Night Lights, page 8
I groaned loudly, but I didn’t really mind. In fact, it worked well as a distraction on our long walk into town. It took over twenty minutes to reach the bottom of Prospect Way, and another fifteen to walk up the main road into Wooralla. By the time we reached the UFO Museum, my jeans were damp, my nose was numb, and my lungs were wheezy from the chill.
The museum was a large windowless shed with nowhere near enough lighting and way too many draughts. Still, there was something welcoming about the hodgepodge of glass display cabinets and polished timber tables. An old cast iron stove was trying to heat the large open floor plan and failing miserably. Wispy cobwebs and a fine layer of dust over most of the surfaces made it feel more like a bric-a-brac store than an exhibition space.
“Check this out,” Marty said, pointing out a framed artwork just inside the door. It was an illustrated map of the town showing various places of interest. Wooralla Ridge was clearly marked, as was The Flying Saucer Diner. Marty jabbed his finger at a place called Picnic Point that was circled and highlighted with a picture of a UFO. “Good place to spot ’em, you think?”
He wiggled his eyebrows playfully. He was definitely all-in on the UFO nonsense, at least for the duration of our stay.
I grabbed a pamphlet from a brochure stand on the table. Picnic Point Landing Site: A Self-guided Walking Tour. I flashed the pamphlet at Marty. He bugged his eyes and snatched it from me.
“Landing site?” he exclaimed, his face lighting up. His voice carried across the building. A middle-aged woman chuckled as she browsed the postcard display.
“We are definitely doing this,” Marty said, skimming the pamphlet’s information. “It says here that Picnic Point was the site of a famous UFO sighting in 1974, which was witnessed by over forty people. ‘A busload of local schoolchildren and teachers’,” he read, “‘as well as the residents of nearby properties, observed an unidentified craft in the sky above the Picnic Point Lookout. It landed in a clearing behind the lookout’s parking area and remained on the ground for around five minutes before rising again in a hovering motion, then tilting on its side and shooting off into the sky at an impossible speed’.”
Marty needn’t have recited the pamphlet word for word – it was soon obvious that the Picnic Point Incident was heavily documented throughout the museum. There was detailed information about it everywhere we turned: scrapbooks of newspaper clippings; artistic depictions of what people saw; even audio clips of witness interviews you could listen to through clunky retro headphones. Marty almost lost his mind when we reached a cabinet with a circular plaster cast that had been purportedly created from an indent left behind in the ground by the UFO’s landing gear.
“‘The craft was described as a silver disc’,” Marty read from the wall plaque, “‘like a saucer turned upside down and placed on top of another, with no rivets or joins. From side-on it appeared cigar-shaped, and witnesses who got close to it described it as giving off heat and making no sound’.”
“Got close to it?” I peered at the plaster cast in the glass cabinet. “How close are we talking?”
“People actually got within a metre or two of the craft,” came a gravelly voice from behind us. We both turned to find a bearded man shuffling down the aisle with a large cardboard box in his hands. He walked with a slight limp, his baggy trousers faded and unironed. One pantleg had unravelled at the hem and was getting caught beneath his shoe.
I recognised him from the diner. It was the old bloke who had asked us where we were staying, the same one Zoey the waitress was having words with as we left.
“One of the witnesses who got the closest,” he went on, “came away with what appeared to be a light sunburn from head to toe. He felt dizzy, but was otherwise unharmed. In fact, a day later his skin condition had completely cleared up. He no longer had the severe eczema he’d suffered with since he was a baby.”
A laugh bubbled out of Marty. “Naaah. For real?” He gave me a sidelong glance and I tried to stifle my grin. The old guy seemed sincere.
“Read all about it for yourself,” he said, seemingly unbothered by Marty’s scepticism. He placed the cardboard box down and started unpacking ceramic mugs to stack beside a pile of folded T-shirts on the table. “There are photos on the wall over there, as well as a transcript of his police interview.”
“We’ll check it out, for sure,” Marty said. “I think we spoke in the diner a couple of days ago, didn’t we?”
“We did indeed,” the old guy said. He buffed one of the mugs on his shirtsleeve, then displayed it carefully so the slogan was facing the aisle. The Truth is Out There. “I’m Graeme. I own and run the museum.”
“This stuff is great,” Marty said, waving a hand at everything around us before digging in his pocket. “Very eye-opening.”
