I don’t know about you, but this really makes me believe that there really is something out there.

First video shows Marines on patrol in Iraq spotting some kind of horizontal light in the sky that they can not make out.  Before you view this I have to warn you that some of the soldiers are using some words that might be offensive.

UFOs Sighted By Marines In Iraq: Just incredible, unaltered footage!

UFO Footage From Iraq Soldiers: Strange lights seen in the sky over Iraq through night vision camera. VERY eye-opening!

Hello sci fi fans. Just received my MUFON Journal and wanted to report there were 452 sighting reports in the United States in August 2009. How many are hoaxes ?, How many are real?… It only goes to show you, there is a lot of activity in our skies. Tonight 10/19/09 on the History Channel at 9:oopm EST there is going to be a documentary ‘I know what I saw’. Info, there will be astronauts coming forward, air force personnel etc… I plan to watch.

(Authors Note: This is the second part of my short story “The Lights in the Sky (I).” You can read Part I here.)

“Do you think if we called now, we’d get through?”

Bryan breathed the cool night air deeply into his lungs.  The thin chill that made it’s home in the breeze tickled his throat.  “I don’t think it do any good, babes.  The newswoman said that the lines were probably gonna be down from here on out.”

“But maybe…if we tried…” Annie’s voice trailed off.  She twisted in the soft beds they had begun to dig themselves in the yard – the grass all about their bodies was matted in misshapen lawn angels.  “I just wish I could talk to him.  Talk to Bria and Sylvia.  I haven’t seen them in so long.”

“I’m sure they’re thinkin’ a you too.”

“She’s probably so scared, Bry.  I can’t imagine…”

“We didn’t raise a fool.  Dan will keep Sylv safe and as long as he’s with Bria, they’ll be okay as okay can be now.  No reason to get worked up about it.  Won’t do nothin’ for us.  As my daddy used to say, ‘worryin’ ain’t nothin’ but a rockin’ chair-’”

“Yes, I know.  Gives me somethin’ to do, though.”

“What, layin’ out here not good enough for you?”

Annie opened her mouth to snap back, but it just hung there; nothing came out.

Something in the air had changed; they could feel it.  And Bryan heard something in the darkness, trembling as it grew louder.  The night grew both quiet and loud.  A dog that had taken up barking in the last hour was suddenly silent.

It took him a moment to realize that the sound creeping over him was coming from deep in Annie’s throat.  His mind flashed a vivid picture of Sari, his old German Shepherd, pawing at the door, before it was scratched away by the yowl his wife was threatening to unloose.

“What, baby?  What’s wrong?”

She broke.  And as the tears tumbled from her pearl eyes – the heavens raining gems – the tremor in her throat became a sob and suddenly her head was in Bryan’s shoulder and her tears were washing the grass from his neck.

“Why’s it happenin’!” she sobbed into the shoulder that she had first cried on over forty years ago when her Pappy had moved on.  “What’s it all mean?  We’re here and Danny’s gone and I’m not gonna get to hold Sylvia anymore and everyone’s gone.  Lacie Bello came over yesterday and told me that she wasn’t gonna spend her final goddamn days in this God forsaken place and she left and brought back my Tupperware from last year – she said it was good and she was sorry for keepin’ it so long – and why’d we even stay Bryan we shoulda gone outta here oh baby oh babylove!”  She heaved in the night, filling her flat lungs.  “Jesus, is it our fault this is happenin’?  Was it cause we weren’t right?  What the hell did we do?  Did we bring this on us?”

Annie plowed her head into Bryan’s shoulder, driving them, together, into the ground.  Her wet face gleamed from the lights in the sky.

Bryan held her, not saying anything, numb to the ache in his shoulder and the tearing in his hip.  He just pulled his arms around Annabelle – his Annie – and held onto her as if the wretched flow of time had never existed and they were eighteen again and nothing in the world could ever matter but the two of them, interlocked and shuddering against one another.

Her sobs echoed in his skin, crawling through his body and awakening the something in his stomach he was supposed to have in control.  It was out of its cage and it was threatening to chew up his insides.  Suddenly, he was freezing, and if not for his time-warped grip on Annie, he didn’t think he’d be able to control his shivering.  And so he spoke.  It was the only thing he could do.

“I don’t think it’s us, baby.  We did everything we could, everything the world would let us.  We were as good as we were able, in the face of everything that told us to not be, weren’t we?  Maybe we let things get a little outta control; maybe we allowed some things to happen, but it’s only natural.  We can’t be blamed.  It’s not us.  And if it’s God, then He’s not my God.  He wouldn’t leave us now; he couldn’t leave us now.  He couldn’t leave us.  He couldn’t leave us-” the pit of his stomach began to shudder “-He wouldn’t.  I don’t believe it.”

And then she stopped crying.

