UFO’s and the Magic Tricks of Fiction
I have heard it said that the Native Americans who first encountered Columbus and his crew literally didn’t see the invaders’ ships – not because there was something wrong with their eyesight, but because something so extraordinary and unexpected simply didn’t compute. Did I forget the UFO for a similar reason?
I can’t recall what it was I saw at first through my car window. But I do distinctly remember that – when I was driving one evening –something I saw startled me so much that I turned off the main road and pulled into the parking lot across from my sons’ school. I got out of my car and joined three or four people -- all looking up at a vast, many-lighted object in the night sky. I remember thinking that this thing – whatever it was – was about as large as football field and was hovering in the west, in the direction of the Northern Westchester hospital.
Brief and fading as it is, this is my only recollection of an apparently otherworldly event that has left me in a state of mind somewhere in between credulity and skepticism. I do also remember that, on the morning after it happened, I wanted to see if there’d been any mention of this sighting in the newspaper. But no, the local rag hadn’t yet reported it – or at least hadn’t thought it qualified as “news.”
It is quite possible that my own rational consciousness reached a verdict that was equally superficial – and perhaps that is why (for the next two decades) this tremendous illuminated object in the night sky didn’t find a place in my long-term memory. Or did my memory lapse have a deeper cause – was it more like a case of amnesia after trauma?
After the memory of that awe-struck moment came back to me, I did a little research and learned that I was only one of seven thousand or so people who, during the 1980’s, had seen UFO’s in the Hudson Valley. The sightings have been copiously documented and I urge you to do a Google Search. But if you do, you’ll also learn that the spectacular “spaceships” I and so many other people saw might (or might not) be debunked by a rational explanation: a group of pilots known as the “Stormville Flyers” might possibly have staged the whole marvelous thing. This is a disappointing possibility and I, for one, do not want to believe it. I would much prefer to retain at least a vestige of the wonder that I felt that night. Or should I sober up, be reasonable and dismiss the testimony of other eyewitnesses --like the guards at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant who said they saw it hovering above the reactor?
And so I am left with a question: what did I see – a huge spaceship from an alien civilization or an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a gang of stunt pilots? If it was really a hoax, is it likely that a few pilots were so devoted to the creation of their illusion, so ingenious and so good at keeping their secret that they duped over seven thousand people over the course of seven years? Or, if what I saw was really an alien spaceship, how had it reached a speed fast enough to travel the vast distances of interstellar space?
There is a literary dimension to this puzzle. For it brings me back to Ann Radcliffe, the queen of late-eighteenth century Gothic romance. In addition to insufferably suffering young heroines and brooding Italianate villains, Radcliffe’s novels feature apparently supernatural events that are finally brought down to earth by perfectly rational explanations. These explanations always make the reader feel let down – and a bit of a fool, which is why they do an injury to the fiction. For a great novelist is like a magician – who should never show how he pulled a rabbit from his hat. What’s more the magician himself should never upstage the rabbit – or, as the Wizard of Oz once said: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Vladimir Nabokov valued the artist above all as an illusionist: “the enchanter,” he said “interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher.” If the awe-inspiring spaceship I saw was an illusion, then weren’t the Stormville Flyers enchanters? They created a fiction better than Radcliffe’s, because the magic has remained. After all, maybe I really did see an immense flying object that had come to earth from some planet far away in outer space. But if not, then the illusion was something far worthier than a practical joke. That immense coruscating spacecraft floating in the darkness of the summer evening was more like a spectacular stage show, an improvisational performance of street theater – of sky theater, if you will. And the audience were suburbanites caught offguard in the midst of their daily routines – seven thousand people, of whom I was one, who were privileged with a moment of wonder.
I can’t recall what it was I saw at first through my car window. But I do distinctly remember that – when I was driving one evening –something I saw startled me so much that I turned off the main road and pulled into the parking lot across from my sons’ school. I got out of my car and joined three or four people -- all looking up at a vast, many-lighted object in the night sky. I remember thinking that this thing – whatever it was – was about as large as football field and was hovering in the west, in the direction of the Northern Westchester hospital.
Brief and fading as it is, this is my only recollection of an apparently otherworldly event that has left me in a state of mind somewhere in between credulity and skepticism. I do also remember that, on the morning after it happened, I wanted to see if there’d been any mention of this sighting in the newspaper. But no, the local rag hadn’t yet reported it – or at least hadn’t thought it qualified as “news.”
It is quite possible that my own rational consciousness reached a verdict that was equally superficial – and perhaps that is why (for the next two decades) this tremendous illuminated object in the night sky didn’t find a place in my long-term memory. Or did my memory lapse have a deeper cause – was it more like a case of amnesia after trauma?
After the memory of that awe-struck moment came back to me, I did a little research and learned that I was only one of seven thousand or so people who, during the 1980’s, had seen UFO’s in the Hudson Valley. The sightings have been copiously documented and I urge you to do a Google Search. But if you do, you’ll also learn that the spectacular “spaceships” I and so many other people saw might (or might not) be debunked by a rational explanation: a group of pilots known as the “Stormville Flyers” might possibly have staged the whole marvelous thing. This is a disappointing possibility and I, for one, do not want to believe it. I would much prefer to retain at least a vestige of the wonder that I felt that night. Or should I sober up, be reasonable and dismiss the testimony of other eyewitnesses --like the guards at the Indian Point Nuclear Plant who said they saw it hovering above the reactor?
And so I am left with a question: what did I see – a huge spaceship from an alien civilization or an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a gang of stunt pilots? If it was really a hoax, is it likely that a few pilots were so devoted to the creation of their illusion, so ingenious and so good at keeping their secret that they duped over seven thousand people over the course of seven years? Or, if what I saw was really an alien spaceship, how had it reached a speed fast enough to travel the vast distances of interstellar space?
There is a literary dimension to this puzzle. For it brings me back to Ann Radcliffe, the queen of late-eighteenth century Gothic romance. In addition to insufferably suffering young heroines and brooding Italianate villains, Radcliffe’s novels feature apparently supernatural events that are finally brought down to earth by perfectly rational explanations. These explanations always make the reader feel let down – and a bit of a fool, which is why they do an injury to the fiction. For a great novelist is like a magician – who should never show how he pulled a rabbit from his hat. What’s more the magician himself should never upstage the rabbit – or, as the Wizard of Oz once said: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Vladimir Nabokov valued the artist above all as an illusionist: “the enchanter,” he said “interests me more than the yarn spinner or the teacher.” If the awe-inspiring spaceship I saw was an illusion, then weren’t the Stormville Flyers enchanters? They created a fiction better than Radcliffe’s, because the magic has remained. After all, maybe I really did see an immense flying object that had come to earth from some planet far away in outer space. But if not, then the illusion was something far worthier than a practical joke. That immense coruscating spacecraft floating in the darkness of the summer evening was more like a spectacular stage show, an improvisational performance of street theater – of sky theater, if you will. And the audience were suburbanites caught offguard in the midst of their daily routines – seven thousand people, of whom I was one, who were privileged with a moment of wonder.
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Barney Hill? :)