He offered up two green paper tickets, our complimentary entry to the museum for eating at The Flying Saucer. As far as I could tell, the museum was free entry for everybody; the tickets were obviously a ploy to draw curious people inside.
Graeme watched my uncle carefully. Did he think Marty was being sarcastic? There was nothing snide in my uncle’s words, and his enthusiasm seemed to put the older man at ease. Graeme took the tickets and gave us a friendly nod before shuffling back up the aisle towards the service counter.
Marty quickly became fascinated with a cabinet of collectibles, everything from wind-up tin spaceships to ET plush toys and old VHS movies. When he started examining the large collection of vintage sci-fi comics, I knew he’d be a while. I wandered off on my own, hunting down more information about Wooralla’s UFO sightings. Even though the Picnic Point Incident sounded completely bogus, I was curious to know what other people had supposedly witnessed in the decades since.
As I flipped through a spiral-bound album – mostly photos of the night sky with no real reference for size or scale – I noticed somebody sweeping behind the service counter. His bulky stature was familiar, and the shaggy mop of his blond hair.
It was the guy I ran into on the bush track yesterday.
“Oh,” I said awkwardly when he met my stare. “Err … hey.”
He looked me up and down with a blank expression.
“How’s your head?” I added. The graze on his temple had cleaned up well; it was completely unnoticeable.
The blond guy rested his hands on the end of the broom and tilted his head in a way that felt vaguely patronising. “Have we met, mate?”
It took a second for his words to process. My neck flushed with heat.
Why was I embarrassed, though? He was the one who didn’t remember me.
Behind me came a scraping sound. Graeme was backing out of a storeroom, dragging a large box across the dusty boards.
“Ah,” he said, spotting me. “Bruno’s not bending your ear off, is he?”
The guy with the broom resumed sweeping. Had he hit his head harder than I thought? To be fair, I wasn’t exactly memorable, but surely he knew what I was referring to even if he was blanking on my face.
“How’s everything going up on the mountain?” Graeme asked, tearing open the top flaps of the box. He pulled out a plastic-wrapped tea towel with The Flying Saucer’s logo screen-printed on the front, along with the lines: Fresh Sightings. Brewed Daily. Graeme noticed me reading it and held it up proudly. “These go gangbusters in our online shop.”
My gaze travelled over the museum’s dingy interior. “You have an online shop?”
“It’s connected to our website,” Graeme explained. “We have a very popular Facebook page and YouTube channel.”
“Oh, right.” I smiled politely, wondering just how many tinfoil-hat wearing chumps fell for this stuff. Obviously enough to make it worth printing tea towels.
I gestured at the photo album. “These lights that people claim to have seen,” I said. “Are they always the same kind? How do witnesses describe them?”
Graeme paused only briefly before continuing to unpack his box.
“Why?” he said. “You see something?”
The blond guy, Bruno, stopped sweeping again to stare at me.
“Oh … umm … no,” I backtracked. “I’m just curious about what other people have seen.”
Graeme reached over the counter and pulled out an iPad. I was taken aback to see any kind of digital technology in the context of this old-school tourist trap. He tapped the screen a few times before handing it to me.
He’d opened a Facebook page called Wooralla Skywatchers.
“You should join our group,” he said. “Our members are chatting about this sort of thing all the time.”
I scrolled down the group’s page, which admittedly seemed to be very active. I clicked on the Media tab so I could view the photos and videos.
“Why are there so many pictures of military bases?” I asked.
“Ah, well. We have a few very vocal members who insist UAP sightings are always linked to nearby military installations and are most likely enemy spy drones.”
“UAP?”
“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” Graeme said.
“It sounds like you don’t agree with those members.”
“I don’t not agree with them,” he replied. “Maybe some of these global sightings are high-tech drones. But not what we’ve seen here in Wooralla.” His eyes flicked towards Bruno before connecting with mine again. “What we’ve experienced here is definitely not of this world.”
I scrutinised Graeme’s face. He seemed absolutely serious.
“Why do you think UFOs come to Wooralla, then?” I asked, attempting to sound neutral. I didn’t want Graeme to try and sign me up to Wooralla Skywatchers. “What do they want?”
“Who knows?” he said. “It could be something buried deep in the earth. Some kind of resource that’s important for them but useless to us.”
“Like what?”
Graeme leaned against the counter, gesturing with both hands like a teacher trying to engage me in a lesson. “These hills were once rich with gold, right? And you know how that gold got here?”
I shrugged. “Wasn’t it always here? For billions of years?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But where did it come from?”
