The Radar Operator Bought Me A Beer And Told Me To Forget It

I did two years of national service in a job so boring I have never once been asked about it twice. Perimeter. Gates. Clipboards.

One night in October I watched a light come down over the ranges. Not fall — come down. It descended the way a lift descends: level, deliberate, no wobble. It stopped maybe two hundred feet off the deck and it sat there.

I want to describe the colour and I cannot. It was white the way a welding arc is white — a white that makes everything else look brown.

It sat there. I watched it for what my logbook says was nine minutes, because I wrote the time in and out like the pedant I am.

Then it went up, and it did not accelerate the way anything with mass accelerates, and if you have ever watched a bird get hit by a car you know what real physics looks like, and this was not that.

I reported it. Of course I reported it. I was twenty and I still believed the chain of command was a thing that carried information upward.

Nothing happened. Nothing at all. No interview, no follow-up, and my logbook came back to me with those nine minutes still in it, unremarked, which — I have thought about this for twenty years — is its own kind of answer.