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A UFO CHRISTMAS STORY

This true story is for the Ufologist in us all…
 
  …or The Little Old UFO Lady from Pasadena, Texas, 'er, well, Baylor
 
  Now that Dad has passed I'm mostly Mom's designated driver when she gets invited to "social things" she feels obligated to go to whether I want to attend them or not.  I could just drop her off and then come back to pick her up, but sometimes it just seems more polite to make an appearance and try to find a TV to watch to try and discourage conversations I would rather not get caught up in such as "Is the Pope's stand on Gay Marriage appropriate in these modern times when 'everybody knows'  that every Catholic Church Choir Director is, wink-wink-nudge-nudge,  gay."  This kind of stuff comes up at Christmas Parties from a side of the family that is predominantly Good-still-Church-going-Catholics.

  At "family" gatherings like this I try not to bring up the Bible, Science, Economics, Politics or UFOs unless somebody else brings such subjects up first and then I usually try and lend a good ear and change the subject when I can with saying, "I'll have to look into 'that' and do some thinking about it."  After all it's really their party and I'm just there to be someone's cousin from way back in the good old days of the 20th Century before color TV.   And at least they usually feed you pretty good.

  My Mother's sister died a couple of years ago and so we don't see her husband and his side of the family as much as we used to.  But Uncle Dick called and asked to borrow the big Chili pot for when my cousin Steven brings his Catholic brood of a dozen or so kids I've never met in from out of state for Uncle's family get together, and besides needing the chili pot why don't you show up and join the fun.  Great!

  Mom always felt like she had to send everyone of her Mother's (my Grandma's) grandchildren a gift every year, at least a little something from the Dollar-Store, and she wanted to go meet them all.  They are "into" Irish River-dancing.  Great!

  I was dreading this like I dread most family "things"–after all Mom and I both caught a stomach virus from our Thanksgiving get together with sick snotty nosed kid relatives crawling on us and touching everything, from another family branch–and because I knew Uncle Dick usually had a lot of his Church friends over I have nothing in common to talk to about with, and I remember my cousin Steven as like an 11-year-old when I went off into the Paratroopers back in March 1973.

  Then, worse yet, 2 nights before the Christmas Party I get a big Black Eye and look like I've been in a drunken bar brawl.  So now I know all day at the party I'm going to have to explain "what happened" and be the butt of friendly jokes in a crowd I barely know.  The reality is I don't really know how I got the Black Eye.  We had a pretty big wind storm and I heard some metal–like siding–making an awful racket between Mom's house and the neighbors.  I went out to retrieve the metal, that was making such a racket interrupting her watching TV, to take it and store it under the workshop shed.  I was, all at the same time,  fighting holding on to this piece of the neighbor's metal siding against a blowing wind coming between the houses like a venturi tube, and trying to fasten the blowing sidewalk gate, and then trying to literally grab at and keep my sweatpants from falling down around my ankles as I had not hitched up the draw string very tightly after dinner.  Something happened during all of that activity and the next time I looked in the bathroom mirror I had a Shiner  that totally surprised me.  Don't remember feeling a thing.

  I figured that would take too much telling over and over again and again unless somebody really asked what happened, so Mom and I agreed to make a joke of it and just say I smarted off one too many times to her and she socked me, SOL (Snicker Out Loud).  But "someone's Dad's ancient cousin" was going to look like a rough old character to children starring up at me whom had never met me before.

  Party day things settled into the pattern family get-togethers usually do.  Kids ran around, and off, doing kid things and ignoring the adults, except for the couple of them that always seem to sit around listening raptly to the "Remember-When-We-Did-That" nostalgia stories.  The adults who are going to get drunk, drink.  And everybody else seems to enjoy catching up on the "What has your family been doing lately" or "who died recently" stories.

  Thank goodness there was some documentary marathon program on TV for me to watch.

  Cousin Steven came to sit and catch up.  Steve, I knew, had been a college degreed corporate chemist of some sort (besides the Amway "Business" career I didn't want to bring up at a party).  Steve told me he saw the writing on the wall as his corporation was outsourcing overseas and laying people off and so he had to make a career change while he was young enough to build himself back up to the income levels he needed to support a good Catholic size family, helping them get into college &etc…  So he had become an Insurance Salesman for the Knights of Columbus.

  This, of course, led to a discussion of how Father Michael J. McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus in 1882 as a Catholic service fraternity partly due to the fact that the Catholic Church itself would not let Catholics join the secret society of The Ancient & Honorable Fraternity Of Free & Accepted Masons.  To be fair, a lot of Catholics had been excluded from labor unions and organizations providing social services and banned from other fraternal organizations.   I, myself, belong to the Masonic Grand Lodge of Japan where I joined while stationed over there in the military and I have never heard a Freemason say anything about not allowing any Catholic to join a Masonic Lodge–the ban on joining comes from The Pope and not from the Masons–and not even from the infamous Bavarian Illuminati  of conspiracy theory fame, which was pretty much a defunct organization by 1787 (Atheists need not apply to a Masonic Lodge, however, as belief in  some form of Supreme Being who is the Grand Architect designer intelligence, of some sort, of the whole Universe {i.e."God"}, is required for membership).

