Journal of a UFO Investigator by David Halperin Page B

The license had been issued nearly two years before. I closed the wallet and handed it back.
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    We were getting out of the city now, and the traffic began to thin. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of the Schuylkill River to our right, glistening in the late afternoon sun. I had only the vaguest idea where we were headed. It was a house in the country, he’d told me, out in Montgomery County. This was the headquarters of the Super-Science Society.
    More than six weeks had passed since I’d met Julian in the library, without my taking him up on his dinner invitation. I wasn’t sure, to begin with, how seriously he’d meant it. Also, there was something about him that unnerved me, gave me the feeling he was best avoided. I still went to the Philadelphia library most Saturdays, sometimes with Rosa, never again with Jeff. Of course the bus stopped in Braxton; it always had. I stayed clear of the Rare Book Room. I made sure to leave the library a half hour before closing time, so as not to run into Julian as he left work.
    The last week of March he phoned.
    It was late in the morning, just before lunchtime. I was working at my desk, trying to keep my eyes open; I’d slept till almost ten, but it hadn’t helped. My mother drifted around the house, forlornly singing her song about “sailing along on Moonlight Bay, we could hear the voices singing, they seemed to say . . .” I kept the door to my room closed, tried not to listen. She loves that song; it reminds her of her and my father’s courting days. For me, it’s like fingernails dragged across a blackboard.
    â€œYou have stolen my heart, now don’t go ’way . . .”
    It was Tuesday, but I wasn’t in school. A freak snowstorm the day before had forced the schools to close and put my father into an even nastier mood than usual.
    He’d come into my room about eleven the night before, complaining about the racket I was making, typing up UFO sightings on file cards. I promised I’d do something else that didn’t make noise. But he sat down on my bed to talk, starting out calm, reasonable. The way his inquisitions usually do.
    He just wanted to understand , he said. How was it a bright kid like me could piss away my life on this UFO garbage?
    â€œSo it’s been fifteen years of flying saucers,” he said when I’d answered his questions about the dates, the numbers. “There’s been three thousand or God knows how many sightings of these stupid goddamn lights whizzing through the sky. None of them ever crashes. None of them ever manages to leave anything solid behind—”
    That’s simply not true, I told him.
    â€œWhat?”
    UFOs have at times left physical evidence, I told him.
    â€œYeah? Like when?”
    I didn’t want to get into the Maury Island UFO crash of 1947; that was almost certainly a hoax. There were vague rumors of a crash somewhere in New Mexico, also in ’47, but I’d never been able to find any details. So I began to describe the New Haven case from August 1953, when a red fireball about a foot in diameter tore through a billboard—
    â€œPiloted by very little green men. Right?”
    He sweated, grinned. His eyes were furious. I kept on. Many people in New Haven, I told him, heard the terrific noise the fireball made, scared one woman so much she had a miscarriage—
    â€œAnd what did this red ball of fire leave behind? If I may ask?”
    I was just getting to that. The fireball left some metal by the hole in the billboard. It was analyzed, determined to be copper with some copper oxide—
    â€œCopper and copper oxide. You tell me something now. Why in the goddamn fucking hell would an interplanetary spaceship have left behind it copper and copper oxide?”
    I tried to tell him: I didn’t know why it was copper and copper oxide. I knew the facts; I didn’t know what they meant. That was what I was trying to find out,