THE MONSTERS ARE COMING TO MAPLE STREET
By Sasha Patkin
A brief record of facts. A method of controlling of narrative.
From 1947 to 1969 the United States Air Force kept systematic records of all sightings of unidentified flying objects. Project Sign (1947-49), Project Grudge (1949-52), and Project Blue Book (1952-69) scientifically analyzed reported UFO data to identify possible threats to national security.
Reacting in part to the fear and suspicion of the Cold War, Project Blue Book was the longest running and most serious of these three government projects, amassing a total of 12,618 reports over just seven years. But by far biggest incident included in Project Blue Book occurred over a two-week period from July 12 to July 29, 1952, when a series of unidentified objects were reported over Washington National Airport and The U.S. Capitol, inspiring a tidal wave of UFO sighting reports across the country. The incident as known as the “The 1952 Washington, D.C. UFO incident”, “The Washington Flap”, “The Washington National Airport Sightings”, “The Big Flap”. and “The Invasion of Washington”.
On July 29, 1952, to calm public hysteria, several Air Force generals held what turned out to be the largest press conference at the Pentagon since World War II, claiming that the sightings could be explained as natural phenomena and posed no threat to national security. The sheer volume of UFO reports in 1952 drew concern from the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence, however, and ultimately resulted in a shift of government focus from collecting data to purposefully debunking all UFO sightings, which had become more dangerous than any foreign threat.
The poetry in this project borrows and mimics language from Project Blue Book, military UFO reports, essays and articles about drones and drone warfare, and rhetoric from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It attempts to explore themes of alienation, fear, hysteria, the Other, and the unknown from a contemporary perspective.
The scripted scenes were originally from a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone titled, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
The historical records and accounts are taken from Project Blue Book and various government reports on UFOs which were released to the public under the Freedom of Information Act.
Except for the cover image and images in the collage “Distant Visitors”, which were taken from Google Maps, the images in this project are my own photography, taken with a drone.
Fade in on a shot of the night sky. The various heavenly bodies stand out in sharp, sparkling relief. The camera moves slowly across the heavens until it passes the horizon and stops on a sign that reads “Maple Street.”
“Maple Street, U.S.A. Late summer. A tree-lined little world of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children and the bell of an ice cream vendor.
At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 p.m. on Maple Street. This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street – in the last calm and reflective moment – before the monsters came.”
“A few days prior to the incident, a scientist, from an agency that I can't name and I were talking about the build-up of reports along the east coast of the United States". At the end of the two hour conversation, the scientist made a prediction: ..... 'Within the next few days....they're going to blow up and you're going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings. The sighting will occur in Washington or New York,' he predicted, 'probably Washington.’”i
“At 11:40 p.m. on Saturday, July 19, 1952, Edward Nugent, an air traffic controller at Washington National Airport (today Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport), spotted seven objects on his radar.”ii
Pareidolia
The human tendency to perceive patterns in random information, such as hearing hidden messages in music played backwards or seeing a face in the clouds.
As a child I was something of a sky-worshiper Imagining life into the shifting clouds and endless blue until the day I was called inside told the towers were falling and realized they could come from the sky.iii
Laughing at take-off at my sister’s shut eyes Until I was alone, ascending over the ocean and heard a clunk and then silence like a broken promise.
In Washington I watch above my window wonder if they are watching for the planes to suddenly stop and then drop out of the sky like rain down a window.
Now I shut my eyes in a rickety elevator imagine hearing a snap a sickening silence listening for the tension of the cord.
I throw open my window to November air watching election results stream in Craning my neck to see the news station next door.
I realize I’m praying when I hear the silence of the roar of planes the outside conversations quiet Like the world in delicate balance Afraid to speak
Hanging, suspended.
A man is replacing a light bulb on a front porch. He gets off his stool to flick the switch and finds that nothing happens. Another man is working on an electric power mower. He plugs in the plug, flicks the switch of the mower off and on, but nothing happens. Through a window we see a woman pushing her finger up and down on the dial hook of a telephone. Her voice sounds far away.
“I don’t understand it. It was working fine before –”
“The objects were located 15 miles (24 km) south-southwest of the city; no known aircraft were in the area and the objects were not following any established flight paths. Nugent's superior, Harry Barnes, a senior air-traffic controller at the airport, watched the objects on Nugent's radarscope. He later wrote:
We knew immediately that a very strange situation existed . . . their movements were completely radical compared to those of ordinary aircraft.
