All I photographed this year

"I have a question," says a teenager in my audience at the Pine Bush UFO Fair. "More of a hypothetical. Who do you think aliens would vote for?"

He and his friends immediately start snickering as though I am some drooling rube they are about to prod into admitting stupidity.

I lean toward the mic. "Marianne Williamson."

He sneers, annoyed that I didn't take the bait, possibly unaware of who Marianne Williamson is. I regret not saying Vermin Supreme, but this may not be the audience that would know the friendly fascist who wants a mandatory pony identification program and who wears a boot on his head.

He tries again when I am about to call on someone else. "Do you think aliens would vote for Joe Bid--"

Ah, he wants to say something pro-Trump. Aside from side-eyeing the police for apparent disinformation, my talk did not verge on the political.

"Aliens would be solidly third party," I tell my audience of maybe twenty.

The talk did not go well. This was in part because the speaker before me was a coordinator for MUFON. When his time ran out, he started to leave, saw me, then said, "I guess I'll take a few questions." He did for one-third of my time, touching on how the world will end in the near future, a prophecy that has never gone wrong for anyone.

I saw that a few crews were filming and live-streamed it, a video I will do my best never to see. I cannot say I wouldn't give my talk if I knew it would be recorded for posterity, but I might have dressed in something more presentable than a black beanie, v-neck t-shirt, and long hoodie. Earlier, I saw a filmmaker who has been recording the fair for at least the last five years. He mentioned that he used to be the only one interested, but now several others are filming my fair. I do not say that I do not think it is my fair, simply an event I regularly attend because I occasionally sell books here and otherwise practice keeping a straight face when people tell me things about their abductions and hauntings.

According to the sign out front held by a seven-foot-tall alien dummy, My talk was supposed to be on UFO Myth and Legends. I interpreted this as talking about the Hudson Valley UFO Flap, widely acknowledged as one of the most significant UAP mass sightings in recorded history. By the end of its two-year peak in 1986, over five thousand people had seen what was referred to as the Westchester Boomerang. For some reason, most media ignored it, though a compelling video of the object (one of the objects?) shows it remaining still in thirty-mile-an-hour winds. Had this happened in the era of cell phones, influencers would have beset the Hudson Valley, and it would have been recorded from every angle in 4K. The mid-1980s were a time of expensive consumer camcorders with the fidelity you'd now find in a baby's toy. It was written off as ultralights flying in formation, an explanation about as ludicrous as interstellar beings. It attracted the attention of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, astrophysicist and former governer debunker for Projects Sign/Grudge/Blue Book, before accepting that something inexplicable was occurring -- at least in rare circumstances, such as during the Hudson Valley UFO Flap. (Hynek developed most of the Close Encounters scale and is briefly in the movie of the same name. When the ship lands, you can see him smoking a pipe. He was paid a relative pittance of a few thousand dollars for advising and appearing.)

After the man from MUFON finished, half the crowd stood to leave, which did not offend me. All the recordings meant my audience was uncountable many over years. What did bother me was that many of those who remained began loudly chatting with one another. Not a surreptitious whisper but hearty guffaws. I had to pause the beginning of my talk -- already from necessity abbreviated -- until they decided to stop. I felt as I did before an unruly class when I substitute taught, though I did not have the luxury of writing the class off as a loss and reading once I gave them their assignment. My mother later suggests that I should have said, "Aliens are never this rude when I try to talk to them about humans."

I muddled through the panel as best I could but was rattled and did not perform as usual. Given that this was a UFO fair in the Hudson Valley and they had just been interrogating the man from MUFON about the galactic brotherhood, I was perplexed that, when I asked if they knew about the Hudson Valley UFO, I was met with blank stares. I delved into the UFO sightings in Pine Bush. Many seemed equally baffled why I was mentioning this topic at the Pine Bush UFO Fair.

