Sunday's postcard, and Part 1 of UFOs

July 16, 2023

Boy on the beach, near Deception Pass

UFOs

Part I: The Talk

Area 51 Taphouse, 7522 N. Division Street, Spokane, October 6, 2021

To explain why I would venture to write, here, about UFOs, I will first have to explain my daughter.

Of course, Audrey would have her own take on it. Mine is that she’s spiritually ferocious and unafraid of pure joy, by which I mean she doesn’t share my suspicion that joy is just a set-up for a whack of grief. There is as little hesitation in her laughter as there is in her courage. We travel well together. She enjoys introducing me to new music. We can talk honestly about heavy things without fear of losing each other.

It doesn’t matter so much that she has a much stronger interest in the paranormal than I do. But it does affect the contours of our discussions—that she is open to all sorts of possibilities and I am tethered to the plaid planet of empiricism. Her grades prove she is a sharper student than I was, and it would be a mistake to suggest she is somehow unmoored from fact-finding. When the task calls for it she can pound in footnotes like railroad spikes.

Artist rendition, 1947 UFO sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold near Mount Rainier

That said, Audrey’s the one who brought it up: UFOs. Unidentified Flying Objects or what NASA now calls “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs).” It was a lively conversation by early 2021 and she began to notice I was herding the discussion into a cow pen of sorts. There is a stigma that attaches to journalists who write about UFOs and I was uncomfortable with the thought of getting deeply into it. I found myself pumping the brakes on our discussion in ways that, to her ear, were unreasonable.

It was then she did a very Audrey-like thing. She didn’t get mad. She just paused to calmly explain that she was done—done arguing with me. There was no rancor in her voice.

“Just do your (bleeping) job.” By which she meant—you’re a journalist, just do what you’re supposed to do: evaluate sources, the evidence, and write what you find.

“You’ll do fine.”

A few weeks later we hiked in the high desert in central Oregon for a couple days. She returned to Portland, and I returned to Spokane where, in early October 2021, I gave a scheduled talk to my men’s group at The Onion’s Area 51 Taphouse on North Division. The subject was UFOs.

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