We had high winds here the other night, gale-force blasts that buffeted walls, rattled window panes and swept up anything that was not tied down. One of the casualties in this big blow (imagine the twister scene from The Wizard of Oz - Miss Gulch riding her bicycle past my window, cackling evilly) was the lid to my garbage can. Pickup was Monday morning, the can was left sitting empty by the alley, and the wind storm hit before I had a chance to retrieve it. When I stepped outside the next day to survey the damage, I realized it had vanished. I found the can about a half block away, blown partially into a neighbor's open garage. The lid, however, remained M.I.A.
This caused no small amount of frenzy. The older and more domestic I get (read: lamer and middle aged), the more I bristle at petty annoyances. They say it's supposed to be the other way around; the older you get, the less you sweat the small stuff. But as I age, I find myself able to handle the big crises with a previously unknown valiance, while the everyday stresses - no milk for my cereal, dead batteries, computer crashes, trash can lids nowhere to be found - become more and more intolerable. I need everything just so, everything in its place. Any deviation from what's become - for better or worse - my routine, my way of doing things, becomes a little flickering flame of stress. I wanted to go looking for that damn lid (convinced the functionality of my garbage can would be diminished ten-fold without it), but was already late for work. I had no choice but resign myself to the fact that it would have to wait.
That evening, I conducted a more extensive search. I suspected, judging from what neighbors were saying about the severity of the storm (straight line winds with gusts upwards of 60 miles per hour were reported), the lid probably landed two towns over, but I was determined to make sure it wasn't somewhere I could find it, because a garbage can without a lid is like a deck of 50 playing cards.
Right...?
After completing a full sweep of the alley to no avail, I reluctantly returned to my back yard, and just as I was about to go inside an unusual movement in the darkening sky caught my attention.
I spotted a small white light crossing the southern heavens, where numerous stars had begun to twinkle their way out of the indigo. But this was much brighter than any star, more like Venus on a really good night. This alone made it hard to ignore (there are precious few things in the night sky that appear brighter or as-bright-as the beloved morning star); but what really caught my eye was its high rate of speed as it made its way across the sky toward the east.
This was no aircraft, I knew that much. There was no sound, no slightly delayed rumble of massive jet engines, no whine of a propellar decending in pitch, no evidence of a contrail darkly visible in the last light of day, no red beacons blinking distantly. Just a bright white point of light, and a swift, silent glide taking it across the entire sky in under three minutes. My eyes widened. For a moment I started thinking - daring to wonder if - I was witnessing a U.F.O.
Over the years I have occasionally 'seen things' in the sky that could not be easily explained, but I've never allowed myself to get swept up in any of it. I have always tried to view the world as practically and logically as possible. Doing so has made skepticism a natural discipline for me.
In a way, the term 'UFO' itself is a kind of automatic debunker. U.F.O. stands for 'Unidentified Flying Object', which implies that if you don't know what you're seeing, if anything in the sky is at any time unidentified, , it is technically a UFO, even if it turns out to be a weather balloon or a flock of birds. The acronym possesses no intrinsic connection to little green men or flying saucers or anything of the sort, and therefore really has no business taking on any of the mythology surrounding the flying saucer mania of the last 50 years. If everyone kept this in mind, I believe it would help keep knee-jerk reactions and the occasional hysteria in check whenever something strange - but ultimately explainable - is spotted.
But nobody thinks like that. People are, especially when it comes to space - that proverbial 'final frontier' - knee-jerk and hysterical. And the more we learn about the cosmos (and indeed, it seems we've learned more in the last ten years, certainly since the advent of the Hubble Telescope, then in the preceding fifty), the more obsessed we are with the possibility of alien life, probably because the more we learn the more likely it seems that we will discover it somewhere. It's no longer impossible to imagine life in other galaxies, nor are people who believe as quick to be marginalized. I'm not sheepish about it at all, really. When I look at a photograph of a galaxy far, far away, I see glittering cities of technology, complex societies. And I'd go so far as to suggest that sometime in the next fifty years - within my lifetime - 'first contact' of some kind will be made.