Both said that they had seen "a bright light hovering in the sky...[it] took off, zooming away at incredible speed."
At this point, other objects appeared in all sectors of the radarscope. When they moved over the White House and the United States Capitol Barnes called Andrews Air Force Base, located 10 miles from National Airport. Airman William Brady, who was in the tower, then saw an "object which appeared to be like an orange ball of fire, trailing a tail . . . [it was] unlike anything I had ever seen before."iv
“The next evening the radar tracked UFOs as they performed extraordinary ‘gyrations and reversals,’ in the words of one Air Force weather observer. Moving at more than 900 miles per hour, the objects gave off radar echoes exactly like those of aircraft or other solid targets. Sightings and trackings occurred intermittently during the week and then erupted into a frenzy over the following weekend. At one point, as an F-94 moved on targets ten miles away, the UFOs turned the tables and darted en masse toward the interceptor, surrounding it in seconds. The badly shaken pilot, Lt. William Patterson, radioed Andrews AFB to ask if he should open fire. The answer, according to Albert M. Chop, a civilian working as a press spokesperson for the Air Force who was present, was ‘stunned silence’” . v
Deep Blue
The first chess-playing computer to defeat a reigning world champion, unsettling experts by displaying moves considered to be creative and beautiful in ways previously considered to be qualities of human thought alone.
We fear because we don't understand their language We are unversed in the coding and algorithms which Govern our experience a technical ignorance in ways that seem intelligent Lit by our screens we sleep with our phones our lovers can seem mechanical less than optimal Our fascination with technology dulling Our need for humanity in regular intercourse
We are only as human as each other and We are alone together
In our fear we are mesmerized by perfection Infatuated by the beauty of the calculable Repetitive tasks and static trajectories once thought the province of humans displace the uncanny human need for thought
We fear because they’ve come from elsewhere to do jobs we once did ourselves rendering us dispensable
We fear because we have forgotten. We fear because we are Lonely Unmanned and aerial
Steve. “It couldn’t be a meteor. A meteor couldn’t do this.”
He and Charlie exchange a look. Then they start to walk away from the group. Tommy comes into the view. He is a serious-faced young boy in spectacles.
Tommy. “Mr. Brand you’d better not!”
Steve. “Why not?”
Tommy. “They don’t want you to.”
Steve and Charlie exchange a grin, and Steve looks back toward the boy.
Steve. “Who doesn’t want us to?”
Tommy (jerks his head in the general direction of the distant horizon ). “Them!”
Steve. “Them?”
Charlie. “Who are them?”
“As papers, politicians, and public clamored for answers, the Air Force hosted a press conference July 29, 1952. It was the largest Pentagon press conference since World War II.
A transcript shows that the spokesperson engaged in what amounted to double-talk, but the reporters, desperate for something to show their editors, picked up on Capt. Roy James' off-the-cuff suggestion that temperature inversions had caused the radar blips. James, a UFO skeptic, had arrived in Washington only that morning and had not participated in the ongoing investigation.”vi
The Buzzing of the Drones
Old English drān, drǣn ‘male bee,’ from a West Germanic verb meaning ‘resound, boom’; related to Dutch dreunen ‘to drone,’ German dröhnen ‘to roar,’ and Swedish dröna ‘to drowse.’Sharing an Indo-European root ("dhran, to drone, to hum") with the Sanskrit "dhran", the Greek "thren-os", and the English "thrum", "drum", and "dream".
A constant sound, sustained through repetition such as produced by the pedal tone on an organ or the question: what violence can come from the sky?
Before foreign warfare and the eyes circling Compton, there was the honeybee.
In the shadow of fear buzzes the etymology. Drone, n.
A male honeybee, a nonworker.
Who are them?
Fallen members of the oligarchy, a disease of the hive devoid of their stingers detesting work neither building nor fighting for the polis who keep them alive yet dying for riches
Buzzing with special receptors they are granted one task: Impregnate the Queen.
Workers are free to work. Workers are free to work.
Workers are free to work without worrying about sex about the continuation of this race
Workers are free to drink the nectar carry the pollen to feed us to buzz wildly, to sting out of fear While we perform our function Over and over Without distraction
Buzzing, lilliputian tyrants
You allow us
To not have To think To think
To not have
To think
In the crowd there is a murmur of irritation and concern, as if the boy’s words even though they didn’t make sense were bringing up fears that shouldn’t be brought up. Tommy is both frightened and defiant.
“They looked just like humans.”