I shifted from one foot to the other. I should have paid more attention in science class.
“I feel like you’re going to say outer space.”
“Bingo!” Graeme replied. “Scientists believe gold was formed in stars, and when the stars exploded or collided, they sent gold and debris out into space. Asteroids packed with gold then hit Earth while it was forming.”
“I never realised that,” I admitted.
“That’s why gold is so precious. There’s only a limited amount.” Graeme moved around behind the counter and reached for a paper coffee cup bearing the diner’s logo. “So many veins of gold here back in the day, and miners stripped them clean.”
He sipped his coffee. Bruno resumed sweeping.
“So you reckon extraterrestrials are visiting Earth to mine for something?” I asked, trying not to sound incredulous.
“Why not? If gold ended up here from explosions in the universe, other stuff must have too. I bet there’s something else precious here. Useless to us maybe, but something they want.”
“So they’re not just sightseers, then?” I said dryly.
“Oh ho, we’ve got a cynic!” Graeme chortled. “Never had one of those before!”
He slid Bruno a knowing look and took another sip of coffee.
I quietly scrolled through the photos posted to the Facebook group. It was then I realised that Bruno had been sweeping the same spot over and over. He was watching me again.
What the hell is his problem?
“I might have seen something,” I conceded. “But it was most likely aircraft.”
Graeme placed his cup down. “If you say so.” He cleared his throat. “When did you see it?”
“Last night. We were star-gazing and we noticed one moving.”
The two guys exchanged a quick look.
“That’s how it starts,” Graeme said. “Those lights hiding up there, pretending to be stars.”
“What do you mean?”
“We usually get a few reports of unusual star movements, and then things progress from there.” He pushed his coffee aside and spread his palms out on the counter. “They’re not stars, of course. Or satellites. They might sit there for ages, hiding in plain sight, then whiz off at high speed. Sometimes they change direction or simply disappear.” He leaned over and grabbed a business card from a small stack next to the cash register. He slid it across the counter towards me. “If you check out our YouTube channel, you’ll find some videos we’ve captured using night-vision lenses.”
“Has anyone ever mentioned they witnessed one of these lights kind of … separating?”
“Like splitting into two or three smaller lights?”
I glanced up quickly. “Yeah.”
“Sure have,” Graeme said. “There are documented eyewitness accounts as far back as the sixties.”
He shuffled out from behind the counter and indicated for me to follow him. On a nearby table displaying a collection of scrapbooks, Graeme rummaged around until he located the one he was seeking. He leafed through a few pages before holding it out to me. I swapped it for the iPad and noticed he’d opened it on a yellowed newspaper article titled, STRANGE LIGHTS. ARMY SAYS: NOT OUR FLARES. A black-and-white photo accompanied the article – a mottled square with three blurry white dots. The dark ink was patchy and stained with age. Without any other objects in the frame for scale, the white dots could be practically anything.
There was a caption beneath the picture: Witnesses claim moving star broke into three over Hadley, Eastern Victoria.
“That’s from 1976,” Graeme said, drawing my attention to a handwritten note on the page explaining as much. “My family lived just outside of Hadley back then.”
“Did you see it?” I was surprised by the eagerness in my voice.
Graeme chuckled. He rested his folded arms across the shelf of his round belly. “My folks had me packed off at boarding school at the time. Missed the whole darned thing!”
I continued flipping pages, scanning the headlines of newspaper articles.
“Seen it since then, mind you,” Graeme added. “Plenty of locals have.”
“Really?”
As soon as I heard the inflection in my voice, I wondered whether Graeme thought I was gullible. This was probably his way of selling more tea towels.
“It’s amazing what you find up there if you keep your eyes peeled,” he said. “We’re all so busy staring at our shoes that we forget to look at what’s going on above our heads.”
I gave him a polite smile, hoping to convey friendly scepticism. Maybe my current school situation was tainting things, but I felt like Graeme and Bruno might have a good laugh at my expense as soon as I left the building.
“What did you mean,” I said, handing the book back, “when you said that things progress from there?”
“Ah, well.” Graeme returned the book to the table, almost tenderly. He raised one hand and pointed straight up towards the shed’s timber rafters. “You keep watching the skies.”
