UFOs, Alien Kidnapping & the Hindenberg

News Item: France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades. The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists. "It is a world first," said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of "non-identified aerospatial phenomena." French UFO Website

I'm not sure if I really was kidnapped by aliens, but the story below is true.

When I was 13 years old, I would take the same bus every day to school. I had to walk about 10 minutes to the corner to the bus stop (AC Transit) that came around 7:15am. one day, I left at the usual time and I got to the bus stop and waited and waited and waited and finally a bus came and it was the 10:30am bus. I've never worn a watch, so I had no idea what time it was, but somehow about 3 hours went missing from my consciousness, so I've always just figured I was kidnapped by aliens and they couldn't deal with me, so they just put me back.

Or maybe that's why I am the way I am?

I once thought I saw a UFO, but I figured out it was someone from the other side of the street that shot off a Roman Candle right over the top of our house.

I did try to create a UFO on Halloween, but it's probably lucky my plan failed. For some reason, when I was a kid, the Chemistry sets you could buy had lots of dangerous chemicals (life was so much more fun back in the good olde days, eh?) and I figured out how to make Hydrogen gas and in my wierd mind, I thought I would take a couple of dry cleaning plastic bags doubled up for strength, fill them up with hydrogen gas that I was going to make in the garage, put a gondola full of lighter fluid underneath, make a slow burning fuse, which I was able to make with my chemistry set and float it up over the town on Halloween night and when it blew up in a Hindenberg Jr. like explosion, I would see the story in the paper the next day. What an excellent idea, eh? Make hydrogen gas in the garage with a car full of gasoline..

Well, lucky for me and the rest of my family, I failed miserably. and I was truely miserable afterwards. as I was putting a glass funnel into the rubber stopper which I was going to use to mix the chemicals, the glass tube broke (I didn't know you were supposed to use Glycerin to make the glass slide through the hole) and I jammed about 2 inches of the tube into my right hand right between the thumb and index finger in the nice fleshy part and then it broke off making a nice tube where all the blood could nicely squirt out easily and quite a lot of it did flow.

My Dad was watching football and as calmly as I could (this part is fuzzy in my mind because it's so long ago, so maybe it was a panicky scream?) said I needed some help. We went down to the hospital, I had to wait for what seemed like a really long time with a bloody towel wrapped around my hand, the doctor shot me up with some anesthetic and in about 2 seconds stuck a jagged glass tube held in tweezers in front of my face and said: "Is this it?" Those doctors are such jokers!! Since is was scientific glass, it has lead in it, so it will show up in an X-Ray and there was one small piece left in my hand and it floated around for about 10 years, sometimes coming near the surface and causing pain when I shifted gears while driving. Thankfully, it's stuck somewhere deep inside and it just leaves me alone.

The moral of this story is: If you ever get the idea to recreate the Hindenberg disaster, just watch the film of it bursting into flames and think about the "Humanity".

Hindenberg Video