Steve. “Well, I guess what we’d better do then is to run a check on the neighborhood and see which ones of us are really human.”
There is laughter at this, but it’s a laughter that comes from a desperate attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
“After the Washington D.C. UFO incidents, while the nation's opinion makers satisfied that all was well went on to other stories, the aftershocks of the UFO invasion reverberated throughout the defense establishment. H. Marshall Chad well, assistant director of the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence, warned CIA director Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, "At any moment of attack [from the Soviet Union], we are now in a position where we cannot, on an instant basis, distinguish hardware from phantom, and as tension mounts we will run the increasing risk of false alerts and the even greater danger of falsely identifying the real as phantom."
Chadwell feared that the Soviets could plant UFO reports as a psychological warfare exercise to sow "mass hysteria and panic." In fact, as The New York Times noted in an August 1, 1952, analysis, the Washington sightings and others across the country in July were so numerous that "regular intelligence work had been affected."vii
The Predator and the Reaper
Classifications of military drones.
“Lock your doors folks, OK? Lock your doors. No, it’s a big problem …. We have our incompetent government people letting ’em in by the thousands, and who knows, who knows.”
- Donald Trump, Rally in Warwick, Rhode Island April 25, 2016
"Something unknown to our understanding is visiting this Earth."
- Dr. Mitrovan Zverev (USSR), quoted by Reuters, August 26, 1965.
"They burned the American flag and laughed at police.”
- Donald Trump, Twitter, June 4, 2016
"If I become President, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and scientists. I am convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one."
-President Jimmy Carter during his Presidential campaign
"It’s a rape of our country.”
- Donald Trump, Rally in Ohio, June 28, 2016
"There is scientific evidence that strange objects are circling our planet. It is lamentable that governments have drawn a veil of secrecy around this matter."
-Professor Gabriel Alvial, Cerro Calan Observatory, quoted by Reuters on August 26, 1965.
“They’re trying to take over our children. ...They’re pouring in and we don’t know what we’re doing.”
- Donald Trump, Speech at Saint Anselm College, New Hampshire, on refugees suspected of being terrorists, June 13, 2016
"Unidentified Flying Objects are entering our atmosphere at very high speeds and obviously under intelligent control. We must solve this riddle without delay."
-Rear Admiral Delmar Fahrney, USNR, letter to NICAP, 1956.
“I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country.”
- Donald Trump, Interview on CBS, June 19, 2016
"It is true that I was denied access to a facility at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, because I never got in. I can't tell you what was inside. We both know about the rumors (concerning a captured UFO and crew members). I have never seen what I would call a UFO, but I have intelligent friends who have."
-US Senator, US Air Force General, and candidate for President, Barry Goldwater, quoted from a letter he wrote dated April 11, 1979.
“I want toughness & vigilance. We must be smart!”
- Donald Trump, Twitter, June 12, 2016, after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando.
"I feel that the Air Force has not been giving out all the available information on these Unidentified Flying Objects. You cannot disregard so many unimpeachable sources."
-Honorable John McCormack, Speaker of the House, January, 1965, True Magazine.
“That could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting ready to attack.”
- Donald Trump, Rally in New Hampshire, June 30, 2016viiiix
The Predator and The Reaper II
An uncanny repetition
There is prodigious danger in the seeking of loose spirits.
I fear it. I fear it.x
Who are them?
An alien witch hunt beckons the communal pointing of fingers
A cold war divesting man of himself.
In the droning novel of extrajudiciary killing the reaper cannot feel.
Man One. “He got the car started somehow. He got his car started!”
Don. “And he never did come out to look at that thing that flew overhead. He wasn’t even interested.”
(He turns to the group, his face taut and serious.) “Why? Why didn’t he come out with the rest of us to look?”
Charlie. “He always was an oddball. Him and his whole family. Real oddball.”
(The group starts toward the house. In this brief fraction of a moment, it takes the first step toward changing from a group into a mob. The group members begin to head purposefully across the street toward the house.)
Les. “I don’t understand. I swear . . . I don’t u nderstand. What’s happening?”
Don. “Maybe you better tell us. Nothing’s working on this street. Nothing. No lights, no power, no radio, (then meaningfully) nothing except one car yours!”
Les. “What’s it all about, Steve?”
Steve (quietly). “We’re all on a monster kick, Les. Seems that the general impression holds that maybe one family isn’t what we think they are. Monsters from outer space or something. Different from us. Aliens from the vast beyond. (He chuckles.) You know anybody that might fit that description around here on Maple Street?”