Unsurprisingly, Marty ended up buying one of almost everything from the museum’s merchandise table: a kooky T-shirt for Mum; a squishy UFO stress ball for Nika; a tea towel, three fridge magnets, and a plastic snow globe with a seriously creepy green alien head inside for himself. All I bought was a postcard to send to Erin. As I was paying, I also slid one of Graeme’s business cards into my wallet as an afterthought. At the very least, checking out his YouTube channel would be good for a laugh.
We headed to the diner to order some takeaway coffees. Marty’s phone buzzed with several messages as we waited by the pick-up counter. There was some kind of an emergency at his workplace about a misplaced folder of marketing materials. Marty headed outside to find a quiet place to call back and sort it out.
We’d been served by an older woman who wore a fifties-style headscarf to match her frilly apron. I was disappointed that Zoey didn’t seem to be working today, until I spotted her slipping in the door and shrugging off her coat. She was distracted by a noticeboard near the diner’s entrance. After dumping her coat and bag on the floor, she started plucking at drawing pins, completely rearranging the mess of paper notices. It took a second for me to realise she’d unearthed an A4 page that had been buried beneath newer postings. All I could make out was a photo of a face and the word MISSING in bold letters.
A missing person in a UFO town?
A shiver travelled up my spine. My mind instantly jumped to my weird bushwalking encounter, the unsettling echo of something mimicking my words. I recalled my messages to Erin, our jokes about alien abduction, and instantly felt ridiculous. Imagining things and freaking myself out hardly compared to something as serious as an actual person disappearing.
“Hey there,” Zoey said, passing by me as she approached the counter. She smiled, her brow softening beneath the blunt edge of her fringe. “Owen, right?”
“Yeah.”
I was so pleased that she’d remembered, my mind went blank. I struggled for something else to say.
Zoey stowed her bag and coat behind the counter before slipping an apron over her head. She was dressed in all black again, her hair bunched into a topknot.
“What would you like to order?” she asked, tying the apron strings behind her back.
“I’m waiting on takeaway coffees,” I explained. “For me and my uncle. He’s outside. On a phone call. A work emergency or something. We’ve just been to the UFO Museum.”
For the love of god, stop babbling.
Zoey half-glanced towards the diner’s front window, at the large shed clearly visible across the road. She pressed her lips together and busied herself tidying up order receipts around the cash register.
“The gold mine tours are open tomorrow,” she said. “And there are lots of great bushwalks to check out the local flora and fauna. If you need any suggestions of stuff to do around here, let me know.”
I got the distinct impression that she thought anything was preferable to the UFO Museum.
The museum was a large windowless shed with nowhere near enough lighting and way too many draughts. Still, there was something welcoming about the hodgepodge of glass display cabinets and polished timber tables. An old cast iron stove was trying to heat the large open floor plan and failing miserably. Wispy cobwebs and a fine layer of dust over most of the surfaces made it feel more like a bric-a-brac store than an exhibition space.
“Check this out,” Marty said, pointing out a framed artwork just inside the door. It was an illustrated map of the town showing various places of interest. Wooralla Ridge was clearly marked, as was The Flying Saucer Diner. Marty jabbed his finger at a place called Picnic Point that was circled and highlighted with a picture of a UFO. “Good place to spot ’em, you think?”
He wiggled his eyebrows playfully. He was definitely all-in on the UFO nonsense, at least for the duration of our stay.
I grabbed a pamphlet from a brochure stand on the table. Picnic Point Landing Site: A Self-guided Walking Tour. I flashed the pamphlet at Marty. He bugged his eyes and snatched it from me.
“Landing site?” he exclaimed, his face lighting up. His voice carried across the building. A middle-aged woman chuckled as she browsed the postcard display.
“We are definitely doing this,” Marty said, skimming the pamphlet’s information. “It says here that Picnic Point was the site of a famous UFO sighting in 1974, which was witnessed by over forty people. ‘A busload of local schoolchildren and teachers’,” he read, “‘as well as the residents of nearby properties, observed an unidentified craft in the sky above the Picnic Point Lookout. It landed in a clearing behind the lookout’s parking area and remained on the ground for around five minutes before rising again in a hovering motion, then tilting on its side and shooting off into the sky at an impossible speed’.”
Marty needn’t have recited the pamphlet word for word – it was soon obvious that the Picnic Point Incident was heavily documented throughout the museum. There was detailed information about it everywhere we turned: scrapbooks of newspaper clippings; artistic depictions of what people saw; even audio clips of witness interviews you could listen to through clunky retro headphones. Marty almost lost his mind when we reached a cabinet with a circular plaster cast that had been purportedly created from an indent left behind in the ground by the UFO’s landing gear.
