The IT: A Memoir

I read about it now and find so many details that I missed at the time that I would never miss now. A giant UFO hovered over the Earth for two days before breaking the atmosphere. It just sat and watched like Mr. Fellows, the creepy gym teacher from high school. When it finally came down and hovered over Baghdad, the media tizzy had grown into an unyielding juggernaut. It represent 99% of all television broadcasts. It stayed on all day and all night. The experts and skeptics debated in situation rooms and played hardball with each other. They yammered about what it meant. Why Baghdad? Did they sense the war and gravitate towards it? One skeptic considered that maybe we shouldn’t be calling them UFO’s anymore. UFO might be offensive and soon Interstellar Transport became the norm.

I remember how obsessed my family became. Mom and Dad glued themselves to the television, refusing to peel away. They even hooked my brother Chuckie. They were all into it.

I was into Michelle Connor.

At 16, I had very little to put my stock in. We had been a couple for three years, even though the first year we spent trying to figure out what kinds of things boyfriends/girlfriends did. She had a permit and I had a paper route. She had promised that as soon as she got her license and her own car, she would drive me around. I told her that I could use the exercise.

Even now, I consider her to be one of the prettiest girls ever to exist. Her dirty blonde hair hung to the middle of her neck, she had a tiny mouth and vicious blue eyes, everything in the exact place it should be. Her skin sparkled a pristine alabaster. We laughed together, grew close, almost inseparable. I was happy beyond happy. I was unexplainable.



The Interstellar Transport left Baghdad and disappeared without contact. We all had seen it live and late-breaking. Suddenly, insurgency and political reformation became an afterthought. People watched the skies waiting for them to return and explain themselves. Interstellar Transport became a mouthful for most talking heads and was eventually replaced by IT, which is far less offensive than UFO, if you ask me.

One week later over Krakow, Poland, IT reappeared. This time a door opened up and lights came out. Several orbs of light the size of basketballs floated down and travelled around, taking sniffs at things like dogs searching for territory markers. They changed colors on a frequent basis. Analysts tried to determine what the colors might mean and what the pattern of color changes might mean. With cameras on them all day long, they found out that it changed from blue, to green, to yellow, to blue, to green, to orange, and so on. The debate intensified. Were these lights alien technology or the aliens themselves? Questions being asked all day long on the news: Why are they here? What are they doing? What did they understand? Will they make us a better civilization? Should we attack?



I asked Michelle why she decided to break up with me but she really didn’t know. She just felt like it. She never said what went wrong or if she liked someone else, she just ended it. I hated it. I hated the feeling of her telling me that. It was staggering and wasn’t supposed to happen this way. The boy broke the girls heart and she cried to her friends for days. They consoled her and bad mouthed the boy until the girl hated him more than she ever could’ve even loved him. The rules are clear and written down somewhere. But it didn’t happen that way and I missed her. I missed her minutes after I had hung up the phone with her. I wanted her back so bad. Yeah, I cried. Shamelessly. We shared each others first reciprocated kiss. My real First Kiss: Carrie Hensall, 2nd grade, friend Mike’s backyard, Mike’s dog Bark-bark watched. I squirmed away from her, wiped my mouth and ran. Bark-bark howled in disgust. With Michelle, it took place at her bedroom door. I was leaving to go home and she got up with me. We had been together for a couple of weeks and we were still in the process of understanding how these worked. She never saw it coming. I kissed her on the lips quickly, said goodbye and ran out of the house. I ran all the way home with my heart pounding and my cheeks straining from my smile. I didn’t even see her reaction to it. I didn’t want to, just in case she scowled. When she left me, I had felt like erasing all of my good memories with her so I could better cope with the loss. You don’t realize until you can look back on it that it really wasn’t the “her” that was important, it was the “want”.



Scientists in the EU came to Krakow to investigate the puffs of light. They made the decision to try and catch one so they could begin to understand. They felt justified since they couldn’t communicate with them and they were invading our territory. They had been fast and agile little buggers but they caught one. A female scientist from Denmark, Annelise Pedersen snagged it in a butterfly net. She cornered it behind a McDonald's restaurant. They showed close-ups all night long. Upon further inspection, they found that it was a mechanical box. They couldn’t figure out how it floated or what caused it to light up. A scientist named Antoine Babette died trying to get to its inner workings. An electrical outburst shot out when he tried to crack it open.

