ZapTown

I think I was twelve or thirteen when I saw the lights in the sky. As I remember it, there were three of them, in near-prefect vertical alignment about midway up in the northeastern sky on a clear October night. This had caught the attention of a neighbor in the Northeast side suburb where I grew up. Armed with a set of black binoculars, he peered at the objects, and even let me have a turn. It didn’t show much; just bigger blobs of light than with the naked eye.

I commented that Frank Edwards might like to hear about this. “I called him,” he said.

Frank Edwards

Before Mulder wanted to believe, before Art Bell tried to convince us to believe, there was Frank Edwards. A journalist of the old school, with a clipped, to the point delivery style, he had been in radio since the 1920s, and a fixture on the WTTV late night news in the late 50s – early 60s. He wasn’t an exciting newscaster, but he had a great baritone voice and often concluded his broadcast with viewer reported sightings of the aforementioned objects, monsters, and fringe-science anomalies.

I used to hurry home for lunch in grade school to catch Edwards’ syndicated radio program, Stranger than Science. Over soup, sandwich and glass of milk, Edwards filled my head with tales of cigar-shaped objects in the sky, strange unknown monsters, and on one terrifying occasion, a guy who spontaneously combusted.

That kind of stuff sticks with you when you’re eight.

But he was known best for his series of books on the strange and uncanny: Stranger than Science, Strangest of All, Strange people. His series of anecdotes about the strange and unusual were short of facts but long on the storytelling. I ate them up like candy.

Edwards later served on the board of NICAP (National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phonomena), founded by UFO investigator Maj. Donald Keyhoe, and became a popular draw on the UFO talk circuit. In 1966 he penned what would be his last book, “Flying Saucers-Serious Business.

This included a tour, and a memorable appearance on the Tonight show. Guest host Steve Lawrence was more interested in talking about science fiction TV shows than the serious business of flying saucers. Still, there he was, bona fide, on national TV.

Even in death, the strange and unusual followed him. He died in the late hours of June 23, 1967, just hours shy of the 20^th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s famous 1947 UFO sighting, which he reported as flying “like a saucer if you skip it across the water.”

Which brings us back around to the curiously aligned lights in the sky. Later that night, sure enough, there was Frank Edwards wrapping up the eleven o’clock news with a report of small bright objects in the sky. Not much of a report, really.

But the cumulative effect for me was that later on I spent a lot of time looking up at the sky, and looking down at science fiction novels. My Christmas presents that year included an inexpensive telescope and a paperback guide to the stars. And it was sometime around then that I realized that in the Autumn and Winter sky was a constellation called Orion. Orion, the hunter, wears a belt in the form of an unusually symmetrical alignment of three stars.

Except…and this is where memory is a funny thing. My memory places this sighting in early Autumn, in early evening, and to the Northeast. In these latitudes and at that time of year, Orion appears only very late in the Fall, and more to the East…and they are not vertically aligned; they appear more in a diagonal pattern.

So, was it an amateur’s mistake coupled with faulty memories? Is it wanting to believe that makes it anomalous now? I don’t know….