“‘The craft was described as a silver disc’,” Marty read from the wall plaque, “‘like a saucer turned upside down and placed on top of another, with no rivets or joins. From side-on it appeared cigar-shaped, and witnesses who got close to it described it as giving off heat and making no sound’.”
“Got close to it?” I peered at the plaster cast in the glass cabinet. “How close are we talking?”
“People actually got within a metre or two of the craft,” came a gravelly voice from behind us. We both turned to find a bearded man shuffling down the aisle with a large cardboard box in his hands. He walked with a slight limp, his baggy trousers faded and unironed. One pantleg had unravelled at the hem and was getting caught beneath his shoe.
I recognised him from the diner. It was the old bloke who had asked us where we were staying, the same one Zoey the waitress was having words with as we left.
“One of the witnesses who got the closest,” he went on, “came away with what appeared to be a light sunburn from head to toe. He felt dizzy, but was otherwise unharmed. In fact, a day later his skin condition had completely cleared up. He no longer had the severe eczema he’d suffered with since he was a baby.”
A laugh bubbled out of Marty. “Naaah. For real?” He gave me a sidelong glance and I tried to stifle my grin. The old guy seemed sincere.
“Read all about it for yourself,” he said, seemingly unbothered by Marty’s scepticism. He placed the cardboard box down and started unpacking ceramic mugs to stack beside a pile of folded T-shirts on the table. “There are photos on the wall over there, as well as a transcript of his police interview.”
“We’ll check it out, for sure,” Marty said. “I think we spoke in the diner a couple of days ago, didn’t we?”
“We did indeed,” the old guy said. He buffed one of the mugs on his shirtsleeve, then displayed it carefully so the slogan was facing the aisle. The Truth is Out There. “I’m Graeme. I own and run the museum.”
“This stuff is great,” Marty said, waving a hand at everything around us before digging in his pocket. “Very eye-opening.”
He offered up two green paper tickets, our complimentary entry to the museum for eating at The Flying Saucer. As far as I could tell, the museum was free entry for everybody; the tickets were obviously a ploy to draw curious people inside.
Graeme watched my uncle carefully. Did he think Marty was being sarcastic? There was nothing snide in my uncle’s words, and his enthusiasm seemed to put the older man at ease. Graeme took the tickets and gave us a friendly nod before shuffling back up the aisle towards the service counter.
Marty quickly became fascinated with a cabinet of collectibles, everything from wind-up tin spaceships to ET plush toys and old VHS movies. When he started examining the large collection of vintage sci-fi comics, I knew he’d be a while. I wandered off on my own, hunting down more information about Wooralla’s UFO sightings. Even though the Picnic Point Incident sounded completely bogus, I was curious to know what other people had supposedly witnessed in the decades since.
As I flipped through a spiral-bound album – mostly photos of the night sky with no real reference for size or scale – I noticed somebody sweeping behind the service counter. His bulky stature was familiar, and the shaggy mop of his blond hair.
It was the guy I ran into on the bush track yesterday.
“Oh,” I said awkwardly when he met my stare. “Err … hey.”
He looked me up and down with a blank expression.
“How’s your head?” I added. The graze on his temple had cleaned up well; it was completely unnoticeable.
The blond guy rested his hands on the end of the broom and tilted his head in a way that felt vaguely patronising. “Have we met, mate?”
It took a second for his words to process. My neck flushed with heat.
Why was I embarrassed, though? He was the one who didn’t remember me.
Behind me came a scraping sound. Graeme was backing out of a storeroom, dragging a large box across the dusty boards.
“Ah,” he said, spotting me. “Bruno’s not bending your ear off, is he?”
The guy with the broom resumed sweeping. Had he hit his head harder than I thought? To be fair, I wasn’t exactly memorable, but surely he knew what I was referring to even if he was blanking on my face.
“How’s everything going up on the mountain?” Graeme asked, tearing open the top flaps of the box. He pulled out a plastic-wrapped tea towel with The Flying Saucer’s logo screen-printed on the front, along with the lines: Fresh Sightings. Brewed Daily. Graeme noticed me reading it and held it up proudly. “These go gangbusters in our online shop.”
My gaze travelled over the museum’s dingy interior. “You have an online shop?”
“It’s connected to our website,” Graeme explained. “We have a very popular Facebook page and YouTube channel.”
