🔭 The lights essay

Fellow eschatologists rejoice, for the end is nigh! Again! Just look at all those lights in the sky.

Not the stars; no, not Starlink, either. But almost. Late last year, I spotted a convoy of lights sailing across the sky and promptly lost my shit. Luckily, my wife ID-ed them before I finished scraping a hole in the sand big enough to bury our heads in. (Ostriches don't actually do this, but that doesn't negate its virtues as a defense stratagem.)

The lights I’m referring to are those drones that buzzed U.S. military bases around the same time, mostly in New Jersey. But were they really drones? They flew all around and we still don't know what they were. So they're UFOs.

Cue the X-Files theme. Wait, no, that costs money. Cue the Nine Inch Nails song “Lights in the Sky.” (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US.)

Go ahead and call them UAPs if that helps you silently scream through sleep paralysis at night. Regardless, it's fun to watch politicians and legacy media scramble as Redditors lose their Dead Internet bot minds. A classic UFO flap, replete with boogeymen that have aged about as well as '90s computer graphics. (R.I.P. live-action “Spawn.” The soundtrack's liver-spotted, too, but The Prodigy vs. Tom Morello's car horn still rips.) Some keywords: foreign military, missing nuclear weapons, dirty bombs, China, Iran, aliens, angels, and demons. (BINGO! But, I had to use the “antisemitism” free square and probably plagiarized a Grinderman song.)

Hey, ChatGPT, summarize witness claims: “These reports described drones as large as SUVs, sometimes accompanied by loud humming noises.” It cited Wikipedia and pushed a CNN clip. Conspiracy confirmed.

Questions from the meatverse:

• How do you gauge the size of something in the sky? Personally, I throw rocks.
• Why would something that's supposed to spy make loud noises?
• Ditto for shining lights. (Our Auto-Complete Overlord overlooked these.)

No doubt paranormal instigator, carnival chronicler, and poet Joe Nickell would pin all this malarkey on owls. (He's a national treasure. Check out his website's “Personas” tab.)

Maybe they're manned. Or womanned. Or aliened. (Not the kind being deported… yet.) If they're extraterrestrial and extra-talkative, I have some probing questions:

•  ………

Never mind. I have zero questions about probing. 

If they've paid attention to our depictions of aliens in popular media, we're the ones with explaining to do. If only for the outfits in Star Trek and Godzilla movies.

It's easy to take pot shots at drone sightings from across the pond. (Liquor shots, too, at two-thirds to half the size.) It's also easy to spot mass (media) hysteria after years of listening to MonsterTalk. (“The Science Show About Monsters,” not “Monster Jam and Monster Trucks,” not that there's anything wrong with that.) Our quirky, highly biased sensory equipment—i.e. the human body—doesn't inspire certitude. A scientific, skeptical approach to most claims is a safe bet. As MIB-cosplayer John Keel famously quipped, “belief is the enemy.” (Unless you're into angels or demons, in which case you may now resume your regularly scheduled Spiritual Warfare.)

New query: 

• What would make me take such claims seriously?

Photos wouldn't do it because I know Dale O'Dell. Back when I published an alt-monthly, we featured his surreal, Dalí-inspired digital art—much of it photo-based—as well as columns about his stock photographer days. (He once hucked frozen fish for bald eagles to catch and look all majestic with.) One of his books, “Actual Photos of UFOs” is particularly relevant. Reread the title. It's not “Actual UFO photos.” Truly talented guy.

News reports wouldn't convince me either. Remember that Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast fiasco? No you don't, because it never happened. A big fuss was made post-facto to—surprise, surprise—sell newspapers. I'm oversimplifying this (and, SPOILER ALERT, many other things, too) but data suggests far fewer people tuned in and freaked out than commonly asserted. Plus it was Halloween. And a popular, forty-year-old, well-known story.

What about governmental confirmation? Ha ha ha! Good one.

Even seeing something with my own eyes would be a hard sell. I live near a military base and see weird things in the sky all the time, barn owls included.

Still, if any alien pilots are reading this, let's have a look at you. That's right, like a wrestler gunning for a title shot, I'm calling out the Lights in the Sky. Come at me, light bros.

I expect something less apocalyptic than the lyrics of Hypocrisy's “End of Disclosure.” Fingers crossed for something along the lines of Rob Zombie's “Well, Everybody's Fucking in a U.F.O.”

We can be sure of one thing, regardless. There's no way it'll top the interpretive dancing in that video for Purity Ring's cover of “Better Off Alone.”