Journal of a UFO Investigator Read Free Page A

Jeff said.
    â€œDon’t be mad—”
    But he’d hung up. I stood, receiver in hand, and felt my heart going thumpa-thumpa-thump , the way it does in sentimental books. Only this was for real, very unpleasant, and I wanted it to stop, to be as I’d been before I saw the UFO, before I knew there were things in the sky besides moon and planets and stars, airplanes and birds, the ordinary stuff a little kid might know. Once or twice I heard my father yell, “Will you turn off that goddamn light and get to sleep?” It had to have been my imagination. My father wasn’t even home—I could not hear him mumbling in his sleep from the bed he’d set up for himself in the den, because he couldn’t stand lying next to my mother anymore—and besides I hadn’t turned on any light. I hung up the receiver. After a few minutes I lifted it again. With trembling fingers I dialed Rosa Pagliano’s telephone number.

CHAPTER 2
    TWENTY-NINE DAYS LATER CAME THE BREAK-IN. IT WAS FRIDAY night, January 18, 1963. My parents and I had gone to Trenton, to my grandmother’s, to eat her dinner in honor of the Sabbath, which she had kept on observing in the religious way after my grandfather died, long after my father and even my mother had stopped doing that kind of thing. It’s a twenty-minute drive from Kellerfield, Pennsylvania, where we live.
    We got back after eleven. My father was the first one in the house.
    â€œAll right,” he said. “Which of you two left the door hanging wide open, so anybody in the goddamn world can just walk in and help themselves?”
    It wasn’t me. When we left home, I’d helped my mother out to the car; she was bundled up against the frigid night in two sweaters and her heaviest winter coat and a blanket draped around her. I made sure she didn’t slip on the ice patches in the carport. My father locked up after us. Or, it seemed, didn’t lock up.
    I was about to point this out. But then my father switched on the kitchen light, and we had other things to think about besides whose fault it was.
    My mother took one look, let out a weak scream, and shuffled off as fast as she could move. “I can’t look!” I heard her say. The kitchen was ransacked. We didn’t dare see what they’d done in the living room. We followed her to her bedroom. It was the same there as in the kitchen: all the drawers open, contents dumped on the floor. She collapsed onto her bed, sobbing, wailing.
    â€œDon’t they know I’m sick ?” she blurted out between sobs.
    Burglars should have known not to break into the home of a sick woman. My father stood looking at her, shaking his head, an expression of disgust on his smooth, handsome face, as if at a loss to imagine why having your house broken into should have that effect on anyone. Or maybe I was the one who felt disgusted. He hurried out to the kitchen to phone Sy Goldfarb, our family doctor, to find out what he should do in case this brought on another heart attack. Meanwhile I went to my own room to see what was gone from there. And, at first, was relieved.
    My drawers, like my mother’s, had been emptied onto the floor. Hardly anything, though, seemed to be missing. Later, when things calmed down, we did an inventory and found practically nothing had been stolen. The burglars had even left the TV in the living room, which surely any thief would have wanted. It wasn’t clear how they’d gotten in. My father insisted he’d locked the door, and no windows had been broken into.
    The only thing taken was my briefcase, out of my closet, with a chunk of my UFO files—my report on my sighting the month before, the first three chapters of the book Jeff Stollard and I were writing together—inside it.
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    â€œSo now they can read what you wrote about them,” Jeff said to me. He handed me a sheaf of crinkly, smeary onionskin papers with CHAPTER 3: THREE MEN