Nonencounters of the Extraterrestrial Kind

The movie E.T. the Extraterrestrial was an entirely new experience for me. I reveled in Star Trek and Star Wars. Before those movies I grew up on The Adventures of Superman television series. Some of the outer space shows, movies, books and comic books made perfect sense to me. I loved the writers’ viewpoints and the remarkable intelligence it took to bring such unusual ideas to life. Of course, they were all science fiction and space fantasy like the literature course I took in college. Such things did not happen in real life. We could put a towel on our shoulders and jump of a high set of steps, but we were still not Superman. The American and Russian space programs were scarcely advanced enough to travel from our planet to the moon, much less one galaxy to the next. As for Roswell, I scarcely knew the location of New Mexico to say nothing of the small city now considered the UFO center of the country. I had no idea that the stories about UFO’s were anything other than something you’d read in a book. I had no idea that people were seriously reporting encounters with aircraft and beings from outer space.

The closest I have come to that center of unidentified flying objects in America is probably the area around Hondo, NM when I was a Benedictine monk. Back then I never thought about aliens from outer space. With all of the legal and illegal aliens from Mexico and points south, I was more concerned with their welfare. Did they have a home, a place to stay? Some sort of shelter? Did they have jobs and food? Clothing for themselves and…