Greetings family, friends and neighbors!  This week's  short story is about a modern day roadside attraction that brings back a few memories of UFO's and growing up in the 1950's....Bill

Roadside Distractions

LITTLE GREEN MEN

Lathrop, CA. It appears that a flying saucer has crashed into the

roof of the Power Market near Interstate 5 and that there are

dozens of little green men scouring around and whooping it up on

the roof and inside the building, swinging from the rafters and

creating quite a commotion. The aliens are everywhere, getting

into merchandise, squeezing milk cartons, breaking eggs and

causing general havoc, but are mostly ignored by convenience

store regulars and day trippers that have stopped for snacks and

cold drinks.

My first “encounter” with flying saucers was in 1951 in Howard

Hawks’s classic film The Thing from Another World in which a

saucer shaped alien space ship is recovered from the Arctic ice,

but unlike Power Market’s wacky non-threatening invaders, the

monstrous alien predator is released and manages to wipe out

most everyone in the film, and resulted in me to sleeping with the

lights on for years!

Saucer mania began with the report of nine “flying discs” in

Washington State in the late 40’s by a commercial pilot, and with a

supposed flying saucer crash and alien body retrieval in Roswell,

New Mexico. Reported sightings and abductions increased during

the following two decades, as did science fiction movies including

It Came from Outer Space and The Day the Earth Stood Still. A

short lived Flying Saucer ride was installed in Disneyland’s

Tomorrowland in 1960 where guests piloted their own anti-gravity

spacecraft a dizzying two inches above earths surface. The US Air

Force’s Project Blue Book’s Scientific Study of twelve thousand

reported Unidentified Flying Objects vaguely concluded in 1969

that “ Nothing has come from the study of UFO’s in the past 21

years that has added to scientific knowledge”.

A resurgence in reports of UAP’s (Unexplained Aerial

Phenomena) resulted in a recent American public congressional

hearing and a statement by the deputy director of Naval

Intelligence stating that the military hadn’t found “anything non-

terrestrial in origin”. Maybe we should tell him about the goings-on

at the Power Market in Lathrop. -Bill 7/24