The Ufologist
By Dylan Berman

    The man behind the camera breaths heavily.  
    “Holy shit, what was that? It was just there.” 
    His hand comes into frame blurred, pointing at a jagged ridgeline. The hills are black against the royal blue sky of late evening. His voice is shaky. The shock of the incomprehensible, the part of him that wants to disbelieve despite what he has seen, the uncertainty, the thrill. Here it is in front of him, not in someone else's pixelated video, not on a message board or a TV special, not so easily dismissed. Anything and everything feels possible for the first time since childhood. Those strict laws of Real and True, the whole world categorized, every mystery solved, nothing beyond rational understanding : here is something that has slipped through.  
    “Just there,” he repeats. “It came down just behind those hills.”  
    The man narrates his video for an imagined future audience, unconsciously aware of and mimicking the generic conventions of such footage. He gasps and zooms in, attempting to steady the shot.  
    “Holy shit. Holy shit.”  
    There is no sound of  roaring engine, thrumming magnets, whirring gears, just vast pressing silence as five white lights rise into view, outlining something huge and angular, a dark mass just visible as night falls. The lights pulse dimly, sitting perfectly still once the thing has fully crested the hill. The cameraman zooms further in, filling the footage with digital noise, a muted rainbow mosaic of pixel edges.  
    His voice is now a whisper, carrying the same stunned wonder.  
    “oh my god. my god.”  
    Robert rewinds the footage thirty seconds, watching the craft rise. He rewinds and watches a third, a fourth, a tenth time, hunched over his desk, letting the footage run to its end. The lights rotate vertically and shoot upward, shining dimly through the high fog and then vanishing. He shuts his laptop. Robert has seen hundreds, no, thousands of videos like this one. Silver orbs flinging past airplane windows like huge bullets, Pentagon released thermal footage, stark black and white, motion tracking pill shaped objects that flick effortlessly left and right. Ipoe footage-groups of saucers hovering in cloud cover, shot from the porches of suburban homes, three dots of light in the shape of a triangle sliding slowly over a cityscape, like slipping stars. Five dark spheres clustered about a towering thunderhead, rapidly spinning. Clippings from local newspapers, quotes from frightened locals, headlines about alien encounters, strage lights over the desert. Sketched diagrams of saucers, leaked military documents, patents, security camera footage of wing shaped crafts. He is up for hours in the light of his computer. The Portland Park Incident of 1971. The witness drew a saucer, 50 feet in the air above him, and scrawled the following on his sketch: “The Bible talks about an angel like a wheel within a wheel with eyes all around it. Wherever the eyes went that’s where the spirit of God went. I’m not trying to claim the craft is biblical in origin or nature but what I saw somewhat fits the description. Just thought I’d mention it.”  
    ‘Normal’ people, disbelievers, saw this evidence, dismissed it, and went on with their days. He knew all of the excuses. What was it now, natural gas, ball lightning, mass hallucination? Maybe photoshop, AI? Oh some things are just unexplainable, they said. Strange things happen. It doesn't mean anything. Sheep. Not him, he would face down the truth head on, he couldn’t relegate it all under the slur of conspiracy.  
    He goes for a walk around the block. He is full of questions only a few suited men in high places have the answers to, and they don’t like to be asked. He is certain that at this very moment, technology beyond the comprehension of the public, perhaps even of our governments, drifts the clouds, orbits the earth. Human or otherwise, there is great and terrible power at play, the highest order of mystery, tiers po tiers of lies and secrets. He knows that he and everyone else, whether they know it or not, are observed daily, studied, perhaps watched for entertainment. A few, lucky or unlucky depending on how burning your curiosity is, are taken aboard, violated, spoken to, dropped off naked in cow pastures, or right back to their bedrooms,  memories erased.  
    He loops the block and watches the sky, but the few stars not blighted out by the bright city sit still and twinkling. One day, he thinks. One day it will be my turn.  
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    He always keeps watch for special astrological occurrences. UFOs have higher rates of appearances during solar flares or meteor showers, like the one tonight. It would be invisible through the city’s light pollution, joins in line with the rest of those headed out on the one lane freeway inland Families, hobbyist fathers with telescopes who have dragged their kids along, couples, ready for the edibles to kick in, ready to lay in the trunk with blankets and pillows, to watch each other's eyes as much as the stars. The line of cars turns down a gravel side road, pine trees pressing in closely, then another side road, barrel maintained, hitting a wide gravel dead end.  Out there the sky glimmers with stars. There is no solid black, every piece of the night tinted with heavenly silver. The milky way reveals itself, a ghostly presence, a river in the sky, a heavenly double of the river in the valley below. Robert had a view for miles, over the valley, past another range of hills, at the horizon white sand and a little sliver of the sea. He sets up a special machine, meant to beep upon the detection of large objects overhead, and powered on his high quality infrared video camera. For a while the crowd, their cars spread about the lookout point, saw only stars. He could hear their impatient murmurs, discussing when to call it quits. A little one in the corner of the sky, a momentary streak, a chorus of “woahhhs,” followed by questioning and curses from those unlucky in the timing of their blinks. Crickets thrummed. The night was windless. More meteorites came, large and small, burning up orange or fluorescent green, tears in the fabric of the night, ripping open the dark cloth of the sky to reveal the heavens beyond. He sat motionless, his legs crossed, his fingers steepled. He wasn’t here for what satisfied the rest of them, chatting excitedly to each other, blown away as they climbed in their cars and headed home. He was there as the last other left, watching, waiting, slapping himself if he felt sleep creeping up. He was there to watch the sunrise, bitter with disappointment. He had seen nothing but falling stars.  
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    The airport is on the city's edge, out through those flat outskirts full of junkyards, personal storage facilities, shipping containers and empty lots. There are no sidewalks and all the streets feel unnaturally wide. Robert loves these drives, speeding through the hollow landscape, triple digit mph. Nobody is really here on Friday nights. The street lights can’t tell him what to do anymore. He stops only for the freight trains.  
    The tallest and nicest buildings in this zone are hotels. He discovered the Holiday Inn parking garage on one of these aimless drives a few months back. Six stories tall and ten bucks for the night, Robert parks on the roof each Friday night to watch the planes come in. UFO sightings are more common near airports. Perhaps they are observing or means of air travel, or perhaps they aren't more common near airports at all, just more commonly reported, caught on  cameras and radar. That's how he justifies these nights, and it isn't entirely a lie. He is increasing his odds of spotting something. That isn’t what really gets him up to the top of the parking garage though. Backed up traffic crawls slowly on the freeway, the headlights and taillights making parallel white and red stripes to the horizon. Pigeons flock to their nests on the building's edge. He finishes a cigarette and cracks a second beer just as the lights announce an incoming plane, a strip of them flashing white one after the other up towards the flattened land of the runway. A field of colored pinprick lights pulses on like lightning bugs. They are colored like Christmas lights, warm oranges, twinkling blues, soft greens. It’s a show, shining up at Robert in the blue dusk. The plane comes over him after a long wait, listening to its distant roar and watching the lights dance. It seems so massive and tangible, like a bus passing on the street, so different from the distant flat shape of a plane passing high over clean blue sky on its way elsewhere.  He feels like he could touch the white metal if he jumped, like its jets will pull him in. He loses himself, just for a second, in the mass, the speed, the noise, watching its white underbelly and then its blinking tail as it continues in lower. He sees it release its wheels and hit the runway, sees it send up a puff of smoke, and sees the lights go dark. The stars reveal themselves in the clear night.