I’m taking a poll.  How many of you believe in at least one urban legend or myth?  It can be that bigfoot is real or there are alligators living in your sewers or Bill Clinton wasn’t a pathological liar and womanizer or a myriad of others.  There are lots of them out there and I think, to some degree, we all believe that some totally unproven event or thing actually might exist.  My favorite one is UFOs.

There have been hundreds of books and documentaries written and produced about the subject.  Thousands of eyewitness accounts yet there really isn’t one piece of indisputable evidence proving their existence.  So now that I’ve got some of you true believers fired up, it’s time to tell my UFO story.

I’ve written about my first Aircraft Commander at least once.  He was an old, crusty, Vietnam vet named Mike, but I’ve never mentioned my second AC, Jim.  By the time Mike left the crew, I was considered a seasoned copilot.   What they usually did was to balance out the cockpit experience level by pairing up an experienced copilot with a brand new aircraft commander.  That was Jim.  Jim was a great pilot but his outlook on life was a little different than Mike’s.  Jim was a lot more, shall we say, fun loving.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re flying a 488,000 lb bomber, there’s a lot of opportunity for “fun loving” to get you in trouble.  Here’s what I mean.

On the bottom of the B-52 there’s a very odd piece of equipment.  There have been lots of things added to the venerable BUFF over the years.  Antennas,  cameras, lumps and bumps everywhere, but an original piece, that by 1980 was never used, was something called the “terrain clearance light”.  No one ever explained it’s use, they just said; “Leave it alone, we never use that thing anymore”.  Here’s how it worked.  In the cockpit there were two switches.  One was an “on/off” switch and the other an “extend/retract” switch.  When it was turned on, an large 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight mounted in the belly of the airplane would illuminate and you could then extend the light to the point where it would shine out ahead of the airplane.  You could also stop it any intermediate position.  It purpose was a little confusing.  A million candlepower seems like a lot, but when you’re moving along at 350 knots, 300 feet off the ground, it really couldn’t illuminate out far enough to accomplish anything and by the time I was flying the airplane, there was a low light camera mounted in the nose and a bright light would have rendered the camera useless.  And besides, why in the world would you want to turn on a huge light if you’re trying to penetrate enemy defenses.  But, because it was installed on the aircraft, the maintenance guys still had to keep it in working order.  Jim had come up with a “fun” use for the thing.

The first night we flew together we were on a standard 3 hour low level leg somewhere in Montana or Wyoming or Nebraska, they all ran together.  We were flying in a wide valley at the end of which was a highway running perpendicular to track on a plateau.  We were actually slightly below the altitude of the highway and when we were about ten miles from it Jim turned to me and said, “extend the terrain clearance light”.  It was a request I had never heard before but, after fumbling around the dark cockpit for a second to find the toggle switch, I dutifully extended, without illuminating, the light.  As we got close enough to see individual vehicles on the highway Jim pointed out a camper.  He said that he was going to fly right over it and when we were three miles from the road he wanted me to turn on the light and then slowly retract it and keep it aimed at the camper until we were directly over it and then turn it off.  It’s at this point that I was in a position to make a conscious, life changing choice.  I could be a responsible, mature adult, or could head down the path of perpetual practical jokes and sophomoric pranks.  A difficult decision.  Only seconds to decide.  I turned on the light.

The camper lit up under the blistering intensity of a million candles.  I could see the brake lights come on but as the vehicle slowed Jim eased in some right rudder to keep the light squarely on the side of the weaving Winnebago.  I slowly retracted the light and as we passed directly over the terrified driver, whose face I could just make out, I turned off the light.

I can’t help but wonder what the driver told his children and probably tells his grandchildren today.  “There I was, 1:00 in the morning, driving my camper in the middle of nowhere when I had an alien encounter.  The noise was deafening, the light was blinding.  It seemed to hover over me for a second and then it disappeared in a instant.”

Ah, the good old days!