  Now here was something, insurance,  I could have a little fun talking to Steve about since I had written a satire insurance boilerplate policy of "Rapture Insurance" /insurance/ from my imaginary Apocalypse & Armageddon Assurance Associates, LLC, which I've found usually does get its best laughs from insurance salesmen who understand insurance boilerplate.  And since "The Rapture"  seems to be basically a Baptist theology (it's only really as recent as 1738 by Phillip Doddridge from his interpretation of the non-Biblical  Book Of Enoch  and propagated by Baptist preacher Morgan Edwards in 1788) and not really a Pope approved Catholic doctrine, this was safe ground to kid around about at a basically Catholic Christmas party with a new Knights of Columbus insurance salesman.

  But somewhere in our repartee where we had name dropped Chemical degrees and corporations and my working on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy & Imaging systems for Siemens, the 70-year-old Little Old Church Lady from Pasadena, Texas–just outside Houston–who had been quietly just sitting there eating her Styrofoam bowl of Christmas Chili suddenly latched onto me breaking out into letting us know she had 2 Ph.D.s from Baylor University–Go Bears!–and she was just bursting with energy to talk about Bio-chemistry; prions in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease); neurons and synapses and Alzheimer's disease; the possibility of using psychotropic drugs to speed up the brain's pattern associations to by-pass damaged parts of the mind in stroke victims to facilitate recovery and, by the way, one of her colleagues at Baylor University said he'd been at Roswell in 1947 and saw the Alien bodies and not only are UFOs real but that is where we got all this advanced technology of microchips, fiber-optics, lasers and everything else her friend quoted her–probably right out of the book The Day After Roswell  by Col. (retired) Philip J. Corso.  But she thought she was telling us an eyewitness account from Roswell.  And she finally seemed to be enjoying this party as she had found people she could talk to.

  I wish I was younger when we seemed to be able to recall almost verbatim party conversations, but she had my mind reeling to keep up with her studies of Ebola hosts presumed to now be fruit bats ( http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/artic.....rticle.htm ), which I had not heard about at all yet, and it had been maybe 15 years since I'd read The Hot Zone  on Ebola in Africa by Richard Preston, and here she was quoting CDC papers by author's name.  

  But when she got onto the UFO/Roswell topic suddenly Mom is wanting to interrupt in and mention to everybody that I have had actual  UFO/ET Close Encounters–and I'm trying to give her the "It's not the right place and right time" hand wave-off and raised eyebrow.   Let's just let everybody else talk about what they think, and we'll listen to them and make appropriate positive or negative sounding noises where deemed necessary.

  Never-ever-never-ever-never  start bragging in front of a basically church-going related party audience that you are the first-hand experience UFO expert.  Listen to what everybody has to say and then talk about documented (tell them they can Google it if they want to) UFO encounters like: the Malmstrom Air Force Base ICBM missile silo shutdowns after UFOs were reported by Security personnel  hovering over their silos back in March 1967.

  Later you can always approach individuals from the party who seem like they might have something to bring to the UFO table or can speak confidentially with you about the subject without blabbing to the rest of the family that you are now the family UFO Nut to be ridiculed at parties.  I'm prepared to handle such a scene the same as I used to handle lecturing a Department of Defense college class full of young and rowdy U.S. Marines.  But I see no reason to invite an awkward UFO/ET party debate if not necessary.  Let everybody else have their say, listen and learn.

  Your average person is no more ready to accept the UFO/ET paradigm than I was before I had my 1st major Close Encounter.  I can remember literally rolling my eyes at a "Missing Time" account that had personally been told me a couple of years before I'd had my very own experiences.

  I know I'm not any more likely to convince most people about the reality of the UFO/ET paradigm any more than I can go back to believing that the authors of the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke were not purposefully both lying with their differing family genealogies for the baby Jesus for 1st Century political purposes.  Both tough paradigm lines to cross or un-cross.

  Anyway, by the time I left Uncle Dick's Christmas party I was then glad I had stayed instead of just dropping Mom off, and had gotten to better know my cousin Steve as a grown family man.  But it really was an unexpected pleasure just to try to keep up with the Bio-chemistry conversation–more like a lecture really–with the Little Old Lady from Pasadena, Texas.  And it was neat that the family got to see I can hold a conversation in the sciences and not just have to talk about Old Uncle Dawson the paratrooper and racing driver.

  However, I'm betting our Little Old UFO Lady's friend was not an actual Roswell eyewitness but he had been quoting to her from Col. Corso's The Day After Roswell  and after 10 years or so ago, from a conversation way back in Houston, she was just confused that it hadn't been an eyewitness account being told to her.  The details too closely matched what I remember reading in the book.  And somewhere in my head spinning with all the conversation that suddenly burst out of her, and me telling the UFO reinforcing, "You can Google it," Malmstrom AFB stories, I forgot to mention that they all might want to read Corso's book for comparison.  And it sure had been fun listening to her excitement in telling the story.

  Although I did remember mentioning to my cousin he might want to pick up the book The New Alchemists: Silicon Valley and the Microelectronics Revolution  from 1982 by Dirk Hanson ie=UTF8&qid=1356683855&sr=1-11&keywords=The+New+Alchemists that traces the advance of modern electronics from the time of the Edison-Tesla (Westinghouse) rivalry.  Most of the steps of electronics progress from light bulbs to vacuum tubes to solid-state transistors to Liquid Crystal Diodes and sending digital light signals down finally  bendable glass fibers and the development of MASERs to LASERs and RADAR from Radio all seem pretty straight forward and don't seem to need  the intervention of Alien Roswell Technology: /forum/?page_id=4/3-0-robots-machines/3-1-robots-machines/
 
 
  So I managed to have an unexpected… Merry UFO Christmas!