My parents were fairly wealthy and I had a comfortable and enjoyable childhood. The neighborhood children were all very nice young Christian raised children and we played football in fall, basketball in winter, and baseball in spring and summer. I was 11 years old.
The leader of our group of boys was 2 years older than I and his name was John Wilzewski. He is now a Reverend in South Dakota and when I called him last year he asked me if I thought that the Starship beings were evil. I don't know why he asked me that, but he knows that they are real because of what he saw in 1963. By the way, when my parents put me to bed I slept consistently every night from the time that they put me to bed until the time that my mother would wake me up in the morning. One night I awoke to an extremely loud electromagnetic humming from just barely over the roof of the house. I could have screamed and my mother would not have heard me. It was that loud.
I lay back on the double bed in the guest room with my arms all the way open on either side and just listened absolutely fascinated with the sound. Then I wondered what time it was and rolled over to look at my wind up alarm clock. It was one o'clock in the morning .......
Then, again, I lay back and listened for a few seconds. After laying there and listening, I decided that I wanted to get up, go to the window, and see if I could see any lights.
I then tried to get up, but when I did I found myself paralyzed from the neck down and could only move my head forward twice in an attempt to get up. Almost instantaneously, my consciousness was blacked out.
The next thing I know, my consciousness comes on like a light bulb and I'm able to get up and go to the window, but as I'm rising, I can hear the Starship rise above the house and as I'm moving towards the window it suddenly heads off to the east over the Wisconsin River at an extremely high rate of acceleration ..........
The next morning at the breakfast table I asked if anyone had heard anything peculiar the night before. My mother said yes, that she had thought she heard a sound like the electric sewage pump in the back yard burning out.
I said that I could hear the sound coming from right over the house. My father said sarcastically with raised eyebrows, "Well maybe it was a flying saucer....."
That morning, I went outside and kept my eye open for any power and light people fixing a transformer, but there were none and I really knew there wouldn't be. I even went out back to see if the sewage pump was still working. It was.
I, also, looked at the roof of the house. The UHF/VHF television antenna on the chimney was bent over at 45 degrees.
That afternoon, I went out to play ball with the kids. We were throwing the ball back and forth, warming up for the game, when John Wilzewski came running at top speed all the way from his house to the baseball diamond. He was out of breath and called us excitedly into a huddle.
He turned to me and my brother Dave and said, "You're not going to believe this Rich and Dave, but I saw a flying saucer above your house last night!!!!"
All the kids immediately started Oooooing and Ahhhing over it, but I got suspicious and nervous and asked John if anyone else had seen it. He said his mother saw it, too.
Then he began to tell us the story.
He had been preparing for bed in his bedroom which faced the baseball diamond and my parents house to the south of his house. He suddenly glanced out of his bedroom window and saw a disk with an orange glow coming from the bottom of it.
It was off to the west of my parents house and was perfectly motionless.
John got excited and ran down the hall to get his mother. She hurriedly came into his bedroom and looked out the window and it was still there, perfectly motionless.
They both watched it for a while when suddenly and very quickly it veered off to the east, over my parent's house and then down first street going southeast behind my parents house, quickly accelerated and disappeared. And that was that ..........
My life as a young boy about to reach the time all young men wait for, the sudden change into adulthood, went on without anything unusual happening. Every morning we prepared for school. My father went to the office. My brothers went to school at their designated times. My mother fixed breakfast and lunch and generally ran the household with the cleaning lady coming in to do the difficult chores at a good rate of pay. No one knew.
The Starships, had come into my life and no one knew......
The world was in turmoil in the South with the Martin Luther King Marches, the campuses were in turmoil with the Vietnam War and the draft age at eighteen before you were considered an adult. With this direct threat to one's existence and personal life, radical changes were being attempted and the general atmosphere was one of; who are these people to tell us what our lives will be.
But I was aware of only two things:
Well as I think about it and what my life then became and what the people that I was surrounded with, who all behaved exactly the same as if they came from the same Satanic mould; did either out of complacency, personal and collective neglect, or simply a "fuck you" arrogance; I am amazed at the beautiful and romantic music that comes from these same people.
I do not think that it comes from their personal souls. I have observed, as a silent observer, that most of the people who think things are 'cool' do not have the vaguest idea what they are listening to and even the writers do not have the vaguest idea what they have written and sung.
I have also found, as a silent observer, that the people; all of them; rely on the system; or suffer under the system and never do anything outrageous like get together and rise up against 'It'. They allow the system to define them and then rationalize the rest. If they are suffering they almost think that they deserve it, or they gallantly go on with whatever they are given by the system without really questioning it......at all......even when no one respects them and all they get is shit. And the really funny thing about it all is that I find myself rationalizing other people's behavior also by saying that there is nothing I can do about it. I'm stuck with this shit, there is nothing I can do about it, so I must carry on as best I can.
The eighties, the seventies. The sixties burst for a bit. When we thought we were directly threatened, we questioned everything, but soon the resignation set in, when the draft was stopped. Then everything went dead. The rock died. Disco became popular. Pleasure for the elite, and we are all going to get there someday, at least the majority of us, and the sixties were 'cool', and long hair on rock musicians is also 'cool.'
We believe that we are Americans and that we American human beings are blessed by God. We are God's Gift to the rest of the underdeveloped world. Even if we are left behind by the rest of us, we belong.
And the really goofy part of this is that in the nineties, with the Russian Communists out of the way and speaking no evil, our job is to sell the rest of the world on this one piece of knowledge. And the really incredible thing is that the rest of the world, most of them, believes it and imitates us over and above their own ancient and priceless cultures and beliefs.
