We saw a UFO. It looked like one of those moon pictures you see in encyclopedias, except it was cut in half. It emitted a strange, dull light, unlike anything I had ever seen before; that is, until we saw another UFO.
Over the years, we remembered that day from time to time. Mom would sit with us in the kitchen, dipping bread into her coffee, and mutter, “What could it have been . . . ?” her words hanging in the pungent air and echoing in my ears. And on the weekends, while watching the Discovery Channel, we would occasionally come across a show about aliens and feel compelled to mention our own encounter: “Hey, remember that time we saw that UFO?”
One night, while aimlessly flipping channels and watching TV alone in the dark, I landed on a show that was already on about aliens secretly infiltrating our world. The stories they presented seemed straight out of a science fiction movie, but the program provided convincing evidence that made it both creepy and believable. One story that stuck with me was about a woman who was abducted and raped by aliens and gave birth to several strange creatures in a military bunker in the middle of the desert. The woman supposedly died during childbirth, screaming and crying in agony from her multiple deliveries. Military officials kept the creatures in order to study them and learn more about these enigmatic beings that seem to be infiltrating our world without our knowledge of their presence or sinister intentions.
My mother came into the room wearing the same nightgown she had worn for as long as I could remember, one hand tucked into her square pocket and the other clutching a pewter mug. She stood at the end of the sofa where I was lying down watching the TV program. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her staring at the screen, her gaze fixed and unblinking, except for the occasional involuntary tremor that caused her eyelids to flutter slightly. Together we listened to the monotonous voice of the announcer, a voice-over narration that was accompanied by grainy and dark images. The blue light from the TV cast an eerie glow on my mother’s face, revealing every pore and wrinkle and making the gray hairs in her curly mane translucent. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she gradually leaned down until one of her buttocks rested on the arm of the sofa as we watched the program. She still held the cup in one hand, and I guessed the tea inside had gone lukewarm. Her other hand wandered along the seams of the sofa, plucking at loose threads, before settling on my shoulder with a sudden and firm squeeze. Our eyes locked—mine, frantic; hers, fixed. She uttered my name in a low and strange voice, as if calling out from a cave. I kept looking at her, expecting her to speak, unsure what to say myself. My heart was racing.
“Remember when we saw the UFO?”
It was her voice and her face, but suddenly her expression changed. Her eyes seemed to sparkle with mischief, while her pursed lips and playful gesture seemed apologetic. Sheepishly, she nodded, as if she could read my mind, confirming the thoughts that were zigzagging through my head. My hands were gripping the blanket covering my legs, and when she made a sudden movement, clearly intending to grab my neck, I instinctively recoiled, pulled the blanket over my head, and let out a desperate cry. I remember it as a howl.
My sister rushed into the room and switched on the light. As I uncovered my face, I was still trembling and ready to run or kick or scream again, but the sudden brightness blinded me. Despite my disorientation, I managed to make out my mother sitting at my feet on the sofa, doubled over and struggling to contain her laughter. My sister stood in the doorway in her pajamas, smiling without asking or saying anything, just pushing her glasses up to the bridge of her nose over and over again, as she usually does when she’s feeling anxious. My mother’s laughter filled the room and even drowned out the voice on the TV.
When she finally stopped laughing, she wiped away her tears by drawing the skin of her cheeks up to her temples, and said, “Stop watching so much nonsense. There are no Martians among us.”
“It’s not nonsense! We saw a UFO.”
Mom squeezed my thigh, then got up from the sofa, leaning on the arm for support. She walked to the door and stopped. “What could it have been . . . ?” she murmured in a chilling whisper, winking at my sister. Her nasal chuckle echoed down the hall, gradually fading along with the sound of her footsteps. Her cold tea remained on the table.
I got up from the sofa, furious. As I walked past my sister, I clenched my teeth, leaned close to her face, and said:
“We saw a UFO. And don’t you forget it, you moron. We saw a UFO!”
II
We were returning from my aunt’s birthday party. She lived in the suburbs. A housing development on the outskirts of the city surrounded by large abandoned lots. At the end of the road leading out of the suburb, right at the intersection with the main road, stood a single building between two empty lots enclosed by barbed wire. It was the headquarters of the National Open University. The six-story square building had a worn look, with peeling paint in earth tones reminiscent of old government buildings. Its roof featured an unusual and seemingly useless detail: a large concrete box housing several colossal, defunct satellite dishes. From afar, the building looked like a battered and antiquated robot. The mountain loomed in the background.