Les. “What is this, a gag? (He looks around the group again.) This a practical joke or something? (Suddenly the car engine starts all by itself, runs for a moment, and stops. One woman begins to cry.)
“Look, you all know me. We’ve lived here five years. Right in this house. We’re no different from any of the rest of you! We’re no different at all. . . . Really . . .”
“On September 24, 1952, the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) sent a memorandum to Walter B. Smith, the CIA's Director. The memo stated that "the flying saucer situation . . . has national security implications . . . [in] the public concern with the phenomena . . . lies the potential for the touching-off of mass hysteria and panic."[28] The result of this memorandum was the creation in January 1953 of the Robertson Panel. Dr. Howard P. Robertson, a physicist, chaired the panel, which consisted of prominent scientists and which spent four days examining the "best" UFO cases collected by Project Blue Book. The panel dismissed nearly all of the UFO cases it examined as not representing anything unusual or threatening to national security. Following the panel's recommendation, Project Blue Book would rarely publicize any UFO case that it had not labeled as "solved"; unsolved cases were rarely mentioned by the Air Force.
In accordance with this recommendation, Gregory reduced the number of unexplained UFOs was by simple reclassification. "Possible cases" became "probable", and "probable" cases were upgraded to certainties. By this logic, a possible comet became a probable comet, while a probable comet was flatly declared to have been a misidentified comet. Similarly, if a witness reported an observation of an unusual balloonlike object, Blue Book usually classified it as a balloon, with no research and qualification. These procedures became standard for most of Blue Book's later investigations.”xi
A Smart War
A soft war in concrete terms.
The view from Washington is a perfect picture as stable and crisp as a fairy tale
Watching clouds dissipate in real time, the striking features of an imperial visual culture at war with a concept
To discredit is as simple as the godlike power of the sky
To undermine as simple as the charging of thunderbolts in the sky
As changing the direction of a swarm
It is easy to render alien by verifying and validating the unseen network of call signals, radio waves, Wi-Fi makes invisible facts, violently unsettles fear
The new aesthetic targets
Who is human and What is other
The self and the world
Appeared out of the bright blue sky unaware of their exposures
Narrative masks
The mockery of what we can see attempts to normalize and bring it back down to earth to overwhelm defenses to overwhelm
Not a militant but a mother
Deeply asymmetrical in its intimacy. No sound, smell, taste, or texture
Retuning home to families they
Help with math homework, eat dinner can’t Imagine never touching.
The video uplink from the U.S. Army unmanned drones, sometimes shown to frontline soldiers to boost morale. Desensitization to the death.
The photograph disturbs, pricks. The wounding of an instrument of encounters, imagining and mirroring; a black art to slain your fingers, explosive as temperament The inventory of mortality.
Presence overshadowed by absence provides a spectral view, a strange salve to the points at which the world breaks into a game of two languages, a constituted catastrophe, not from the outside but looking out from our intentions.
In this new hallucination circulating the world. What I do not see cannot prick me. Images build like dust, that exorbitant thing which induces body from soul Each photograph like a death mask cast upon the world Mechanically repeating itself like gunfire burying the moment.
A haunting, subversive medium not when it frightens, repels, stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Kill TVxii
Woman (a little reluctantly). “Well . . . sometimes I go to bed late at night. A couple of times . . . I’d come out here on the porch, and I’d see Mr. Goodman here in the wee hours of the morning standing out in front of his house . . . looking up at the sky. (She looks around the circle of faces.) As if he were waiting for something, (pauses) as if he were looking for something.” (There’s a murmur of reaction from the crowd again as Les backs away.)
Les. “She’s crazy. Look, I can explain that. Please . . . I can re ally explain that. . . She’s making it up anyway. (Then he shouts.) I tell you she’s making it up!”
Suddenly he is left completely alone, and he looks like a man caught in the middle of a menacing circle.
Les. “I’ve already explained to you people. I do n’t sleep very well at night sometimes. I get up and I take a walk and I look up at the sky. I look at the stars! Ethel. That’s exactly what he does. Why, this whole thing, it’s . . . it’s some kind of madness or something.”
Steve (nods grimly). “That’s exactly what it is some kind of madness.”
Steve (raising his voice). “There’s something you can do, Charlie. You can go home and keep your mouth shut. You can quit strutting around like a self -appointed judge and climb into bed and forget it.”
Charlie. “You sound real anxious to have that happen, Steve. I think we better keep our eye on you, too!”
