They Are Out There

“They Are Out There!” By Edward J. McCoul

They say childhood fears are like seeds buried deep, sprouting only when you least expect it. For me, the seed was planted when I was young, a child too small to fully understand yet big enough to imagine the unimaginable. I was a boy of eight, sitting in a dark theater, my father beside me as the screen flickered to life. The air buzzed with anticipation, but I was already nervous, my stomach tight with the kind of dread that only children know.

War of the Worlds came first. As I watched those metallic monsters rise from the earth, their cold mechanical eyes sweeping over human cities, I gripped the armrest until my knuckles turned white. I had nightmares for weeks afterward, visions of tall, hulking machines trampling through my hometown, looking for boys like me to take away. And then, just a year later, came The Day the Earth Stood Still, a movie with less fire but even more fear. The alien, humanoid but somehow so distant, staring down at humanity with chilling indifference, his intentions unknown. It wasn’t the explosions or the lasers that haunted me—it was the silence, the heavy, ominous silence that followed these beings wherever they went.

One evening not long after, I remember standing alone outside, staring up at the sky as dusk settled in. The stars winked in the growing dark, and for a moment, I thought I saw something move. A tiny blip of light, zipping across the sky. My heart skipped. Was it a plane, a satellite…or something else? My pulse thudded, and before I knew it, I was running home as fast as my legs could carry me, as if that unknown object might swoop down at any moment to snatch me up.

Those early fears never fully left me. They lay dormant, the way a tiny ember smolders beneath ash, waiting for the right gust of wind to stir it to life. And as I grew older, the gusts came—rumors and stories that fanned that ember into a steady flame. I read about the crash at Roswell and the endless whispers about Area 51. News clippings about mysterious lights seen by commercial pilots, sightings so common that even the president, Jimmy Carter himself, claimed to have seen one.

They called them UFOs. Unidentified. Unexplained. Unseen by some, yet ever-present in the background of our world. Sometimes I’d be out in the yard at night, and I’d catch myself looking up, scanning the sky as if expecting to see a flash of light or hear the faint hum of engines descending. As an adult, I knew it was irrational. The odds, I told myself, were astronomically low. And yet, every so often, a chill would creep up my spine, and I’d remember that night in the theater, the cold stare of that alien figure, the mechanical arm that seemed to reach through the screen toward me.

In my thirties, I took a trip to New Mexico, a pilgrimage of sorts. The desert was vast, open, and hauntingly beautiful, the kind of place that felt almost like another world. As I drove through Roswell, the quiet stillness only added to the feeling that something was watching, hiding just beyond sight. I stopped at a diner, hoping to shake off the unease that had settled over me. The locals had stories, of course—stories they were eager to share.

An old man with weathered skin and a knowing look leaned close as he spoke, his voice barely above a whisper. “They’ve been here longer than we think,” he said, his eyes narrowing as he glanced around the room. “They’re just waiting. Watching. They don’t need to rush.” He told me about friends who’d seen things, bright lights darting across the desert sky, strange shapes that hovered too long, and an uncanny silence that settled in their wake, thick as fog.

By the time I left, my hands were trembling. As irrational as it was, I felt as though I’d been marked. An invisible thread seemed to connect me to those stories, pulling me back to that same primal fear from my childhood. I looked up at the clear, cloudless sky, half-expecting to see something staring back.

Years passed, and the fear ebbed and flowed like a tide. Then, one evening, a news headline caught my eye: Pentagon confirms existence of unidentified aerial phenomena. My heart skipped. The government was acknowledging it. After decades of secrecy, of rumors and dismissals, there it was in black and white. The article went on to describe sightings by military pilots, accounts of strange objects moving at impossible speeds, defying every known law of physics. These weren’t shadows on the radar—they were real, tangible things seen by experienced eyes.

I spent the next few days in a haze, rereading the article, scouring the internet for anything else I could find. I stumbled upon testimony from former pilots, men who had no reason to lie, describing encounters that left them shaken.

One man, a seasoned Navy pilot, spoke of an object that had hovered in front of his jet, motionless and silent, before suddenly darting away at a speed that defied comprehension. “It was as if it was studying us,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Sizing us up.” I could almost hear the unspoken question in his words: what were they waiting for?

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, feeling the weight of the sky pressing down on me. The silence was suffocating, the darkness impenetrable. My thoughts drifted back to the movies I’d seen as a child, the scenes that had haunted me for so long. But now, they didn’t seem like fantasy. They felt like a warning.

I got up and went to the window, pulling back the curtain to peer into the night. The street was quiet, the houses dark and still. But the sky—it seemed almost alive, vast and stretching into infinity. For a moment, I felt like that boy again, standing outside, staring up at the stars. The rational part of me wanted to laugh, to dismiss it as foolishness. But a deeper, older part of me—a part rooted in ancient instincts—knew better.

There was a flash. Just a tiny one, like a glint of metal catching the light. My breath caught, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I leaned closer to the window, eyes wide, straining to see. Another flash, closer this time, and then another, a small, steady pattern of lights blinking in the darkness. They hovered, unmoving, just a few hundred feet above the ground.

My heart pounded, my chest tight. I could barely breathe. The lights were close now, too close, and I could see a shape—a shadowy form against the night sky. It was silent, impossibly silent, as if sound itself had been stripped away.

And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it vanished, leaving only the heavy, suffocating silence in its wake. I stumbled back from the window, heart racing, my hands shaking. I wanted to believe it was nothing, a trick of the light, but deep down, I knew the truth.

They were here. They had always been here, watching, waiting, biding their time.

And perhaps, one day soon, they would step out of the shadows and make themselves known.