We were in my mother’s little Toyota Corolla, the first of two or three cars waiting at the slow traffic light. We stared straight ahead at the darkened building. It was after eleven at night, and in our city of muggings and kidnappings, waiting at traffic lights always felt like an eternity.
My mother gripped the steering wheel tightly with both hands. Her eyes darted nervously between the two side mirrors. As the co-pilot, I kept checking the center rearview mirror, meeting my sister’s anxious gaze reflected in the glass. She, in turn, looked back at the cars behind us, while I watched the traffic light ahead of us. We waited for the light to change. Mom inched the car forward, ready to accelerate as soon as the light turned green. With each move, I had to lean further forward, straining to catch a glimpse of the traffic light, which was almost obscured by the position of our car.
We all saw it at the same time. It wasn’t a look on their faces that caught my attention, because my eyes were already fixed on the apparition above us. An aura filled the Corolla like a gas: invisible, yet palpable, that shocked us into a stunned silence. The pressure was deafening, like a ringing in the ears, as we struggled to comprehend what we saw through the windshield: an object hovering above the building with the dark mountain as its backdrop.
A perfectly round object resembling the moon, cut in half, hovered motionless over the roof of the building—too motionless. In other words, it was so still, it was almost as if we were frozen in time, suspended in the moment as it covered the massive satellite dishes. But what struck me most wasn’t its sheer size, its imposing and alien appearance, or the eerie silence surrounding it. It was the light emanating from it. The dull white glow seemed to constrict my pupils, but it did not extend beyond the aura that surrounded the object like a luminous belt. Its radiance was confined solely within the semicircle of its shape, with no rays escaping around it, and all of its flashes were tightly concentrated within its lines. The light did not flood the dilapidated, crumbling ruins of the building, or spill over into the weeds and trash of the empty lots. It was a huge, silent, glowing object.
The insistent honking of the beat-up Chevette behind us snapped us out of our trance, and we quickly put the car in gear. As we pulled away, we immediately lost sight of the object hovering over the building.
“Did you see it?”
“What was it? Where did it go?”
“I don’t see it anymore. Look out the back window!”
“No, please, don’t!” I screamed at my sister, throwing myself between the front seats of the car and hugging her knees. As she crouched on my back, I felt her glasses dig into my spine. Over the curve of her elbow, I risked a glance through the rear window and at the building, which had plunged back into darkness.
My mother’s accelerating to pass the Chevette on the main road jolted me back upright in my seat. My hand was still gripping my sister’s, which was clammy and cold. As we passed the Chevette, the driver flipped us a dirty, bruised middle finger with a sliver of fingernail sticking out. He seemed emboldened by our pale and horrified faces. It was obvious that he hadn’t seen what we had just seen—a UFO hovering above us in the dead of the night.
III
All the way home, I struggled to find the words to convey what we had just witnessed. It was hard to describe the strange, unidentified object, and even harder to express the unsettling feeling of seeing something completely out of the ordinary. The experience felt like a scene out of a science fiction movie, and left us wondering if our senses had deceived us.
But the three of us saw it. We couldn’t all be crazy. This was no collective hallucination. We saw a UFO.
As soon as we got home, my mom lit a cigarette off the stove. Coils of hair stuck out from her forehead, ready to ignite. She walked past us, blowing smoke, while my sister and I rummaged through the refrigerator and drank water, trying to process what we had just witnessed. Suddenly, Mom came back into the kitchen with a National Bank notepad and three different pens in her hand. With the cigarette still dangling from her lips, she handed each of us a yellowed sheet of paper and a pen, keeping the notepad for herself.
“All right everyone, find a place to sit and sketch what you saw,” she instructed us.
I stood there for a moment, like a fly rubbing its legs together. Unlike my sister, I wasn’t very good at drawing. Even with the image burned into my retina, it was a challenge to reproduce what I had just seen.
My sister had already left the kitchen and was on her way to our bedroom when my mother urged me on:
“Come on, what are you waiting for?”
