Weird! Who, me?

Way back in the 1980’s I was working at a citrus ranch on the East side of Imperial Valley.  That was when I decided on a life promise to never live West of where I worked, again.  I’d drive to work with the rising sun in my face, work all day, then enjoy the setting sun in my face on the way home.  One day I was driving the company’s little red Japanese pickup home with a couple of other guys in the cab.  It was mostly cloudy so the sun wasn’t an issue that day, but there were breaks in the clouds, too.  As we drove along I noticed a bright light in the western sky above a big, dark cloud.  It was coming down, but quite slowly.  I am fairly certain it was a meteor and that it was coming nearly towards us, which would give it the illusion of moving very slowly.  We watched it for a couple of minutes until it went behind the cloud, and here comes the fun part.  Suddenly, it came right through the cloud, leaving a clear spot behind, through which we could see blue sky.  The hole continued to grow bigger for a couple of seconds after the light passed through.  Shortly after, the meteor burned up or something, because the light went out.  Now my mind says meteor, and the heat of its entry into the atmosphere made the cloud turn back into water vapor.   We all saw it, so it wasn’t my feeble brain creating things in response to the sun in my eyes, or swamp gas or any of that.

  Well, today I was eating my lunch at home and I turned on Discovery Channel and watched a show about UFOs.  They were describing an incident at the Chicago airport where an object was visible (but not on radar) above one of the concourses, but then it shot up into the sky and left a hole in the clouds through which people could see blue sky.   They claimed that is proof positive it was a UFO, because there is no other explanation for something with enough energy to melt a hole in a cloud.  Wow!  So I saw a UFO after all?  Well, that’s one thing.

Second thing.  I’ve seen very unusual, big, black cats out at the farm where we hunt pigs, and I’ve seen them on 3 separate occasions.  They have a short tail, but are otherwise proportioned more like a cougar.  The bobbed tail says, Bobcat, but I’ve also seen bobcats out there and they are an entirely different kind of cat.  In fact, I’ve been within 4 or 5 feet of a bobcat out there and had a very good look at him, indeed!  I’ve seen these black cats in full sunlight twice, and I’ve seen them up close (20 feet away or so), moving slowly, and out in the open.  There is no doubt about what they are and what they are not, but it leaves me in a curious situation of having observed something unknown to science.  Scientists are all from Kansas (Show me!), and invariably react to reports like mine with disdain.  They always respond with something like, “There is no such thing as a black cougar”, or “All cats look black at night.”, or “I’m sure he thought he saw it, but it was actually just swamp gas nebulizing into a poltrificating storm, causing caustrophying ions in his eyes and making it look black” while giving the impression they really believe it has to do with inbreeding.  

That makes two different, unrelated things where I find myself on the opposite side from scientists, and I desperately don’t want to be there.  Well, I can’t do anything about duplicating a meteor punching a hole through a cloud, so that one has to remain in the category of an interesting tale, but I will probably see a black cat again.  The thing is, I have had an ongoing argument with myself over what to do about it.  The easiest thing would be to shoot one.  But I don’t really want to shoot an unusual animal, even if it does give me scientific credence, because then I would have well and truly earned scientific disdain for having killed a rare animal - one that probably deserves to be on the endangered list.  The other alternative is to photograph it in detail, but there is a big problem with that.  It’s probably about a hundred times harder to get a good photograph than to shoot it, and I am not THAT good at sneaking up on wild predators.  Plus, I don’t have the proper equipment for it, nor the money to buy it, not, frankly, a burning desire to get that far into photography.  So, I guess I’ll just have to remain in that poor, pitiful, unloved and un-believed group of people who are generally labeled as weirdoes.