Annie pulled away from Bryan’s shoulder, propped herself above him.  He convulsed, taken by the inexorable shivers, but only for a moment, then it passed – it was back in control, back in its cage.  He thought she was going to say something, let the panic take her again, but her lips, though quivering, never parted.  She just looked into his roadmap that had beset his face – the lines and ruts stood in the shadows and made a few of their own – and he looked into hers.

My my my, he thought, I was a lucky one.

Then they were kissing, lips dried and dreary, wetting against one another.  Hands on each other’s faces, searching the cracks, feeling the wrinkles, smoothing them into their own youth.

And the sky was filled with light, black to white, night into antiseptic day.

The horrible flash lasted a moment, and then the lights in the sky came back, brighter than ever before.

Annie and Bryan stared into space, mouths agape and eyes afire.  Bryan coughed but his eyes never wavered.  Annie lay back next to him, fixated out the brilliance above them.  “So,” she said. “It’s come.”  Her voice was flat in Bryan’s ears.

“Yes, babes,” he whispered.  “I think it’s arrived.”

“I feel cold.  I want to go back.”

“To where we were before?”

She finally broke away from the Medusa hold of the inverted night.  “To when we were young,” she whispered, “and we had all the time in the world.”

“Just you, me, and the Boss?”

“Yeah.  Just us.”

“I’d like that.  But alas, me fair lady, we’re here and we’re now.  You can borrow my glasses if you want.”

“We all brought this on ourselves.”

“I’m sure you’re right, dear.”

Bryan forced himself away from the lights, glanced at Annie.  Somewhere deep off he realized that the night had died and there was silence.  “Maybe it’s not real.  Or maybe it’ll be better in the end.”

“In the twilight?” Annie said, eyes moving back to the heavens.  She gave a laugh; it was harsh.

“Yeah,” Bryan took her hand and whispered in her ear, “in this twilight.”

The sky began to brighten again – horrendously, blindingly bright – as the lights came down.  The radiance illuminated Annie’s face, melting away time and its infernal trappings.  She was eighteen again.

“You know what, baby,”

“What, Bryan?”

“I’m really fucking scared.”

“Hush your mouth.  You know I don’t like it when you talk like that…

I’m scared too.”

BOB DEAN at the Project Camelot Awake and Aware Conference, Los Angeles, 19 September 2009. This is another wonderful, heartfelt presentation by the best loved lecturer on the UFO circuit… and again Bob presents and comments on some of the suppressed NASA slides of Apollo 13, Mars, and Saturn which he has acquired. Enjoy

(Authors Note: So I enjoy writing some fiction, which normally result in being denied for publication.  Guess what: with a blog, I can do what I want!

The following is the first half of a short story that I wrote earlier this year. You can read Part II here.)

The grass was slight and cold beneath their necks.  It had crunched, pleasant and full, as they lay down, bending the blades and staring towards the sky.

Bryan’s knees whispered their age as he knelt, popping and grinding as he slid next to Annabelle – his Annie – whispering that the time for moonlight serenades had long past, that the years were caked on just a little too thick for this kind of romance.

But Bryan scooted himself beside her anyways, ignoring the simmering heat that burrowed from his knees into his hips.

It would be gone soon enough.

As his shoulder touched hers and the lawn bent beneath his shifting legs and the sickly sweet redolence of the cool springtime snaked its way out of the cracked blades, Annie glanced sidelong into his face, joining her fingers with his rough ones.  She had never cared that his hands were so coarse; she had never complained about the stains on his shirts or the grease in his hair or the coal he had sometimes tracked onto the kitchen linoleum.  A smile crept onto her lips – they were cornered with the gentle creases that time insists upon leaving as a sign that it even exists – and her eyes sparkled and glinted, reflecting in the night.

“Ah…” she exhaled, clearing her throat of the debris of age, sewing up the tiny cracks that sometimes spidered through her voice.  “We shouldn’t have ever stopped doin’ this.”

Bryan didn’t sigh or clear his throat – he was beyond those easy measures and his voice hadn’t sounded like he remembered it for the last few years.  He had hated it at first: the watery, wavering tones didn’t belong in his mouth, to be chewed and spit out so slight and frail.  But he had gotten used to them, as people get used to all things.  And the hate was gone soon enough, running off to play with someone that had something better to get angry at.

“Well,” he said.  “Too late for that now.  Besides, if not for what’s goin’ on, the grass would itch too bad and all we’d be doin’ was complainin’.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

And they lay still for a few minutes, listening to the unending sounds of their backyard as it lived and breathed all around them.  The houselights were off – so they didn’t interfere with the ethereal night – and the neighbors had all run off either hours or days before.  Kevin Everett and his wife had left almost a month ago, speeding away with the garage door barely open and the car packed up so high that Roger Bartem had said he was damn near shocked that they didn’t take out every lamppost along the way, bein’ that a car with so much in it has got to be tough to see outta and the weight is probably so poorly distributed that it’d be hard to handle.