Steve. “I’m surprised at you, Charlie. How come you’re so dense all of a sudden? (He pauses.) Who do I talk to? I talk to monsters from outer space. I talk to threeheaded green men who fly over here in what look like meteors. You’re standing here all set to crucify all set to find a scapegoat all desperate to point some kind of a finger at a neighbor! Well now, look, friends, the only thing that’s gonna happen is that we’ll eat each other up alive ”
Tommy (shouting, frightened). “It’s the monster! It’s the monster!”
Charlie (pulling the gun from Steve’s hands) . “No more talk, Steve. You’re going to talk us into a grave! You’d let whatever’s out there walk right over us, wouldn’t yuh?”
Woman. “You killed him, Charlie. You shot him dead!”
“Project Blue Book was ordered shut down in December 1969 and the Air Force continues to provide the following summary of its investigations:
1. No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security;
2. There was no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represented technological developments or principles beyond the range of modern scientific knowledge; and
3. There was no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as "unidentified" were extraterrestrial vehicles.
The risk of missing a genuine conventional threat to the U.S. Therefore, they recommended the Air Force de-emphasize the subject of UFOs and embark on a debunking campaign to lessen public interest. They suggested debunkery through the mass media, including Walt Disney Productions, and using psychologists, astronomers, and celebrities to ridicule the phenomenon and put forward prosaic explanations. Furthermore, civilian UFO groups "should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking… The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.
It is the conclusion of many researchers that the Robertson Panel was recommending controlling public opinion through a program of official propaganda and spying.”xiii
Prosaic Explanations
Stars, clouds, planets, meteors.
Commonplace, unromantic, the concern of the masses.
Occasionally one stares into the night sky and sees nothing
A lack of poetry defining the celestial bodies
The glare of cities polluting the perspective Of the galaxy.
When the enemy probably, it’s probable, isn’t. A planet which is catching up to the temperatures of rising debates and then are pushed down again in a flustering denial.
Words which lose their meanings, which lose the perspective of the earth.
“How was I supposed to know he wasn’t a monster or something? (He grabs Don.) We’re all scared of the same thing. I was just tryin’ to . . . tryin’ to protect my home, that’s all! Look, all of you, that’s all I was tryin’ to do. (He looks down wildly at the body.) I didn’t know it was somebody we knew! I didn’t know —” (There’s a sudden hush and then an intake of breath in the group. Across the street all the lights go on in one of the houses.)
Woman (in a hushed voice). “Charlie . . . Charlie . . . the lights just went on in your house. Why did the lights just go on? Don. What about it, Charlie? How come you’re the only one with lights now?”
Les. “That’s what I’d like to know.” (Pausing, they all stare toward Charlie.)
“Somebody’s pulling a gag or something.”
Another rock lands on the porch.
Man One (shouting). “It isn’t the kid . . . it’s Bob Weaver’s house.”
Woman. “It isn’t Bob Weaver’s house, it’s Don Martin’s place.” Charlie. “I tell you it’s the kid.” Don. “It’s Charlie. He’s the one.”
Human
A derogatory adjective.
Incumbent fears fomenting with great resentment and the execrable execution of egos, the collateral damage of xenophobic news, faked targets of catastrophic polarization, parties festering recrimination, revolutionarily infecting lasting harm through demonized demagogues unbalancing the totality of the raving, rigged, foiled firebombing of secret meetings banking on total destruction of high-profile politicians shooting up their numbers like madmen in the market of mainstream media, assaulting democracy, vandalized and sprayed with the paint of a new vocabulary of fear a cloud of conspiracy darkening the rhetoric which must be endured by the incited living rooms of triggered nuclear families with their fingers dipping to new lows and rising slowly, to the office, high pulpits speaking for the lowly establishment, as we obey a principle of defiance.
The camera starts to pull away, until we once again we’ve reached the opening shot looking at the Maple Street sign from high above. The camera continues to move away until we dissolve to a shot looking toward a metal spacecraft, which sits shrouded in darkness. An open doo r throws out a beam of light from the illuminated interior. Two figures silhouetted against the bright lights appear. We get only a vague feeling of form, but nothing more explicit than that.
Figure One. “Understand the procedure now? Just stop a few of t heir machines and radios and telephones and lawn mowers. . . Throw them into darkness for a few hours, and then just sit back and watch the pattern.”
Figure Two. “And this pat tern is always the same?”
