Roswell and Other Visitations

Saturday afternoon, post-soccer game and post-pizza celebration, Little One and I are driving to one of my local libraries. After discussion over a variety of topics, we turn, inevitably, to spooky tales of the paranormal and / or Unexplained.

I regale her with the fortieth or forty-fifth telling of the scariest moment of my childhood: when I mistook Grammy, taking out the trash, for a Sasquatch. Despite her bout of giggles, she is a tough crowd. Less than a minute later she is demanding more. More spookiness, more paranormal, and more Unexplained.

So I decide she's old enough to learn some American mythology. I start with Roswell.

"There are some people who say," I began in a conspiratorial drawl, "that a spacecraft from another world crash-landed on our planet in 1947."

She's hooked.

"One dark stormy night in July a flying saucer crashed in New Mexico. The army came out and gathered up all the wreckage, and trucked it all back to one of their secret military bases."

Wide eyes in my rear view mirror.

"But a crashed flying saucer isn't the only thing they found."

"No?"

"No." I pause for suspense.

"Well, what else did they find?"

"They found bodies. Alien bodies. Three of them. Two dead on the scene, but one alien ... he was still alive when the army found him."

I tell her that the creature lived for another five years, hidden away in an underground government bunker. Then I tell her that this started a whole wave of UFO sightings, over the next twenty years or so, so much so that the government started a special program called Project Blue Book to investigate all the UFO sightings and UFO encounters people were reporting all over America. Hundreds and thousands of reports of flying saucers - some by multiple witnesses, some with accompanying photographs, some with actual film footage.

After a moment, Little One suprises me, as she often does, with an insight way beyond her years. "I know why there were so many sightings," she announces.

"Oh yeah? Why's that?"

"Because they were looking for their friends. The three aliens that had crashed."

Wow! Tell me Little One isn't going to be a writer when she grows up ...