But Roger was gone now, came over earlier in the day to tell Bryan that he’d see him around and that he heard the mountains were the best place to sit and wait and since his sister-in-law was situated up there, it’d be best to take Jenna and see what happened.  He tipped his flat-billed hat, struck a match and sucked on the end of a Marlboro, and stepped off the front porch.  Bryan had said goodbye and asked Annie if she wanted to head towards the mountains, too.  She had answered with a flat-out no and Bryan didn’t push it beyond that.  He didn’t rightly care either way.

So they lay here, in the backyard of their tiny little house on the newly deserted Emerson Drive, where no monsters were due and they had lived in peace and mostly quiet for the last thirty-five or so odd years.

Annie squeezed Bryan’s hand a little tighter – the cold band of so-called priceless metal dug into his fingers and he smiled as he noticed.  “You remember when we used to come out here and lay with the old radio and stare at the stars all night long?” she said, voice falling slightly by the end.

“Yes, Ma’am, I remember.  I used to pray that the Boss would come on so you’d get up and dance.”

She giggled, rolling on her side and slapping at him.  “Tramps like us…” she sang.

“Baby, we were born to run!” Bryan finished, voice booming out, echoing across the yard and into the trees and off the empty houses and the still pavement.  It was the voice he had long ago forgotten.  A troupe of birds rustled the budding leaves and took off into the night and the chorus of crickets stumbled over a few notes.

They fell into fits of laughter before Bryan began to choke and cough.  It didn’t stop the snorts and it just made Annie laugh harder.

“Oh my oh my oh my, stop it stop it,” he yowled between the laughs and the coughs.

“You really hit that one hard, Bry,” Annie laughed, tiny tears forming near the spidery wrinkles that spread from her pretty green eyes.

“I was just thinkin’ a you dancin’, the way your skirt would sway around.  It would dance with you, you know that?  Like you two were partners.  It was hard for me to cut in and dance a little myself.”

“Well, those skirts were always better dancers than you anyways…”

He groaned.  “I bet they were.  But you were the one chasin’ me!”

“What color glasses you got on?” she laughed.

“Whichever ones make me look better to you.”

That tickled Annie and she began to cackle and Bryan joined her until they were both coughing and coughing for air.

“Quit doin’ that,” she said, bouncing Bryan with her hip.  “You’ll kill us both!”

“Baby, I couldn’t ever do that,” he said.  “I’d kill for you, I’d die for you, but I’d never kill you.  That would just make my life a good-ole waste a time, now wouldn’t it?  Well, my dad always used to say that chasin’ you around was just that.”

“I thought I chased you?”

“I took off my glasses.”

Annie giggled again. “Your father, God bless him, loved me.”

“He loved your cookin’.”

“That was enough for me,” she sighed, smile waning on her lips as she slid again into Bryan’s hand.  “Would you ever let me fall apart, Bryan?”

“Only if I knew how to put you back together.”

“And what if you lost a piece?” she asked.

“What piece is it?  The one that insists on spendin’ my money?”

“I ain’t answering that.”

Bryan grinned. “Well, I guess I couldn’t let you fall apart then.  I’d just pick you up and hold you together.”

“Did it mean anything, babe?”

“Did what?”

“Anything.  Everything.  All of this.  It mean anythin’ at all?”

Bryan frowned, creasing his forehead.  He slid his head into hers – his thinning hair simmered against the stiff blades.  “I bet it meant somethin’.”

Annie sighed, and as Bryan shifted his eyes from the sky – it was hard to pull them down – he could see her eyes staring into the space his had just moved from.  They were glistening, rubies of blue-green in the night.

“It meant somethin’ to us, din’t it?  What we did, how our lives were?  Right?”

“You’re probably right, just like normal-”

A grin tugged at his lips, “-that’s the first time you ever admitted that-”

“-and we been good, huh?  Me and you been good.”

Bryan shifted onto his elbow and stared into her eyes, head blotting out the reflections, stealing the tiny jewels.  “We been great.  Daniel turned into a good one, and nothin’s better than Sylvia.  And we spent enough nights dancin’ in the dark – as Bruce used to say – don’t you think?”

“You’re the one that couldn’t stand Springsteen before I came along,” Annie said, lips curling.

Bryan lay back beside her, setting eyes afire as he did.  “Well, you gave me some extra, um, motivation.  He helped me find my backseat, you know.  Can’t fault a guy for that.”

She giggled and squeezed his hand even tighter.  “You stop that, mister, ‘fore my daddy hears and chases you off again.”

The lights in the sky were bright enough to show her smile.

Searching For The Truth