Column: Tales from Exit 22

My cousin chased a UFO for 20 minutes.

My cousin was in the Air Force. He would have caught the UFO, too, if he had been in an airplane. He was never a fast runner.

I thought that when everyone began carrying cameras — a digital camera, a cell phone camera, or both — that we’d see endless photos of UFOS.

UFO. No, not Unidentified Fried Object, Ubiquitous Frozen Objects, Unleaded Fuel Only, Unlikeable Family Oddball, or Unpleasant Fish Odors. UFOs — Unidentified Flying Objects.

People are clicking shutters at everything that moves or doesn’t move. You’d think they’d be shooting a plethora of photographs of UFOs.

With more cameras than there are people, we still haven’t been able to come up with a photo good enough to make a single Doubting Thomas say, “Wow! UFOs really do exist. Thanks for pointing that out.”

My in-laws believe in creatures from outer space. They claim that my wife, The Queen B, married one. They are a laugh riot. We have no photographic proof of space aliens that look as if they are still growing into their green heads emerging from a spaceship with lights blinking like an old jukebox while making strange sounds like R2-D2 on a Red Bull IV.

Growing up, I’d heard of people who had spotted flying saucers and flying cups and saucers. Most of them had eyes in need of an overhaul or brains that were all thumbs. Some listened to dental records. They had to see UFOs because we didn’t have Lady Gaga, Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber. People who saw UFOs made the news.

“Me and Lemuel were fishing for catfish and we had just polished off a case of Pabst with a whiskey chaser when this bright light appeared out of nowhere and asked to see our fishing licenses. Holy cry! It was a UFO. If I didn’t believe it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have seen it. I just wish I’d have had a camera.”

Years ago, a neighbor had something land on his farm. It didn’t make crop circles. It left footprints that a spaceship would leave. Or what some thought a spaceship would leave if a spaceship left footprints that looked like what was left. Some believed there was evidence that a flying saucer had landed and then taken off again. It had turned a farm field into an airfield.

It wasn’t Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid or Target Field. It wasn’t even a silo bearing the miraculous image of Charlie Sheen. But it was cool in an odd way.

Some folks blamed the imprints in the soil on our local tourism and corn bureau. We didn’t have a local tourism and corn bureau. Others blamed the government. We blame the government for everything. Unless it’s something good. I blamed the economy. We blame the economy for everything that we don’t blame on the government. And we blame the government for the economy.

Was it a hoax? Was it man-made? Who was the perpetrator? Were we living in cloud-cuckoo-land? Was there aluminum foil involved?

Investigators appeared. They set about to prove what they already believed. I’m not sure anyone from the government investigated the scene. Homeland Security wasn’t so nervous in those bygone days.

What did the signs of a brief visit of something that might not have even been there mean? I suspect they said succinctly, “There is no sign of intelligent life on this planet.”

It’s puzzling. We’ll never know the answer. Just as we’ll never know how many pancakes it takes to shingle a doghouse. Maybe Sasquatch pilots a flying saucer. That’s why we can never find a Sasquatch.

But why are sightings of UFOs so infrequent compared to the past? Have you checked the price of gas lately? They’ve cut back on travel. Those spaceships probably get less than a mile per gallon and that’s driving sensibly and at the posted speed limits.

Do I believe in UFOs? I don’t know. When it comes to UFOs, I straddle the fence like a veteran campaigner for public office. There’s no shame in believing in such things, but I’ve had my misplaced optimism crushed more than once. When I was a boy, I believed that we’d have flying cars by now like those depicted on “The Jetsons.” I’ve learned that life is a chess game in which each chess piece has a mind of its own. Eden Phillpotts wrote, “The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”

I believe everything, nobody, nothing and everybody.

And I carry a camera.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.