Imagine yourself driving down a rural highway…

Imagine you and your lover, or a former lover, driving down a rural highway at midnight, a two lane highway with no illumination other than your headlights and the stars. The moon set an hour ago and the clouds drifted away.

You argue about how badly you mistreated his parents, boss, former friend or second cousin who hasn’t spoken to him for years. Or perhaps her head is collapsed against the windshield while she snores, and you can see a single drop of saliva rolling down her chin. 

This leaves you trying to tune in a late night ball game from the West Coast because even baseball is better than Tammy Winette singing “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” between occasional waves of static.

Suddenly she jumps in her seat, or he shakes his head, points to the windshield and shouts: “What’s that?”

You see three lights, two of them white and the middle one red, stacked on top of each other and quickly disappearing into the surrounding stars.

Do you:

Say “My God, was that a flying saucer?” and report it to the police as soon as you get to the next town?

Tell them, “Of course it’s not a flying saucer, stupid, it was probably a plane?”

Spend the rest of the drive looking for more, and, perhaps, the rest of your life hoping to see one again and wondering if that was your only opportunity to experience something extraordinary?

Never think about it again?

Smile knowingly to yourself because even though this is your first encounter of any kind, you just saw the proof of what you’ve known all along: That we are not alone, that we haven’t been alone for a long time, and that the government has known about this since the crash at Roswell back in 1947 and have been lying about it all along, keeping the truth locked up in the files of the Majestic 12 organization along with the truth about the hollow earth and telepathic dolphins who can tell the Navy where the Soviet submarine fleets are and Area 51 in Nevada where physicists are reverse engineering a flying saucer that is powered by amplifying gravity?

Daydream, if only for a moment, that your mother is in the back seat, and that the three lights circle overhead and beam her up to the mother ship and return her with an implant that suppresses her impulse to tell you that Jessica or Johnny Davenport now makes eighty grand a year in his/her own practice and you could do a lot better if only you would learn to apply yourself and stop seeing your lover who even now is drooling on the passenger window?

No matter what your answer, if you reflect back on what your response to the question was, you will discover something deep and profound about your personality and your way of thinking, whether or not you are, in fact, a realist or a magical thinker, a dreamer capable of projecting possibilities perpetuating beyond the peripheries of the stars or a practical and pragmatic planner plotting a path to home, safe and secure in the knowledge that the world is predictable, plain and, probably, free of unwanted intruders with prying eyes from beyond our boundaries.

Unless, of course, you believe that Area 51 is more certainly real than heaven, and that I am just one more pawn in the global conspiracy to suppress or ridicule the truth.

Phillip T. Stephens

Smashwords

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