UFO Story

In my last entry I wrote about the common occurrence of strange events happening late at night, usually after being woken up or being woken up due to the strange event. I thought this time I would write about the first time I ever heard a story with this occurrence. In fact it is probably the first inexplicable story that I heard which seemed to me to have an ounce of credibility to it. However, this story is different in that it is a UFO story. I believe it is the only UFO story I have.

The story was told to me when I was in high school. In my final year I took a course in advance physics. It was essentially a university level physics course that the school taught. Students came from other regions of the city just so that they could take this course. We had just finished taking a class on relativity. In it the teacher explained that ordinary matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light because as its speed approaches that of light the energy exerted on the object to make it go faster ends up being converted to mass. As the object gets more massive it takes even more energy to make it go faster. As the object reaches the speed of light its mass becomes infinite and so effectively making it impossible to go faster. The teacher then got slightly off topic by explaining that this is why UFOs could not be visiting Earth from other planets. The great distances involved and the limitation of velocity prevented any reasonable quick travel across the stars.

Further discussion on this point continued. Of course a classroom full of teenage boys (there was only one girl in the class) was bound to have a few trying to argue for the existence of UFOs. The teacher finally agreed to concede one point by telling the following story.

He had studied at Carleton University in Ottawa, and while he was there he was good friends with another science student that lived on the campus in student residence. This friend was a hard core student of science and didn’t have any interest in supposed inexplicable events, in particular UFOs. He was interested only in what could be explained by science.

However one night my teacher’s friend went to bed only to be woken up in the middle of the night. For reasons he couldn’t explain he got up and looked out his window and there hovering in the air outside of the residence was a flying saucer. (Now this story was told to me so long ago that I have now forgotten the details of the saucer, such as size, etc, but I don’t think that is critical.) Any way, the student observed the saucer for a few minutes and then finally decided that no one would ever believe him unless he told some other students on his floor and have them look. So with this he ran out of his room and started hammering on a couple of his friend’s doors trying to get them to wake up and look out the window. (Again, I have forgotten to what degree he had success in this operation, but he was able to rouse at least one neighbour.) Upon returning to his dorm window he looked out only to see that the UFO was gone. The other student or students saw nothing. My teacher’s friend recounted this event later to his friends. He admitted that it couldn’t have been a UFO, yet on the other hand he had seen something that he couldn’t explain.

My teacher had full faith in his friend and that he wouldn’t have made up this story, yet still he couldn’t believe in UFOs.

Comments:
Obviously I like this story because it has the repeating theme of being woken in the night to experience a curious event. Unfortunately the story is handed down to me second hand, and now third hand to you dear reader. So this leaves much room for error in the facts, not to mention that we really can have no faith in knowing what the personality of this student was like. However I did know my physics teacher quite well and knew that he definitely was not the type to entertain bogus ideas and pseudoscience. I don’t think he would have told this story unless he trusted his friend, and even then I think he was reluctant to tell it.

I also don’t know what to make of the UFO theme. I have never seen a UFO and have never met anyone who thinks they have. Also UFO sightings seem to be associated with modern-day western observers. The ancient Chinese didn’t seem to report on them very often. Still, it is a fun story and possibly another piece of the puzzle.