Sure as shooting

When I was in high school, oh, probably the 10th grade, two upper class men approached me and asked me to meet them on a weekend. At the time I was sort of pleased that really mature guys outside of my own classmates had noticed me.

The house I was riding my motorcycle to was on the other side of the Chenango River, which passes, like a main circuit cable, through Broome County, NY. So I crossed the Chenango Bridge, arrived, and after being offered and accepting a cold can of soda they explained that they had heard that I had interest in UFOs.

While the area is nothing like the seemingly endless suburbs surrounding Los Angeles, where I lived, later worked, and where I was nearly killed, I was curious about how and why they sought me out. Looking at a Venn diagram of our shared friends, I saw no overlap.

Anyway, while I didn’t meet their criteria for a true blue UFO believer willing to go on the stump, it did serve to jump start my curiosity in the subject. I ended up reading a ton of books on the “UFO phenomena."

Alas, later as a cop operating a black and white car through those monotonous days of repetitive sunshine, few clouds and gorgeous sunsets, I next heard about UFOs when I interviewed a female subject on A—a Ave., or somewhere near there, er, anyway close to San Vicente Boulevard which ends near a Schwab's Drugstore. Late into that particular night watch, we got a call to,”See the woman. Unkown trouble. Code 2.” Soon after arriving that inevitable woman told me and my rookie partner, who was fresh faced and right out of the police academy--the kinda' guy who daubs his necktie repeatedly with Scotch Tape wrapped around his fingers, sticky side out, to pick up every errant piece of dandruff, that she had been accosted by Moon men while she worked in her garden late that evening.

I mean, why would you pick midnight to weed your vegetables? Was she expecting a visit from someone?

So I asked her how she knew they were Moon men. She explained, “They told me they were."

"Did you see anything else?," I asked.

Yes, she said, I did. "I saw a 200 foot silver spaceship covered with flashing lights and hovering right over that fence. Right there!"

Okay, I said, “We’ll keep an eye out for it. If anything happens, please call us. I can’t guarantee it’ll be us, however. But it is our beat."

When we got back in the car, the kid wanted to put out an immediate APB on that silver ship saying that we had a duty to protect her. "If you want to do it I can’t stop you,” I said quietly while turning to face him, "but it may not reflect well on your future promotability when you radio that hokum in." You see, once this information is broadcast, it can’t be later denied or ever re-called. And it’ll reside for an eon on the tapes spinning on the huge bank of tape recorders with their flashing lights, huge rolls of tape and the needles on their VU meters dancing around. They resembled something out of Cape Canaveral or the busy bridge of the Starship Enterprise (NGC-1701, which was, by the way, my first badge number). So he didn’t.

Looking back on this caper in hindsight, perhaps he should grabbed that microphone with both hands and hollered out that zany APB (the infamous Be On The Lookout for…) because it might have averted the upcoming morass the kid would sink in.

Some months later, I found myself as the only cop at his wedding. Very curious, I thought, because he had invited a number of fellows he had ridden with to the ceremony. You always invite guys you ride with or have ridden with to any major communal caper you might put on. You know like that inaugural swim in a new hot tub, a new house, the new Chevrolet Corvette you can’t really afford but you’re counting on over time earnings when you crack and testify in a huge new case. But, no, you wouldn’t you'd find yourself TDY to the day watch to minimize your cost to the police if it was going to be a big deal, thus abrogating your planned get rich quick scheme, because the guys with the railroad tracks and stars on their collars weren’t as simple as you thought.

The kid’s wife seemed nice as did her daughter when I met them in that once notorious California wedding conga line, a social relic from that lost era. Don’t get any ideas, I mean nice as in “pleasant.” They seemed to get along with the ‘Lar.' Granted, however, I’m not a wedding expert and had really only appeared in one wedding where I’d be an usher at my UCLA roommate’s first tragic nuptial. So, call me a rookie or a tyro in the wedding game if you must, but I possess the graduate degree today. My own first marriage and expensive divorce also lay in that misty sort of a soft light Twilight Zone future.

So, a bit of time passed, I had another accident which laid me up, and the kid, La--y K——r, was accused of fooling around with his new wife’s daughter. Then he received that dreaded double whammy when things really run off the rails: he was fired and then he was prosecuted for fooling around with the new wife’s 15-year-old daughter. These LA stories can make you weep, I swear.

But you never will know when UFOs will enter your life, but they’ll change it. Just as sure as shooting.

John Burtis is a former Broome County, NY firefighter, a retired Santa Monica, CA, police officer. He obtained his BA in European History at Boston University and is fluent in German. He resides in NH with his wife, Betsy.

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