Everywhere I go I find a pal

Peter Weinschenk, Editor, The Record-Review

I saw an Unidentified Flying Object on Sunday afternoon.

The time was 3:45 p.m. The place was CTH N near Cardinal Lane, town of Cassel, as I headed west from an afternoon of cross country skiing at Nine Mile Forest.

I saw the object as it reflected sunlight in the northwest sky. It was headed speedily to the west.

The object looked like a large, silver-metallic bar of Dove soap. It didn’t look like an airplane or a jet. There were no contrails.

As unusual as the object was, I focused on it, watching it travel through the cloudless, blue sky. It was maybe five miles away from me.

I returned my gaze to the road, in order to stay safe while driving, and looked back into the sky. It was gone. I searched every corner of the sky, trying to find the object but there was nothing.

I thought this was very strange. If it were a commercial jet or even a military airplane, I should have been able to see the plane one more time before it disappeared over the horizon.

I continued west on CTH N. It finally dawned on me just what happened. “Oh no,” I told myself. “I just saw a UFO.”

I am not a person even vaguely interested in the supernatural or conspiracies. I have never seen a UFO before or thought I did. I don’t imagine things. Yes, just like everyone else, I see a snake on the ground in the woods before I realize it is a curved stick. And, yes, I’ll mistake shimmering sand in the desert for a pool of water. But, basically, everything I have seen in my life has been there.

Returning home, I told my family. The eyebrows went up. We rehearsed all of the available options. A plane without contrails. Water vapor. A falling satellite. My wife, Susan, checked the flight schedule from Central Wisconsin Airport. There were no flights from that airport that should have been in the air at that time.

Since then, I have wondered what in the world I might have seen. Was it an ultra-fastmoving man-made thing? Or a flying saucer from another planet? Or a huge metallic bar of Dove soap?

An experience like this works on a guy. For better or ill, it opens up a whole new can of possibilities. One starts to speculate. The imagination rushes in.

That said, let me just add that I am just going with the flow on this one. If I saw a plane, that’s cool. If I saw a Martian spacecraft, well, that’s cool, too.

The universe is a wild and wacky place.

My Sunday experience sparked my curiosity. I would love to identify my Unidentified Flying Object. Now, that would be something.