.