“Oh, right.” I smiled politely, wondering just how many tinfoil-hat wearing chumps fell for this stuff. Obviously enough to make it worth printing tea towels.
I gestured at the photo album. “These lights that people claim to have seen,” I said. “Are they always the same kind? How do witnesses describe them?”
Graeme paused only briefly before continuing to unpack his box.
“Why?” he said. “You see something?”
The blond guy, Bruno, stopped sweeping again to stare at me.
“Oh … umm … no,” I backtracked. “I’m just curious about what other people have seen.”
Graeme reached over the counter and pulled out an iPad. I was taken aback to see any kind of digital technology in the context of this old-school tourist trap. He tapped the screen a few times before handing it to me.
He’d opened a Facebook page called Wooralla Skywatchers.
“You should join our group,” he said. “Our members are chatting about this sort of thing all the time.”
I scrolled down the group’s page, which admittedly seemed to be very active. I clicked on the Media tab so I could view the photos and videos.
“Why are there so many pictures of military bases?” I asked.
“Ah, well. We have a few very vocal members who insist UAP sightings are always linked to nearby military installations and are most likely enemy spy drones.”
“UAP?”
“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” Graeme said.
“It sounds like you don’t agree with those members.”
“I don’t not agree with them,” he replied. “Maybe some of these global sightings are high-tech drones. But not what we’ve seen here in Wooralla.” His eyes flicked towards Bruno before connecting with mine again. “What we’ve experienced here is definitely not of this world.”
I scrutinised Graeme’s face. He seemed absolutely serious.
“Why do you think UFOs come to Wooralla, then?” I asked, attempting to sound neutral. I didn’t want Graeme to try and sign me up to Wooralla Skywatchers. “What do they want?”
“Who knows?” he said. “It could be something buried deep in the earth. Some kind of resource that’s important for them but useless to us.”
“Like what?”
Graeme leaned against the counter, gesturing with both hands like a teacher trying to engage me in a lesson. “These hills were once rich with gold, right? And you know how that gold got here?”
I shrugged. “Wasn’t it always here? For billions of years?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But where did it come from?”
I shifted from one foot to the other. I should have paid more attention in science class.
“I feel like you’re going to say outer space.”
“Bingo!” Graeme replied. “Scientists believe gold was formed in stars, and when the stars exploded or collided, they sent gold and debris out into space. Asteroids packed with gold then hit Earth while it was forming.”
“I never realised that,” I admitted.
“That’s why gold is so precious. There’s only a limited amount.” Graeme moved around behind the counter and reached for a paper coffee cup bearing the diner’s logo. “So many veins of gold here back in the day, and miners stripped them clean.”
He sipped his coffee. Bruno resumed sweeping.
“So you reckon extraterrestrials are visiting Earth to mine for something?” I asked, trying not to sound incredulous.
“Why not? If gold ended up here from explosions in the universe, other stuff must have too. I bet there’s something else precious here. Useless to us maybe, but something they want.”
“So they’re not just sightseers, then?” I said dryly.
“Oh ho, we’ve got a cynic!” Graeme chortled. “Never had one of those before!”
He slid Bruno a knowing look and took another sip of coffee.
I quietly scrolled through the photos posted to the Facebook group. It was then I realised that Bruno had been sweeping the same spot over and over. He was watching me again.
What the hell is his problem?
“I might have seen something,” I conceded. “But it was most likely aircraft.”
Graeme placed his cup down. “If you say so.” He cleared his throat. “When did you see it?”
“Last night. We were star-gazing and we noticed one moving.”
The two guys exchanged a quick look.
“That’s how it starts,” Graeme said. “Those lights hiding up there, pretending to be stars.”
“What do you mean?”
“We usually get a few reports of unusual star movements, and then things progress from there.” He pushed his coffee aside and spread his palms out on the counter. “They’re not stars, of course. Or satellites. They might sit there for ages, hiding in plain sight, then whiz off at high speed. Sometimes they change direction or simply disappear.” He leaned over and grabbed a business card from a small stack next to the cash register. He slid it across the counter towards me. “If you check out our YouTube channel, you’ll find some videos we’ve captured using night-vision lenses.”
“Has anyone ever mentioned they witnessed one of these lights kind of … separating?”
“Like splitting into two or three smaller lights?”
I glanced up quickly. “Yeah.”
“Sure have,” Graeme said. “There are documented eyewitness accounts as far back as the sixties.”
