America.
A month
. But then, there’s a whole slew of historic references to unexplained sightings going back thousands of years. We’re talking hundreds of references throughout history about bright balls of fire, flying ‘earthenware vessels,’ luminous discs. It’s not just a modern phenomenon. I mean, check out these historical records: ‘Japan, 1458: An object as bright as the full moon and followed by curious signs was observed in the sky.’ Or this one: ‘London, 1593: A flying dragon surrounded by flames was seen hovering over the city.’ ”
“Opium’ll do that to you every time,” Dalton half-joked. “Seriously. Drugs were legal back then, weren’t they?”
“Besides, none of these references are even remotely verifiable,” Gracie added.
“Sure, but the thing is, there are so many of them. Written continents apart, at a time when traveling from one to another was virtually impossible, when most of the world was illiterate. Even the Bible’s got them.”
“Big surprise there,” Gracie scoffed. A charged silence hung between them. “So what are we saying? What do you think we saw?”
Finch pulled off his glasses and used his sleeve to give them a wipe as he thought about it. “I’d have said mass hallucination if it wasn’t for the footage.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief, slipped his glasses back on, and looked up at Gracie. “I can’t explain it.”
“Dalton?” she asked.
His face clouded with uncertainty. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands tightly through his hair. “I don’t know. There was something . . . ethereal about it, you know? It didn’t look flat, like something projected, but then it didn’t look like something hard and physical either. It’s hard to explain. There was something much more organic, much more visceral about it. Like it was part of the sky, like the sky itself had lit up, you know what I’m saying?”
“I do,” Gracie agreed uncomfortably. The sight of the bright, glowing sign, as vivid as when she first saw it, materialized in her mind’s eye. An upwelling of elation, the same one she felt when she first saw it, overcame her again as she remembered how it had formed itself out of nothing.
It was as if the air itself had been summoned by God
,
lit up from within into that shape
, she found herself thinking. Which didn’t sit well with her. She’d stopped believing in God when her mother died, ripped away from her young daughter by an unrelenting tumor in her breast. And now, here it was, this unexplained thing in the sky. As if it were taunting her.
She pushed the thought away.
Get a grip. We’re running ahead of ourselves here. There’s got to be a logical explanation for it.
But a nagging question kept coming back.
What if there isn’t?
Gracie stared out the window, scanning the sky for another sighting, her jumbled mind desperate for an answer. The satphone rang, and as Finch stretched across the table to answer it, her mind migrated to a UFO hoax from a year earlier. The clip, showing a UFO buzzing a beach in Haiti, had clocked up over five million viewings on YouTube within days of its posting, hogging chat rooms and news aggregator sites across the Web and popping up on every FunWall on Facebook. Millions were taken in by it—until it turned out to be something a French computer animator had put together in a few hours on his MacBook, using commercially available software, reluctantly explaining it away as a “sociological experiment” for a movie—about a UFO hoax, natch—that he was working on. With the advances in special effects and the proliferation of faked videos of such high quality that they managed to convince even the most staunch of skeptics, a subtle question arose in Gracie’s mind: Would people recognize a “true” event of this kind when—as it seemed—it really happened? She knew what she saw. It was right there in front of her, but everyone else was only seeing it on a screen. And
A month
. But then, there’s a whole slew of historic references to unexplained sightings going back thousands of years. We’re talking hundreds of references throughout history about bright balls of fire, flying ‘earthenware vessels,’ luminous discs. It’s not just a modern phenomenon. I mean, check out these historical records: ‘Japan, 1458: An object as bright as the full moon and followed by curious signs was observed in the sky.’ Or this one: ‘London, 1593: A flying dragon surrounded by flames was seen hovering over the city.’ ”
“Opium’ll do that to you every time,” Dalton half-joked. “Seriously. Drugs were legal back then, weren’t they?”
“Besides, none of these references are even remotely verifiable,” Gracie added.
“Sure, but the thing is, there are so many of them. Written continents apart, at a time when traveling from one to another was virtually impossible, when most of the world was illiterate. Even the Bible’s got them.”
“Big surprise there,” Gracie scoffed. A charged silence hung between them. “So what are we saying? What do you think we saw?”
Finch pulled off his glasses and used his sleeve to give them a wipe as he thought about it. “I’d have said mass hallucination if it wasn’t for the footage.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief, slipped his glasses back on, and looked up at Gracie. “I can’t explain it.”
“Dalton?” she asked.
His face clouded with uncertainty. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands tightly through his hair. “I don’t know. There was something . . . ethereal about it, you know? It didn’t look flat, like something projected, but then it didn’t look like something hard and physical either. It’s hard to explain. There was something much more organic, much more visceral about it. Like it was part of the sky, like the sky itself had lit up, you know what I’m saying?”
“I do,” Gracie agreed uncomfortably. The sight of the bright, glowing sign, as vivid as when she first saw it, materialized in her mind’s eye. An upwelling of elation, the same one she felt when she first saw it, overcame her again as she remembered how it had formed itself out of nothing.
It was as if the air itself had been summoned by God
,
lit up from within into that shape
, she found herself thinking. Which didn’t sit well with her. She’d stopped believing in God when her mother died, ripped away from her young daughter by an unrelenting tumor in her breast. And now, here it was, this unexplained thing in the sky. As if it were taunting her.
She pushed the thought away.
Get a grip. We’re running ahead of ourselves here. There’s got to be a logical explanation for it.
But a nagging question kept coming back.
What if there isn’t?
Gracie stared out the window, scanning the sky for another sighting, her jumbled mind desperate for an answer. The satphone rang, and as Finch stretched across the table to answer it, her mind migrated to a UFO hoax from a year earlier. The clip, showing a UFO buzzing a beach in Haiti, had clocked up over five million viewings on YouTube within days of its posting, hogging chat rooms and news aggregator sites across the Web and popping up on every FunWall on Facebook. Millions were taken in by it—until it turned out to be something a French computer animator had put together in a few hours on his MacBook, using commercially available software, reluctantly explaining it away as a “sociological experiment” for a movie—about a UFO hoax, natch—that he was working on. With the advances in special effects and the proliferation of faked videos of such high quality that they managed to convince even the most staunch of skeptics, a subtle question arose in Gracie’s mind: Would people recognize a “true” event of this kind when—as it seemed—it really happened? She knew what she saw. It was right there in front of her, but everyone else was only seeing it on a screen. And
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