I sat down at the small telephone table just outside the kitchen, placed the yellowed National Bank letterhead on top of the phone book, and began to sketch. Within minutes, my sister passed me on her way back from our room. My mother urged me to finish.
“Hurry up, girl!”
After I finished my sketch, I went into the kitchen and saw the other two sketches face down on the table, concealing the image of that disturbing vision we had seen.
I caught them off guard when I showed them my sketch right away, since they weren’t expecting it. With a look of shock and uneasiness—at least that’s what I read on my mother’s face—they turned over their own drawings. The three sketches were almost identical, depicting the square shape of the building, the triangular outline of the mountain, and the semicircle of the object that none of us had yet named. Mom stubbed out her cigarette in a jam-stained saucer. She had the stunned look of someone about to shout “bingo,” but something caught in her throat. She got up from the round kitchen table and began to pace around it, hands on her hips. She stopped suddenly, cocked her head to one side, and gave us a blank stare before saying, “What could it have been . . . ?”
“It was a UFO,” I replied without a hint of doubt. “What else could it be?”
“It was too low to be the moon, and it was too big not to make a noise. And that light . . . ”
“Yeah, that light, it was . . . eerie!”
“It was dull and unearthly, not like any light I have ever seen!”
“Could the satellite dishes have attracted it?”
“If these Martians are so advanced, they should be studying humans at Harvard or MIT . . . Not here at the National Open University!”
My sister remained silent, her eyes wide as she listened to the back and forth between my mother and me. I felt sorry for her; she looked frightened and in shock. I squeezed her hand again, which was still clammy and cold.
“We saw a UFO and lived to tell the tale. We can rest easy now . . .” I said to my sister, smiling warmly at her. It was over, and the fun part was speculating about what we had seen. My mom was already cracking jokes about Martians, and I thought everything would be fine. But instead of laughing, my sister gave me a nervous grin that barely hid her fear.
Mom started to eat some of the birthday cake we had brought home wrapped in foil from my aunt’s party, and took a few sips of cold milk. Every now and then, she would look out of the kitchen window.
“Are you sure they didn’t follow us? What could it have been . . . ?”
We went into our bedroom to get ready for bed. As soon as the lights were out, my sister crawled under my sheets and covered her head. We pretended to be asleep and listened through the wall to my mother on the phone with her sister. They were both chronic insomniacs. They exchanged polite greetings and my mother informed her sister that we had returned home safely. Then, after a pause, she blurted out dramatically, “We saw a UFO!” The words bounced off our pillows and deepened the darkness for the rest of the night.
IV
My freshman year of college was bittersweet. On the one hand, I was excited by the idea of leaving home and living independently. However, the reality of living alone was a different story. I missed my sister’s company and felt guilty about leaving her behind. She didn’t have many friends, and I worried about her ability to fend for herself in everyday situations like grocery shopping, taking public transportation, socializing, or even asking my mother for small things like money for movie tickets, which she loved. We texted a lot and talked on the phone often. However, long-distance calls were expensive, so we kept them short. Anyway, my sister was a person of few words, and our conversations were often one-sided. I would ask the questions and she would answer with the bare minimum. Otherwise, she was silent. Just the usual questions: “How are you? What are you reading? Do you like it over there?”
I was passionate about my field of study, which included math, physics, and aerospace engineering. I worked hard and earned excellent grades to get into the program I wanted. All my hard work paid off when I received a scholarship to a prestigious international program.
For my farewell party, Mom invited her sister and brought my grandmother home for the weekend. On Saturday, she made a big plate of chicken and rice, and we prepared for a trip to the beach the next morning. We packed a cooler with soft drinks, beer, and fruit, and brought food and snacks for the day.
The drive to the beach in the old Corolla was unbearable. It had no air conditioning. Plus we had to listen to my mom and aunt repeat everything to my grandmother, who was wedged between my sister and me in the back seat. They had to shout because she was deaf and couldn’t hear their words over the boleros on the radio and the wind coming in through the windows, which were rolled down as far as they would go.
Sitting on the beach, devouring oysters in the midday sun, my sister and I felt happy and relaxed in each other’s company, nourished by the simple pleasures of everyday life, just like when we were kids. When we finished, we ran into the water to rinse off the lemon and sand.