So when I first spotted this bright and clearly odd object moving across the sky at an incredible (impossible?) rate of speed, making no noise whatsoever, I admit for a moment, just for a moment, I was intrigued, even a little excited. What the hell was I seeing? It could not be easily explained. Were my eyes deceiving me? It couldn't be moving that fast could it? But there it was, clearly visible to my naked eye, shooting right overhead.
I wanted to call the kids out to have a look, or maybe dash inside to grab my video camera, believing in those few moments that what I was seeing might be history-making, the first genuine UFO encounter, but the object was moving so fast I knew it would be gone by the time I returned. Instead, I stood motionless in what had become a chilly evening, determined to scrutinize the thing, to discover through heavy gazing the answer to this sudden riddle. Like Bill Murray on Saturday Night Life once, I stood with head thrown back, mouth agape, and muttered, 'What the hell is that?!' until it had traveled the entire width of the sky and disappeared over the treeline to the east.
When it was out of sight, I went inside and did what anyone would do in the modern age: consult the Internet. Part of me wishes I'd left well enough alone, because it did not take me long to identify, beyond a reasonable doubt, my 'unidentified flying object.'
It was the International Space Station.
I felt disappointed, and a little sheepish for giving so much rein to my imagination. But as I read on, I became intrigued and excited once again. I knew about the space station, but never any real details; nor had I ever seen it, or any man-made object (outside of satellites) in the heavens at night. I know they're there of course, but never sought them out, and never had something jump out at me like this.
The International Space Station (ISS) is a joint project between 17 countries that began in 1998. It should be completed in 2010, and is expected to be in continual operation for most of the next decade.
In a low-Earth orbit 240 miles up, it is currently 191 feet long, 146 feet wide, and its speed truly is astonishing. The bright white light I saw cross the sky was traveling at approximately 17,000 miles per hour. It makes approximately 15 full orbits around our planet each day.
To that end, ISS flyovers are not all that unusual, but you must be in the right place at the right time, and conditions have to be just so. Like the moon, it does not emit its own light but is merely reflecting sunlight, which means its apparent position relative to the sun must be conducive to reflecting down to Earth. Likewise, the position of the sun relative to the space station must also be just right.
Therefore (and this is what makes my encounter so cool), I feel fortunate to have been granted such a chance viewing, and an unobstructed one at that. Not only did the ISS and the sun have to be in the right place at the right time, but I had to be in the right place at the right time. Any other night, I would likely have been inside when it passed (it's flown overhead many times before, without my ever knowing), cooking dinner or doing chores or playing with the kids or what have you. But there I happened to be, in that narrow three minute window of opportunity, with the sun positioned just right and moreover, the skies above me crystal clear.
There was something almost kismet about it, and it brightened my evening.
More than a decade ago, the Heaven's Gate cult committed mass suicide, believing they would be transported to a 'higher plane' of existence hiding in a spaceship in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet that was making an appearance in the spring of 1997.
Beyond the tragic senselessness of this act, lies a deeper and more important consideration. I said it at the time (to anyone I could get to listen), and it still holds true today, maybe more than ever: the incredible complexity and grandeur of our universe - be it that which is out amidst the cosmos we have yet to fully comprehend (comets shrieking through the inner solar system, galaxies dying and being reborn, supernovas exploding in an instant with more energy than can be found in all the creation around them) or the comfortably terrestrial pleasures we understand fully, that possess no speed, no power, no new enlightenment, but are no less fantastic (the deer that raid the apples in our back yard when no one's around, waking up to the moon smiling through my window, or to thunder, or to snowfall) - our place in it, and perhaps most importantly our ability to discover and enjoy it, IS the higher plane.
And we should all be endeavoring to travel to that higher plane whenever we can. Doing so makes the petty annoyances, including and especially lost trash can lids, pale by comparison.
Don't wait for a chance encounter, a trip to the 'higher plane': visit http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/index.html to find out when the ISS will be flying over your head.