He shuffled out from behind the counter and indicated for me to follow him. On a nearby table displaying a collection of scrapbooks, Graeme rummaged around until he located the one he was seeking. He leafed through a few pages before holding it out to me. I swapped it for the iPad and noticed he’d opened it on a yellowed newspaper article titled, STRANGE LIGHTS. ARMY SAYS: NOT OUR FLARES. A black-and-white photo accompanied the article – a mottled square with three blurry white dots. The dark ink was patchy and stained with age. Without any other objects in the frame for scale, the white dots could be practically anything.
There was a caption beneath the picture: Witnesses claim moving star broke into three over Hadley, Eastern Victoria.
“That’s from 1976,” Graeme said, drawing my attention to a handwritten note on the page explaining as much. “My family lived just outside of Hadley back then.”
“Did you see it?” I was surprised by the eagerness in my voice.
Graeme chuckled. He rested his folded arms across the shelf of his round belly. “My folks had me packed off at boarding school at the time. Missed the whole darned thing!”
I continued flipping pages, scanning the headlines of newspaper articles.
“Seen it since then, mind you,” Graeme added. “Plenty of locals have.”
“Really?”
As soon as I heard the inflection in my voice, I wondered whether Graeme thought I was gullible. This was probably his way of selling more tea towels.
“It’s amazing what you find up there if you keep your eyes peeled,” he said. “We’re all so busy staring at our shoes that we forget to look at what’s going on above our heads.”
I gave him a polite smile, hoping to convey friendly scepticism. Maybe my current school situation was tainting things, but I felt like Graeme and Bruno might have a good laugh at my expense as soon as I left the building.
“What did you mean,” I said, handing the book back, “when you said that things progress from there?”
“Ah, well.” Graeme returned the book to the table, almost tenderly. He raised one hand and pointed straight up towards the shed’s timber rafters. “You keep watching the skies.”
Unsurprisingly, Marty ended up buying one of almost everything from the museum’s merchandise table: a kooky T-shirt for Mum; a squishy UFO stress ball for Nika; a tea towel, three fridge magnets, and a plastic snow globe with a seriously creepy green alien head inside for himself. All I bought was a postcard to send to Erin. As I was paying, I also slid one of Graeme’s business cards into my wallet as an afterthought. At the very least, checking out his YouTube channel would be good for a laugh.
We headed to the diner to order some takeaway coffees. Marty’s phone buzzed with several messages as we waited by the pick-up counter. There was some kind of an emergency at his workplace about a misplaced folder of marketing materials. Marty headed outside to find a quiet place to call back and sort it out.
We’d been served by an older woman who wore a fifties-style headscarf to match her frilly apron. I was disappointed that Zoey didn’t seem to be working today, until I spotted her slipping in the door and shrugging off her coat. She was distracted by a noticeboard near the diner’s entrance. After dumping her coat and bag on the floor, she started plucking at drawing pins, completely rearranging the mess of paper notices. It took a second for me to realise she’d unearthed an A4 page that had been buried beneath newer postings. All I could make out was a photo of a face and the word MISSING in bold letters.
A missing person in a UFO town?
A shiver travelled up my spine. My mind instantly jumped to my weird bushwalking encounter, the unsettling echo of something mimicking my words. I recalled my messages to Erin, our jokes about alien abduction, and instantly felt ridiculous. Imagining things and freaking myself out hardly compared to something as serious as an actual person disappearing.
“Hey there,” Zoey said, passing by me as she approached the counter. She smiled, her brow softening beneath the blunt edge of her fringe. “Owen, right?”
“Yeah.”
I was so pleased that she’d remembered, my mind went blank. I struggled for something else to say.
Zoey stowed her bag and coat behind the counter before slipping an apron over her head. She was dressed in all black again, her hair bunched into a topknot.
“What would you like to order?” she asked, tying the apron strings behind her back.
“I’m waiting on takeaway coffees,” I explained. “For me and my uncle. He’s outside. On a phone call. A work emergency or something. We’ve just been to the UFO Museum.”
For the love of god, stop babbling.
Zoey half-glanced towards the diner’s front window, at the large shed clearly visible across the road. She pressed her lips together and busied herself tidying up order receipts around the cash register.
“The gold mine tours are open tomorrow,” she said. “And there are lots of great bushwalks to check out the local flora and fauna. If you need any suggestions of stuff to do around here, let me know.”
I got the distinct impression that she thought anything was preferable to the UFO Museum.