“I’m going to miss this,” I said to my sister.
My sister’s eyes sparkled like bubbles in the sunlight. Without her glasses, her eyes looked clear, translucent, and most of all, sincere. We hugged each other. The sea lapped around us, leaving salt on our faces that hid our tears. Over her elbow, I could see Mom smoking a cigarette, pointing and smiling at us from under a red umbrella that was set back from the shore—farther to the right than I remembered when we entered the water. She looked like a tropical Medusa, with her curly serpentine tresses swaying in the breeze.
From abroad, I cherished the memories of my family and honored them on a small shrine: a cork board hanging on my bedroom wall. On the board, I pinned a photo of my mother, my sister, and me at my sister’s birthday (both of us dressed as bunnies, with bunny ears hanging down, sitting at the table next to a piñata and a cake); another photo of my sister and me standing on top of a snow-covered mountain (our faces barely distinguishable between adolescent features and knitted hats that almost covered our eyes); and a third photo of my sister alone (with a serious expression on her face, glasses on level, hair parted on the side, and a long ponytail falling over her shoulder). A postcard from home also graced the board.
At first, I saved money from my allowance to call my family from time to time. Like clockwork, Mom and my sister would ring me every week at a set day and time. But after that first year, things changed. I got a job, made friends, and started dating. Our calls became less frequent and more random. And often, it was me who ended the call: either because someone was waiting for me outside, I had to go out, or it was too noisy to talk. Hearing my sister’s voice on the other end of the line became more of a coincidence than usual. I figured she was busy with her own life, of which I knew the bare minimum: she was in college, sharing a new car with Mom after they sold their old Corolla, and tutoring kids with learning disabilities part-time. Reading books, drawing pictures, and watching movies filled her free time.
Still, my sister never failed to send me a postcard every month. In return, I made it a tradition to send her a card from every new city I visited, showing the most beautiful local scenery and a brief description of the place. All of my sister’s postcards were handmade and had a space theme: planets, stars, and galaxies. She used different techniques and materials: caricatures, abstracts, watercolors, and pencil sketches. They showed her artistic development over the years, as if they were part of a single collection. The early ones had a short inscription on the back, while the later ones were simply signed with a scribble and dated.
The forty postcards my sister sent me are now displayed in my favorite room in my house, along with the cork board where I sometimes add an occasional photo.
V
Returning to my country was not something I wanted to do; it was a condition of my scholarship abroad. After three and a half years away, going back to my mother’s house was devastating in many ways. For one thing, my fancy title was unlikely to get me a decent job in my hometown. It was also heartbreaking to leave my partner behind with the unrealistic promise of reuniting. On top of that, I would lose my independence. The biggest challenge, however, was that my customs, beliefs, and habits were no longer consistent with the place I was returning to. I resented my mother for smoking in the house and, unlike before, confronted her with health facts she was unaware of. Our different diets also caused friction between us.
“What do you think I put in your belly for almost twenty years? And yet here you are, alive and well! And even more of a pain in the ass since you stopped eating meat, it seems.”
I considered myself an agnostic, but I did not dare tell my family. I had to pick my battles. The house was filled with religious imagery, a constant reminder of who I no longer was. Still, I kept the medals and prayer cards that my mother and grandmother had given me for protection. They gave me comfort and a sense of familiarity—a way back to my roots, so to speak.
I spent the first few weeks after my return observing and learning the customs of the house as if I were experiencing them for the first time. I began looking for work at local companies and in neighboring towns, but none of the opportunities excited me. Few offered the potential for independence and self-sufficiency. The country was going through a severe economic depression. Meanwhile, while looking for a job, I began volunteering at the university’s physics department, assisting teachers with lab preparation and curriculum redesign. It was disheartening and difficult for me to accept the decline of this once prestigious institution, especially in the midst of deteriorating conditions.
