SPACING OUT – Look, Up In The Sky (UFO hunter)
"Holy Christmas!" screams Lee Szymborski, a 53-year-old retired stockbroker and part-time drummer. "Look at that object moving!"
We all gaze skyward as the last patches of orange sunset duck behind the peaks of Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area.
"That’s Venus," Alex Podovich replies. Besides the moon, it’s always the first object visible in the night sky.
Tonight, I’m hunting extraterrestrials. Podovich, a Ukraine-born electrician, organizes sky-watches twice monthly with his hobbyist group, the Las Vegas UFO Hunters. They trek to the valley’s darkest suburbs, where strange lights emanate from places other than the top of a glass pyramid.
"Venus doesn’t move!" Szymborski argues. "Look at it! It’s moving very erratically!"
If any of the UFOs we see are indeed driven by spacemen, then hunting would probably be a more accurate word for what they’d do to us. What would our ragtag army of 15 — armed only with binoculars, chairs and coffee thermoses — do once we "catch" one anyway?
"There were 12 disk-shaped objects with domes on top, little button domes on top of all of them," said Ellen Bullock. "Twelve of them went over the top of my house and there was not one sound."
Bullock, a 58-year-old medical technician, is regaling the group with her closest encounter of the second kind.
"Whatever those were, they were wingless and had domes on top," she says.
A commotion erupts on the other side of the Sandstone Quarry Overlook, interrupting the story.
"Over here!" shouts Iris Manzo, a 55-year-old housewife. "To the left! Follow my finger!"
The greatest challenge in group sky-watching is pointing out a pinprick of light. Even to someone standing inches away, your finger position could describe any of about 50 white dots.
"That airplane is about to go underneath it," Iris explains. "You can see it with the naked eye."
We’ve been through this before. None of us can see what Iris sees. If we used her naked eye, maybe, but not any of ours. We need binoculars, which usually confirm that she’s onto something genuine. (How fitting it is that she shares her name with an eyeball part.)
This light appears to move in a straight line. But it’s way too fast to be a plane, and sports no aviation lights.
"(UFOs) don’t always fly like they’re crazy," Podovich informs me. "The shortest distance between two points is still a straight line."
Suddenly, the object quadruples in brightness — like a distant car placing you in its headlights by turning. We all emit an involuntary "whoa!"
A few seconds transpire before I can compose an explanation. We’ve seen a satellite; the glint was either sunlight or moonlight reflected back at us when the angle was right.
"That was not a satellite," Podovich states emphatically. "Satellites don’t flare like that."
Podovich, who moved to town nine years ago (18 years after immigrating to New York City), insists that UFOs are "all over the place" in Las Vegas.
"Three weeks ago, I was sitting out on my balcony watching the sky, and this disk materialized out of the blue against the sky," he told me earlier. "It was a greenish-yellow color, slowly moving. And I took my binoculars and started looking at it. It was actually pulsating and had a cross section of a mushroom."
I’m like Agent Mulder, I want to believe. However, while I’m certain that life exists elsewhere in the universe, it is an entirely separate question as to whether alien beings bothered to conquer the light-speed barrier just to come here and get kinky with probes on farmers.
"Holy Christmas!" the familiar cry repeats.
Szymborski has spotted another UFO that’s really a planet: Mars. I can tell because it’s pink-hued, brighter than most stars, and lies within the planetary ecliptic. (My dad taught middle-school science.) It’s also completely motionless.
"No, look at how that’s moving!" Szymborski insists. "That is really traveling!"
Szymborski invited me on a sky-watch with his own UFO group, the Planeteers. This was after I already confirmed my plans with Podovich. Neither group had heard of the other, so I orchestrated a one-night merger.
Although polite to a fault, Szymborski is starting to give the group the willies — and me a guilt pang for extending the invitation.
"If you’re gonna see something, you’re gonna see it definitely," Podovich pronounces. "There’s not going to be any doubt in anyone’s mind."
I grab a patch of blanket beside some new friends — Consuelo Manzano, 40; Stephanie Ramirez, 15; and Daisy Ponce Guillen, 21 — worrying how to write this article if I don’t see any of Podovich’s definite UFOs tonight.
Just as I rest my eyes on a group of stars, one moves. And I mean really moves. It zigzags like Penelope Pussycat trying to outrun Pepe LePew in a Warner Bros. cartoon.
I ask my blanket buddies if they see it, too. They do. We all observe it change course simultaneously — to the left, then down, then to the right.
"Holy Christmas!"
The familiar cry now emanates from me.
"You see what happens to nonbelievers the first time?" Podovich says, beaming.
Something strange is occurring, however — I mean besides the fact that someone who isn’t human may be piloting a craft that isn’t of this world above our heads. Only the four of us on the blanket can track this UFO.
"I don’t see it," Iris says.
Iris can’t see it and we can? This makes no sense. Even Szymborski isn’t with me on this one.
"Nope," he says.
After squinting for 15 straight minutes, Podovich declares, "You’re obviously not sharing what you’re smoking."
Speaking as someone mocked by groups of people from all walks of life, I can state that guff never feels quite like it does coming from a UFO hunter.
Considering the craft’s wild motion, at first I shunned binoculars, fearing I might lose it. But now I check. The object is easy to find, and doesn’t budge a smidgen relative to the background stars.
When I remove the binoculars, the object moves again. It’s like the monster in my closet reacting to my bedroom light in third grade. (Fine, fifth grade.)
After making such a fuss, I’m ashamed to report my finding. On the Internet later, I read all about a phenomenon called autokinesis.
The autokinetic effect is an optical illusion that makes stationary objects appear to move when it’s really our eyes moving — to gather enough light to process dim scenes. It has been verified by thousands of experiments, and is highly subject to suggestion. (One person can suggest to others a motion for the object, and the others will see that motion.)
That means I just spent 15 minutes doing what I rolled my eyes at Szymborski for doing: declaring unequivocally that a motionless point of light was a craft driven by little green men.
Two unidentified lights approach from the horizon. We all see them this time. They’re moving in a curved line and growing brighter — so bright that we start to glow in their light.
"Evening," says law enforcement ranger Kelly Cole after bringing his SUV to a stop and rolling down his window. He asks to see our permit. Podovich produces it. It reads "for night sky telescope observing." It’s for 10 people.
"There are more than 10 here," Cole says. (That’s because of me and my merger.)
We may be abducted tonight after all — to jail.
Podovich explains that the woman who issued the permit told him it was good for as many as 25 people.
Cole talks to someone on his radio, and the problem seems solved.
"I don’t have enough room for all you guys, anyway," he says.
Before he leaves, Cole asks if we’ve seen any unidentified flying objects.
The answer, I suppose, depends on who they’re unidentified by.
Watch video of Levitan and the Las Vegas UFO Hunters at www.reviewjournal.com/video/fearandloafing.html. Fear and Loafing runs on Mondays in the Living section. Levitan’s previous adventures are posted at fearandloafing.com.
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