Figure One. “With few variations. They pick the most d angerous enemy they can find . . . and it’s themselves. And all we need do is sit back . . . and watch. Their world is full of Maple Streets. And we’ll go from one to the other and let them destroy themselves. One to the other . . . one to the other . . . one to the other ”
The camera slowly moves up for a shot of the starry sky, and over this we hear the Narrator’s voice.
“The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, atti tudes, prejudices – to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill – and suspicion can destroy – and a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own – for the children – and the children yet unborn. And that is the great pity of it all.”
Distant Visitors, 2016
Accidental aerial self-portraits of Google photosphere creators on the National Mall, digitally obscured
Dawn
From the Old English verb dagian, "to become day." A choice.
“I can’t make sense of things anymore,” the voice of my grandfather, after a morphine drip the candidates on a screen behind him “Nothing seems to be holding together.”
“That’s because it doesn’t make sense,” my father entering deadpan while my grandfather sits glassy-eyed behind him. My father offers the word “Kristallnacht” to my cousin, who refuses it.
When I return in a week, my grandfather lies between realms in a state my mother tells me is known as Sundowning
The hospice aide, Dawn, transcribes his sleepless night:
“Help help help”
“I’m dying”
“Pick me up”
“Grab my hat”
“Did you hear that?”
“No, what?”
“Didn’t you hear my father calling my name?”
He awakes to find Dawn standing over him.
“Where am I?”
“You’re home.”
“Why are you with me?”
“I’m taking care of you.”
“I’m not dead?”
“I don't know what happens after someone dies, but maybe, just maybe” my aunt mumbles through ellipses.
As I stand in the doorway I am struck by his appearance like nothing I’ve seen before on this earth.
“It was a rapid decline,” my father tells a cousin.
“Just last week we were talking about the election.”
Thin body blended with white as though from elsewhere mouth open but slanted breathing elsewhere
When everyone leaves I pull away the sheet interrupting white with a hand black and bruised from a body which has stopped circulating and I lay my hand on a warmth that does not feel like death.
A week passes again and the last breaths of October rattle and the sun comes in slanted from elsewhere and as I drive up the coast and I watch the night begin to doubt.
The sky shifts as I come to a bridge impossibly white and arched over water I cannot see and endless fog.
How do you prepare for the end of the world?
Before he left he waited for my grandmother’s hand and the voice of Dawn, breaking
“Tell him not to be afraid.”
“Maybe, just maybe,” I hear my aunt’s voice again as my car is engulfed in orange
and it all seems less like ridiculous imaginings and more like a rational consideration of possibilities so beautifully simple when the night lets go of its fear and trusts it to the sky.
Works Consulted
Berkowitz, Roger. "Drones and the Question of “The Human”. Ethics & International Affairs, 28.2 (2014): 159-69.
Chandler, Katherine F. "A Drone Manifesto: Re-forming the Partial Politics of Targeted Killing." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2.1 (2016): 1-23.
Greene, Daniel. "Drone Vision." Surveillance and Society (2015)
Gusterson, Hugh. "Drones 101." The MIT Press (2016): 3-28. JSTOR. Web. 3 Dec. 2016.
i Captain Edward Ruppelt, “The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects,” as quoted in Ridge, Francis L. "The Washington National Sightings." The National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena . N.p., 15 Dec. 1997. Web. 5 Dec. 2016.
ii Carlson, Peter. "50 Years Ago, Unidentified Flying Objects From Way Beyond the Beltway Seized the Capital's Imagination." The Washington Post. N.p., 21 July 2002. Web. 5 Dec. 2016.
iii Line inspired by Heart of a Dog (2015), by Laurie Anderson.
iv Ryan, Michael. The Third Kind: A Compendium of U.F.O. Encounters. 16 Nov. 2015. Web. 5 Dec. 2016.
v "The Central UFO Registry." UFO-Alarm. 2016. Web. 5 Dec. 2016.
vi Peebles, Curtis, Watch the Skies!: A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth. Berkley Books, 1994.
vii "UFOs and the Government." HowStuffWorks Science. HowStuffWorks, n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.
viii Michael. "Famous UFO Quotes By Presidents, Politicians, Military Officers And Astronauts." Mysteries Of The World. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.
ix Gass, Nick. "The 21 Craziest Quotes from the Campaign Trail." Politico. 11 Nov. 2016. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.
x Line adapted from The Crucible
xi "Project Blue Book." Revolvy. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.
xii This poem directly quotes language from Susan Sontag's On Photography and Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida
xiii "Project Blue Book." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.