Random Story – My near alien abduction

This is just an odd little story from my life.

I’ve had a long interest in space, so when I was a kid my parents got me a small telescope.  It had a tripod, but fully extended it was only about three feet tall and somewhat wobbly.  So I built a desk out of some old 2X4s and boards that I could set the telescope on.  And I put this and an old lawn chair in my observatory.  One of the best places to see the southern half of the sky was also a direct line of sight to a nearby road.  I live in the middle of nowhere, so there isn’t much traffic, but still I didn’t want to be blinded by someone driving home late at night.  Not to mention the outside lights our neighbors had.  So my observatory was just some sheets of tin nailed to more 2X4s to act as a light block.

On clear nights, I’d go out and sit in the dark listening to my Walkman letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.  I’d then make observations, trying my hand at drawing star clusters, lunar craters, or marking the positions of the Galilean moons. 

One night, I had been looking through the telescope for some time, and I sat back to stretch.  During this I had closed my eyes, but with my face pointing straight up I opened them, and was almost blinded by this bright flash right in my face.

I’ve always had an overactive imagination, so my knee-jerk reaction was ALIENS!  But after about twenty heartbeats – so maybe two seconds – I realized what had happened and started laughing.  Some random firefly was just flying along, looking for a mate, and decided to light up maybe a foot in front of my just opening, strained, dark adapted eyes. 

That only happened once, but there were several times where I was looking at something through my telescope when suddenly the field would be filled with this overly bright, greenish yellow blob.  Some people love the image of fireflies on an evening.  I think of them as blinding bastards who make me think of aliens.