Growing Up Alien: Page 5

It wasn't long before an extraterrestrial influence began to make itself felt in our own household. First my father claimed he'd seen mysterious lights passing over the continental divide. Then there was the time my parents went out for a walk and returned saying they had spotted the tracks of an unearthly three-toed being in the snow outside. Soon afterward I discovered some inexplicable tracks myself, but still I was skeptical about the possibility of interplanetary contact; my imagination ran in more of a nineteenth-century gothic vein. For instance, I was convinced that the howling sounds produced by the 100-mph winds pounding our deck were actually the demonic cries of a giant, tormented black dog that haunted the roof above my room at night.

My cynicism about UFOs began to erode when my father informed me that my mother had been briefly abducted by aliens late one night when she got up to adjust the thermostat. My dad found her unconscious on the kitchen floor; when she came to, after more than an hour, she had no recollection of what had happened. Dad concluded that she had been abducted by space monkeys. He had heard them in the walls that night, speaking some kind of high-pitched digital language. After that I made sure to listen for these interplanetary gibberings over the dog's howl that continued to disturb my sleep.