I did not expect an audience of believers, as I stated when starting that my interest boiled down to "I know this information, but I find most of it fascinating and entertaining; it is not something in which to invest religious belief." I sense that some were here not to listen to speakers but to gawk at freaks. When I did my research for Artificial Gods, I did not have some element of this? Of course not, but I was stealthy about it and found more value in listening now and teasing later. I would not have attended such an event with a mind to heckle. What would be the point? The speakers will do a fine job proving themselves silly without your chortles upon being egged on -- and I include myself in this. I assured them that I would begin cleaving as close as I could to reason and research but would get weirder the longer the speech went on, ending on mentioning that UFOs and the assorted phenomena (including Bigfoot) could be projections of the Collective Unconscious and initiatory events, all stemming from the same source.

My talk was, however, something rehearsed, not off the cuff. I had facts and quotes, several of which would have been amusing stingers if anyone cared. I did get a few laughs where I intended, but standing before a faintly hostile crowd was nerve-wracking.

The night before the fair was a series of speeches from people who have made this field their life or those who are the niece of people important to Ufology. (I am not casting aspersions at the latter speaker. She has more of a right to speak on the topic than I do. All I did was attend a few meetings and sky watches, then wrote it into a novel.) Tickets there were $45 a piece. That audience would have been composed of more people interested in suspending their disbelief long enough to listen.

I don't need or want believers in Ufology. I want people who can enjoy what I am trying to give them, which is a mildly comedic take on bizarre material. One of the best books on the subject, Night Siege, is dull and repetitive, which is what one would want in a credible examination. If every other story was a different brand of inventive lunacy, you could write it all off as attention seekers. Into the tenth unrelated teacher or pilot saying, "I stopped on the road with other drivers and looked at a lighted triangle the size of a football field," one feels that maybe they saw something. I mentioned Silent Invasion, where Ellen Crystall thought Bigfoots were the foot soldiers of at least five species of aliens (including a 1950s-style robot with antennae) who were constructing a mining operation under the ground where my audience sat. Still, I made sure to give that relative weight it deserved. I bemoaned that, of Crystall's supposed thousands of pictures, only a few are reproduced in the book and in black and white.

I am not now built for these sorts of events if I ever was. I have the writer's affliction of wanting to be left alone with my materials to work. People are welcome to buy my books – I would prefer it, as I have 150 by the end of the event -- but I don't want to sit in a tent under an occasionally spitting sky and watch people pass me by. I sell (or give on consignment) twelve books at a gross of $90 and a net of probably $20. I spend $34 on food to keep Amber from revolting against me.

Amber was in no mood to tolerate waking early on their day off to accompany me. I told her a few times that they didn't need to. Getting the tent up on my own and managing bathroom breaks would have been a little tricky, but I could have handled it. They are grumpy for the first hour of setup, suggesting we discard the cloth banner they bought me years ago because there was a dime-sized pale tan stain on the final H of my name. I assured them that no one would notice and we would still pin it up. They accused me of forgetting the tablecloths, packed in one of the boxes of books, and left there since the last time I did this fair. Then, they said I should have washed these. When they saw I had packed ten of each book in two boxes, they were annoyed I would undo their hard work of organizing the four boxes of these under our bed. I assured them I would be only too happy to reorganize them when I unpacked since I would sell books and wanted to count them anyway. When I accidentally misgendered them once, they were cross, though I have only just started to shift from female pronouns to nonbinary ones; mistakes will happen, and I do not think they would have noticed it if they had not been awake at 6:20.

As always, after giving a talk, my greatest urge is to hide in the quiet dark for half an hour, which is tricky at an open-air fair when I have another hour and a half before I can pack up. (I see a few booths shutter around this time, leaving empty spaces on the street, but I do not have this luxury.)

A woman comes to my tent half an hour later and says she enjoyed my talk. This doesn't seem right, as I did not enjoy my talk and cannot fathom why it would be different for her. She asks which of my books is about my experiences. None of them are explicitly about them -- there is a chapter in Holidays with Bigfoot and Artificial Gods is a fictionalization of my research in Pine Bush. She says I should write one. I agree that I should, but I haven't. She buys Artificial Gods, which is probably the right call.

last watched: Master of None
reading: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell