"I hate to bring this up because I enjoy having you as a friend."
"That's not a great way to start a conversation," I told my running partner.
These extraordinary days have amplified otherwise routine dialogue, giving reason to think and comment in ways not usual to our previously patterned lives, I thought. This ought to be good.
We eased past the rear of the Clinton Library, turning east on a sidewalk framed by magnolias. The sun rose through wispy gray clouds and we labored in the humidity. I fought the urge to move closer than social distancing allowed, then wondered if six feet was enough space, depending on what he was about to say.
My running partner is well read, extremely smart, and thinks things through. We had already covered the November election and the economy, wearing masks, reopening schools, and the possibility of a covid-19 vaccine. But he starts this conversation with fear it'll end our friendship. I braced.
"I'm worried about UFOs."
Not what I expected. I considered ignoring him. Biting my lower lip, I turned my head to the green dumpster sitting oblong in the path just off the library campus. It stunk. The dumpster seemed out of place in that setting, just as my running partner's comment did.
"Why would you possibly be worried about UFOs?"
He shook his head. "I just think it's impossible that we're the only sentient life forms in the universe. A couple of weeks ago, senators demanded a report on UFOs. Seems like things are heating up."
A pandemic. Murder hornets. A Saharan dust cloud. Now I have to worry about this?
In mid-June, Sen. Marco Rubio, as part of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote a report calling for the federal government to create a unified response to UFOs and to answer a few questions, such as potential threats posed by these "unidentified aerial phenomena."
The conversation took me back to my paper-route days as an early teen. You see a lot of weird things in the darkness of 4:30 in the morning. It's a between time that hovers in the middle of totally asleep and fully awake. It's as if weirdness waits for that crossover to materialize.
My brother and I saw passed-out drunks we thought were dead (thankfully aroused by quick toe jabs to the ribs). We saw suspicious cars roaring out of the darkness as if chased and then quickly disappearing. But the deep black of the early morning sky was always worth watching. We'd see shooting stars streak marble-sized across the horizon. We caught sight of satellites or shuttles poking along on clear mornings.
Sometimes, the atmosphere around us would become really still, unmoving, as if a pause button were hit, as if the weather had instantly changed. Eerie silence followed. I remember the strange feeling at those moments that something wasn't right.
There was a series of mornings that I remember very clearly and still can't explain. My brother and I would walk from our house up a steep road, all the while heavily laden with bags of newspapers. He was in charge; I was the second-in-command of our two-person outfit. One morning, we crested the hill and noticed a strange cloud-like object hovering on the horizon in front of us.
"What's that?" he asked, pointing.
I stared at it a good while. "I don't know, some kind of weird storm cloud or something."
"It has lights."
Looking again, there was indeed a light on the underside of the cloud. It didn't flash, it just beamed. "Is that the top of a house?" I offered.
"No, it's not a house. Have you ever seen a house in the sky? Idiot."
We studied the unmoving cloud for a few minutes, then shrugged it off and plodded along, plopping newspapers on front porches and forgetting about the cloud as we made the big circle home.
The next morning, we climbed the hill, and both stopped dead in our tracks. The hair on my neck tingled. The cloud was there again, in the exact same spot.
It was rounded, light gray on top, darker in the creases. The light was still there as well. It didn't move, sitting in the sky exactly as the previous morning, as if watching us. We tried to look at it from different angles, but nothing changed. It was a cloud. A cloud that didn't move. It gave us the creeps.
The cloud was not visible in the daytime but it was there the next morning. I told a couple of my friends and, though the early morning paper route often intrigued them, they made fun of me. On the next morning, my brother and I hustled to the top of the hill and the horizon was empty. The strange cloud had moved on.
I remembered those mornings where the weather seemed to pause, seemed to have a different feel that would pass suddenly. I remembered the mornings that gave me the creeps because something unseen seemed to be lurking. I remembered all that after talking to my running partner.
Not long ago, the U.S. Navy released footage of fighter pilots chasing what they described as a white Tic Tac over the Pacific Ocean, just west of San Diego. The footage is incredible. Now, Senator Rubio wants a threat assessment.
A few months ago, I would have punched my running partner in the shoulder, made fun of his concern about UFOs, and lay a plan for scaring him. But now, after seeing things I never thought possible, never saw or heard of before in Arkansas--a pandemic, a Saharan dust cloud--I decided to hold judgment.
If nothing else, these extraordinary days have taught me the unbelievable can be made real and conversations about UFOs seem, well, normal.
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Steve Straessle, whose column appears every other Saturday, is the principal of Little Rock Catholic High School for Boys. You can reach him at sstraessle@lrchs.org.