The Moonlit Path

I always wanted to be an Astronaut when I was a kid. I had a growing fascination for space and humankind's collective desire to explore the unknown. I would stare into the sky for countless hours at night, mesmerized by the otherworldliness that somehow felt so close yet so far away. The millions of stars spangled in the sky were like tiny pinholes upon a sheet of black construction paper draped above the quiet suburb where I had lived, hiding undiscovered secrets behind its total blackness. Almost every evening, probably since I was ten years old, I would direct these fixations into the open expanse of the universe above and wonder, sometimes out loud, whispering softly: is there anybody out there? And often times I would answer myself: there must be.

The first time I had actually seen some sort of alien-like phenomenon was when I was twelve. I remember while staring into the sky one summer evening as I was playing with a handful of robot action figures on my front porch, a bright ball of light appeared slightly above where the sky abruptly hits the horizon. The oval shape radiated brightly in the distance and hovered in a particular spot for at least five minutes. The brightness fluctuated as it stood suspended in mid-air until finally it drifted sideways, a few feet to the right and then disappeared. At first perhaps I thought it might have been an airplane or some sort of military aircraft, but a few seconds later, a second light appeared in the same exact place the previous light was and once again slowly drifted to the right and disappeared. I wasn't sure what it was, but I knew what I saw was not "natural"--and it terrified me. I ran in the house throwing my Transformers into a pile on the ground, slamming the door behind me and headed straight for my parent's room. My mother, laying on her side underneath a thin blanket and eating soft batch cookies from a package of Almost Home, was hypnotized by the television set and immersed in an episode of Jeopardy. "Who is--hey, stop running in the house!" she yelled, looking at me in that firm parental scowl. I nodded submissively while catching my breath and slipped under the covers next to her in comfort that she would protect me. I never said a word about what I saw, not to her or anyone else for that matter.

Until I was about nineteen or twenty, I would wake up from mid-sleep to visions of grey, shiny-skinned figures with triangulated faces, bright hospital-like lights and strange noise that resembled whispers and clanking of metallic "tools." During that period of my life I was thoroughly convinced I had been abducted by alien life-forms--probed, tested and experimented on--until I came to the realization that those horrifying visions were just interpreted hallucinations from a disorder I had been suffering from called Sleep Paralysis.

As an adult, my condition has significantly diminished to once or twice a month, and even though I know exactly what it is that I am facing, I still frighten myself on occasion. To this day I continue to lose myself in the night sky, contemplating the possibilities of whether there is some sort of intelligent life-form existing beyond the infinite boundaries of the universe. While there is no physical evidence, I cannot deny the feasibility of such a thing. If we humans are here today in this world, intelligent as we are, it would be arrogant and ignorant of us to think that we are the only ones. If we are here now, then so are they (wherever they may be.)