I saw my first UFO in the late nineteen eighties, when I was in elementary school. In addition to being a child, I was not a perfect witness. I cannot pretend I was not already interested in paranormal phenomena. From the time I could read, I exhausted my school's small supernatural section (to the left of the library door, top shelf). If you needed a first grader to tell you about regional breeds of sasquatches and the theories behind hauntings, I was your boy. As I recall, few teachers engaged me on these topics more than once, aside from an art teacher who asked me to stop including the same almond-eyed aliens in every project I did.

If I had then told you I had seen a UFO, you would have been justified in patting me on my blond bowl cut and sending me on my way to scribble stories. I recognized the tropes then. I connected Bigfoots and UFOs before it was in vogue among researchers, long before I could articulate how the First World War influenced the Second.

The night I saw the UFO, my family was coming home from my cousin Phil's birthday party, placing this event on a weekend in the middle of December. He did not live far from us, a matter of a few miles. It was dark, but not too late. I looked out the left back window as we were just about to pass the Texaco plant, just before the A1 Deli. The object was a hundred feet above the top of the trees and houses, an enormous triangle with even rows of lights. I rolled down my window and stuck my head out, screaming my fear and delight. My parents shouted for me to get back inside and roll up the window, which I assumed was because they were justifiably terrified of the object overhead.

We were home in two minutes, maybe a little less. I was surely chattering about the object and my parents were just as surely ignoring my weirdness.

I may remember seeing a small column on the bottom of the front page of the Poughkeepsie Journal - I was a regular reader of the paper because I liked to look at the comics during breakfast - claiming the object was ultralights flying in formation. I knew even in elementary school this was unlikely.

There was a Hudson Valley UFO flap, though I did not know it at the time. It is rigorously detailed in a number of books, most notably Dr. J. Allen Hynek's Night Siege. There were thousands of sensible witnesses of the course of a few years, many of whom saw the object on the same night in different locations.

My sighting doesn't seem to exist among these. It had to occur after 1986 - I was not sufficiently literate prior to kindergarten and would not have had access to appropriate books - whereas the UFO flap faded a couple years earlier. I can find no mention of my UFO in any of the literature. Granted, there was no internet then and so no blogs or tweets of another witness to this object.

My parents do not remember. it is hard to believe that they would let that slip their minds, but I rationalize this away as them knowing I was an imaginative kid interested in the paranormal and thus so not believing my declaration that they wouldn't even bother looking up as I flooded the car with frigid air. To them, I might as well have been saying I saw a pterodactyl. Such would not be outside the realm of my storytelling, born writer that I am.

The recollection is firm as only a few dozen childhood memories are. I did not imagine, contrive, or dream the object. I expected the world to be changed the morning after my sighting because surely this would be the moment where the aliens made contact, only they didn't and I was unaware that I was evidently alone in seeing this until I mentioned it to my parents several years ago.

I do not know what this means for my sighting. It is easy to say it never happened, but that doesn't feel true. Like much in the realm of the paranormal, facts and observations do not cohabitate. I can prove none of this, not even by citing the anecdotes of someone else who had seen it. The literature talks of The Oz Factor, the sensation of unreality when one brushes against Forteana. Numerous books are written about how the experiencer has a different perception or memory than others around them. So much seems to occur in a liminal space just outside our objective reality, too like temporal lobe seizures and dreaming, which is unsatisfying ground to anyone who values verifiable observations.

This sighting proved nothing to the world and shows me only how difficult it is to prove an impossible claim from three decades ago. I don't expect or need anyone to believe me, though I wouldn't mind commiseration from those who have stared down a firm memory in solitude. I lean on suspicion when it comes to other's supernatural experiences. I want to do everything I can to disprove the more outrageous claims, so I can find those cases (or elements of cases) that are too sturdy for to be called eager misunderstandings.

I did not see anything else paranormal for a decade after the ship - and the couple glimpses afterward pale in comparison. I have known people who conversationally pile on unbelievable adventures in abandoned houses and on midnight roads. I researched through my childhood and adolescence before falling into an apprehensive skepticism. I can diagnose the likelier, entirely mundane geneses of most supernatural yarns (hypnogogia, camera flash in dusty rooms or rain, insects, bears, mange, hoaxers, pareidolia, recorded static, the ideomotor effect, misidentified planes, marsh gas, infrasound). This sighting was too vivid. I have too many personal referents to slide it away. I saw something, even if I can find no one else who did, and I persist in being unable to explain it because it gives me so little wiggle room to call it something else.

All of which should not be construed to say I believe it was creatures from another galaxy, as I believed at ten. It was simple something and no amount of study has satisfied me as to exactly what.

Soon in Xenology: Mummies. The interview.

last watched: Deadpool 2
reading: Abduction by John E. Mack
listening: Fiona Apple