Reconnecting with my sister upon my return was effortless. She had always been my constant lifeline, and nothing had changed. We started going to movies together, and I often accompanied her to her tutoring job, where I read, studied, or drank coffee. In the evenings, we unconsciously fell back into the routine of gathering in the TV room to watch the news and programs on the Discovery Channel or one of the cable channels. The same soft, pillow-lined sofas, along with the textbooks, encyclopedias, and novels on the shelves around the TV cabinet, created a warm atmosphere that seemed to erase the day’s arguments with my mother or my bad mood. The room wasn’t necessarily beautiful, but it was cozy, or at least that’s how I felt upon my return.
At the time, we were following the news of an anticipated interstellar object that was expected to visit our solar system. Based on the available data, this was the first object ever observed by ground-based telescopes from outside our solar system, providing the first confirmed evidence that interstellar visitors are real. We scrawled the date Saturday, October 14, on a piece of paper, and taped it to the refrigerator door to remind ourselves of the day the interstellar object would pass closest to Earth, some twenty million miles away. Despite the colossal distance between them, it didn’t stop us from fantasizing over dinner about the possibility of the object colliding with Earth. “I hope it crashes into the presidential palace. It would do us all a favor,” my mother said as she blew cigarette smoke through her nose. Her comment may have seemed extreme, but it was born out of a hope for a predictable end to the current atrocious government.
Through my volunteer work at the university, I was given access to an old telescope. I spent a few days repairing it to get it working properly. The night I finished, I marveled again at the details of the moon and remembered how much I missed my astronomical observations.
Excited at the prospect of using the telescope, I arranged an evening at the lab to show it to my mother and sister on a Saturday when they were both off work. I put together a basket of red wine, cheese, cold cuts, and fruit, chuckling at how different our snacks were from the ones we had on the day of my farewell party at the beach. Just before we all left to go to the lab, I closed the refrigerator, pointed to the piece of paper stuck to the door with a magnet, and said to them:
“This is happening today. The interstellar object will pass ‘close’ to Earth tonight. If we’re lucky, we might be able to catch a glimpse of it through our old telescope.”
As we walked to the door, Mom let out a nasal laugh, and my sister pushed her glasses up to the bridge of her nose and twisted her lips into a grimace.
That night, my mother frowned as she drove, leaning forward over the steering wheel. We entered the university campus in the darkness, navigating through the labyrinthine inner roads, which were riddled with potholes, logs, and weeds. Abandoned buildings and huge, unfinished construction sites loomed on either side, providing a haven for beggars and drug addicts. We got to the Science Faculty at last. The lab was right next to a pond. As soon as the guard saw us approaching, he quickly unlocked the door and then relocked it with heavy chains and large padlocks. On all sides, the walls were covered with thick vegetation, except for the entrance wall, which seemed to have been cleared for the sole practical purpose of allowing us to pass through. The guard helped us carry the device to the back of the building where there was a corridor, and we positioned it so that it faced the moon. It was a clear night, and the darkness of the campus allowed us to see the starry sky. After setting it up, we poured glasses of wine and sat down against the wall to gaze at the night sky. We took turns looking through the telescope, and I explained everything we saw. It was their first time using a telescope, and as we sipped wine, my mother’s enthusiasm for planetary observation and science grew. “I wish I had known about this remarkable device that makes things look bigger sooner!” she exclaimed, punctuating her words with a shrill, nasal laugh. My sister shook her head at her innuendo, but couldn’t help laughing under her breath. Neither could I.
My sister took her turn with the telescope, while my mother and I struggled to cut into the cheese with a pocketknife we had brought along. I gave up and let her do it. As I was about to refill the glasses, a scream pierced the air. I turned around, expecting the worst. Mom, half drunk, was fumbling with a knife in the dark. What I saw was truly amazing: a massive crescent-like object rising above the empty field behind the building, obscuring the full moon behind it. The sound of the crickets, the wind, the traffic on the nearby highway, and our fear were drowned out by a deafening silence. The dull aura surrounding the object gradually contracted until a beam of iridescent light emanated from beneath it. I felt a strange suction pulling not just my body, but everything inside me. My sister’s clammy hand squeezing mine brought me back to my senses. I saw her face for the last time. She hugged me. I held her as tight as I could while she whispered in my ear:
“This is it. It’s time to go home.”
Wrapped in her arms, over the curve of her elbow I saw the object, hovering above us, its portal of light beckoning, and my mother’s mane floating in the moonlight like a Medusa in space.
