Written for a contest. Didn’t win, but I like the story.
Many people have asked me to speak out publicly about what happened in Kill Devil Hills that night. Many people have claimed they were there with me or they know my whereabouts now. As a message to all of those people: I can almost certainly assure you that you weren’t there. I can most certainly assure you that you have no idea where I am now.
Some people say it was Divine fate that the site of the first flight sustained human flight was the site of the most important if not the most spectacular crash in recorded history. The first publicly confirmed crash of a flying craft that didn’t originate from Earth happened on August 19th, 9:04pm. I was putting up equipment and flicking through previews on my Nikon in the last discernible twilight shadow of the Wright Brothers Monument. I’d been taking pictures for National Geographic all through the evening and the sunset hours.
I wish I could say I looked up and saw the trail of light or a blinding flash or something, but the only thing that I noticed as it was falling was that I suddenly couldn’t see my preview screen for all the light. I thought it was one of my crew members’ flash bulbs for a split second between the flash and the impact.
A steely ball the size of one of those had torn through the pine trees at the edge of the plain and embedded itself in the artificially preserved dune, kicking up muddy sand and splattering a line almost exactly along the path of that last, longest flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright.
When I got to the ball, it was slightly crumpled and bits of the thermal shielding were everywhere, but when it opened, the passenger was still miraculously alive. He, she, it was mostly the shape of a biggish scarab beetle with half a dozen fingers on each of four forelegs and miraculously lucid eyes. I felt myself illuminated by him like I’d stuck my face in a Xerox machine.
He crawled out and fired some kind of chemical coolant from a canister all over the outside of his craft. Then he turned around and caught my eye. He pointed at his craft. He pointed at the moon. He walked over to his ship and leaned against it hard, trying to roll it out of the hole and then looked at me, and I clearly understood the implication, “Aren’t you going to help?” It never even occurred to him that I might be hostile, or maybe that even if I was, that there was a thing I could do to hurt him.
I clambered up beside him and we rolled his craft until he beckoned to stop, and then he hopped up on top of it. I didn’t see exactly what he did to make it work, but I saw a circle in bright green laser light drawn against a cloud in the sky, steady and unwavering. He sat down beside his ship and started drawing in the sand with his fingers, looking up at me occasionally, waving like he wanted to say something.
I took picture after picture with the help of the crew, since he was so utterly unafraid. He waited there for hours, acknowledging us, but not terribly interested. He just looked bored and impatient. At 2:30, the adrenaline was finally starting to wear away and make me shaky. Then a thrumming sound hit just at the bottom of my hearing. I looked up that time and got a wonderful shot of the craft that came to pick him up and take him away. He drew a sign on the ground (that’s the National Geographic, December 1994 Cover everyone knows so well by now), and was gone.
I sent the photographs on to National Geo and to the Smithsonian, the BBC, the Washington Post, the Times, and the News & Observer along with who I was and my credentials and a letter signed by myself and my entire crew.
Five days later we all started getting the calls from the Government and contractors wanting to interview us, and when they became more strongly worded, we knew it was time to go. As you know, not one of us has been seen since. We still tell our story out here on message-boards, in email and in newsgroups, just to let you know that we’re indeed still alive, that we’re safe, that we’re happy with what we saw that night and what we’ve seen since.
Oh, one final thing to those who are still looking for me. You’d be surprised to know how far the Internet goes…
