Trust No One
(whose wife made this mask)

I receive a message from Dawn, the director of my local library. The crux is that a man had come in, asking if she knew anyone involved with UFOs. I've worked in libraries enough to have fielded my share of crackpot questions. Once, I had to endure a long tirade from a woman with notorious mental illnesses who insisted that Stephen King had stolen the plot of his book Dreamcatcher from her thoughts, which I could not convince her was beyond the capabilities of a public library to prove.

But Dawn knows me. I have given borderline credulous talks on the subject for the library. Serendipitously, he asked the correct librarian, one who could point him to an excellent resource who is under-stimulated enough from the pandemic to indulge this.

I shoot him an email, giving him the most neutral bona fides (researched and wrote a novel about the Pine Bush phenomena, Artificial Gods). I don't wish to admit my personal, paranormal experience to him, mainly because I have little. He schedules a phone call that Saturday.

I am no fan of talking on the phone, though I grant the necessity of it in this situation. We can only go so far via email, though I am considerably less anxious about typing my theories than saying them.

I know nothing about Pete, having not bothered googling him until after the call (there are several by his name who I can pull up, none of whom are definitively him). He had responded in a course, cogent way but also used an email address specific to his project. He may not, in short, be who he is.

This is not the typical paranoia of government surveillance and Men in Black. (I doubt I am interesting enough for them, and they wouldn't much need a file on me as much as an exhausted intern who skims my journal; I have done all the compiling for them.) I respect a burner address on a site made only for that. This is a world of the sometimes unhinged. Best to have barriers in place, something I do not have as an author. (I hope this will be allowed to persist. Who wants to do the work of being cautious?)

He speaks in a confident baritone as I pace my home, earphones in, trying to keep my energy even. He has no specific plan for this research except that it might help those going through similar issues. (He does not espouse to be an abductee or much of an experiencer.) I know well how these things can overtake someone, propelling them in a direction without them knowing why.

"I don't know if I want to write a book," Pete says. "I don't have to tell you how much work that is."

I bite my lip, not offering to write this book, even though I could without too much struggle. I find it easy and fun to write ten thousand word think pieces about a talking mongoose.

We appear to see eye to eye on the phenomena. Something is happening, but not how it portrays itself; it may not be benevolent, or not in a way we would call benevolent; people are genuinely traumatized by the experience, no matter the objective reality. He is not interested in the UFOs themselves -- or he is, but not under the aegis of this project. Gods know, the topic is well-covered elsewhere. He wants to interview people who have encountered the phenomena in the Hudson Valley ten years or more ago and see how it has affected them. He does not seem disappointed that my most significant potential sighting for which I have anchors does not match up with any other sighting; too late to have been part of the Great Hudson Valley UFO Flap. Also, I was younger than ten, already interested in the topic, and none of the other people who would have been there witnessed anything. He suggests that it might have been a sighting meant only for me, in which case the aliens -- for want of a better term -- are indeed tricksters. This is a word I want him to have ringing in his head.

Best of all, I casually name a few people in the phenomenological ufology world, and he doesn't hesitate to call them debunked or untrustworthy, matching my opinion. He also is at least comfortable with the fact that I know at least as much as he does in this realm, mentioning that I read Jung's book on the subject and pronounced it a little redundant because it is the foundation of what everyone else says beyond a superficial level of the experience.

He asks if I know anyone else who would want to be involved. After learning that he has run into the Pine Bush people, I admit that I do not have promising leads for him. By its nature, most people wouldn't want to acknowledge or admit that they saw something anomalous in the sky, let alone confess to having been affected by it long term.

Given the breadth of related subjects we cover, he seems level-headed and well-read on ufological thought. Though he is not local (so, from whence his interest?), he says that he will likely come to the Pine Bush UFO Fair in June and would like to interview me in more depth that weekend.

Depending on the project, I could be something of a liability because I do know so much about all of this. I am not some person off whom UFOs have glanced. I would not be the one to trust to be untainted. When I went on sky-watches with the Pine Bush people, I saw airplanes over an airport where they assured me cloaked UFOs wore the mask of our technology.

UFOs are, often enough, less unidentified objects but an initiation to greater mysteries. Given what happens to some people who delve into them and how it sometimes becomes a defining factor of one's life despite one's wishes, it would be wise to look the other way. The phenomena may not let you, but best try.

last watched: The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window
reading: Guns, Germs, and Steel