A School Trip and a Sighting

           The school trip to the local observatory did not begin well. It was the first such trip I, as a newly minted high school science teacher, had ever taken my students on. Now when I was a high school student (my classes hate it when I say stuff like that), school trips had students full of energy and sound. We talked and laughed, but at least we exhibited some enthusiasm on the bus ride to our eventual educational destination. This school trip had a vacuum of silence, almost everyone staring at and playing with their ‘devices’. I wish I had the authority to tell them to leave those bloody things in their lockers, but I didn’t. I hope they don’t continue doing that when they have a chance to look at the images of the now cloudless sky through the big telescope.

           The worst was Gary, who had his eyes on his device for most of his time in my classroom, no matter what I said to him about doing that, and his eyes were constantly on it on the bus.

           To get my students interested in what they were going to see, I told them about the flying saucer craze in movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Nobody ever saw one for real, but apparently one person saw something in the sky and said that it ‘looked like a saucer.’ Movie makers bought the idea, and so began the craze. I had my dad’s toy flying saucer when I was a boy.

           For my class the week before, the school trip, I arranged a showing of the B-est of all B-movies, Plan 9 and Outer Space. Among other campy elements, it featured Bela Lugosy (who had died before most of the movie was filmed, so it wasn’t a speaking part). There was a female character who was beginning her active movie career as ‘Vampiri’, a Swedish wrestler who played someone with no lines but who walked around with a very big body and a very scary face. Plan 9 of the space invaders seemed to consist mainly of bringing the human dead to life (with new flesh on their bodies) to attack and scare humans.

           At the end of the movie, the viewers saw the aliens’ flying saucer burst into unnatural looking flames.

Going on the Trip

           One reason that I wanted to take the class to the observatory was that my old university pal, Frank, worked there. We took pretty much all the same courses, and helped each other with our assignments so that we both received good marks. It was like old times again talking to him about the school trip and how I had shown the students Plan 9 and Outer Space. We both had a good laugh, especially when I told him how, with his help, I planned to use student viewing of that movie on the trip.

           When he saw me leading the students towards the room with the telescope in it we winked at each other in a conspiratorial manner.

           One aspect of their being able to look deeply and clearly into space that fascinated the students most when they were in the classroom was conjunction events. That was the rather deceptional name for what happened when two objects, satellites or pieces of space debris collided with each other. There were at least 4,500 satellites in 2021, and the number has probably grown considerably since then. And as for space debris, conservative estimates had over 36,500 of them over four inches long in our atmosphere. I knew that some of my students would be looking for conjunction events when their turn came to look through the telescope.

           When we walked into the room with the telescope, I was glad that some of the students were eager to see the skies like they never had before. A few rushed forward to be among the first to scan the sky. I had told them of what they might be able to see that would possibly be almost as interesting as conjunction events.

           As each one had completed their time on the telescope, I would ask them ‘what did you see’? A couple of them said they had seen what they thought could be a conjunction event, but were disappointed when they did not see any explosions. They did enjoy seeing the other planets ‘in person’ as one of them said, and the stars other than the sun

           Gary was the last one to have a sky viewing through the telescope. I practically had to push him all the way to it before he would take his eyes off of his device and look at another device. At first his look was very casual, trying to display to me and to his fellow students his lack of interest. But then he changed. There was a sudden intensity, with his eyes almost literally on the glass surface he was looking through. But that was nothing when compared to what next caught his eyes and his total attention.

           When his time was up, we were on a fairly rigid schedule, and I asked him to come with us, he just said a very loud NOOO. When I asked him what he had seen, was still seeing, he replied, “I saw a conjunction event, but what I saw next was a frigging flying saucer, exactly like the one in the movie - identical.

           There was silence. Then I laughed, as did my friend Phil, when he came down the ladder that led to the top of the curved ceiling through which the telescope penetrated. He was carrying an object in his hand that he soon revealed was a picture of a Plan 9 and Outer Space flying saucer. As previously planned he had superimposed it on the telescope. It was something generally used for shading what people saw when the sunlight was too bright for them to look through.

           Then Gary laughed, and said, “You sure fooled me. Good one sir.” On the bus-ride back to the school, he and I engaged in a long conversation about outer space. He asked me what courses I and my friend Phil took to get involved with the sky (his actual wording) as an adult.

And in the next class he never looked at his device once.