The box was sent to a laboratory at the University of Buffalo because of a fellow named Timothy Skuczak, a research scientist with a degree in mechanical engineering. Somehow, this high profile project fell into his hands because the EU did not want to give it to the American government but the US had the technological means to give it a proper examination in a safe environment. It stayed public. This being the first time a confirmed alien specimen had been in the U.S. and being from Williamsville, a suburb of Buffalo, I was supposed to be enthralled, spastic with hometown pride and joy. We were in the national spotlight for something besides a horrible October ice storm. My dad went nuts, a UB grad himself. He had already been hooked on the story and now it came to his hometown, to his alma mater. Somehow, that made this more special for him. We didn’t know at the time how big a deal this was about to become. The only thing I could imagine at the time was getting drunk with my friends.



Friday night, two days after Michelle broke up with me, I left for Greg’s house at 7:30 and wasted no time getting drunk. By 9 o'clock, I consumed enough to make me intolerable. Greg's parents allowed us use of the basement and his brother bought us two 30-packs of Miller High Life. We took full advantage of the situation. We listened to Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen and we laughed like crazy. How his parents put up with us, I’ll never understand. As the night rolled forward, I thought of Michelle. I related to the heart-broken lyrics of American singer-songwriters. With a flash of anger and sorrow, I burst into tears in front of my friends. Everyone stared at me and before they had a chance to console me, I ran from the house. I crossed the street without looking, I ran around the block until I was out of breath. At that point, my friends had come outside to find me but I ran in the other direction. A little ways down the street, I stopped at a tree and I spewed hot, burning foam, remnants of a pork chop dinner and cool ranch Doritos. I dropped to my knees and puked again. Kyle showed up next to me and asked what was wrong. I got to my feet and almost punched him the face. Anger seeped through my clenched fists. He asked again and I just spit something awful from my mouth. I put my fist against the bark of the tree and I scraped. I dug in deep and tore it across the trunk. Kyle's face contorted when he asked me what I was doing. I just pushed past him, past everyone, and stormed off. Every time I passed by a tree, I scraped my knuckles against the bark. By the time I got back to the house, blood dripped from my fingertips.



Once Professor Skuczak got his hands on the box, he had a camera pressed to his face all day, everyday. After two days of testing, the Interstellar Transport arrived in the good old U.S. of A. It hovered over Amherst where the UB North Campus sat, like a big, dark cloud ready to drop mountains of snow and hail on us all. NASA picked up a transmission from an unknown source, most likely the IT, and didn’t have the technology to handle it. So whatever pleas were made went unheard. NASA sent a message back. Dane Hudson, a NASA employee and Niagara Falls, NY native, walked onto the roof of one of the buildings at UB and waited for the IT to pick him up. Hoping that they received and understood the message, NASA and the rest of the world waited. They watched Dane on every single station TV had to offer, even the home shopping channels became news programming. I couldn’t stare at the same guy just standing so I opted for a hockey video game instead. My parents set up a little dining area in the living room so we could all gather around and watch as we ate. Here I caught some of the history in the making. The IT lowered itself closer to Earth, a hatch drew open and a smaller craft came out. The smaller IT swooped down towards Dane. A hatch opened up on the bottom of the smaller craft and a long, white ladder made of what seemed like nylon rope fell out. Dane grabbed ahold and the smaller IT hoisted him up to the larger craft. Then the large hatch closed and the IT hovered back to its original position.

At this point, skeptics began to question the authenticity of the whole ordeal. These aliens could build a gigantic spaceship but all they could come up with to pick up Dane was a rope ladder? The more the news focused on this aspect the more people began to question it. The public demanded to know if the U.S. started the whole thing. The President had to make a global statement that they had absolutely nothing to do with any of this very serious situation.

Days passed before the hatch opened again. The same small craft flew out and hovered to the ground. The same smaller hatch opened up and a piece of paper fell out and fluttered to the ground. Once recovered, the President read it to the world. It said, Give them back the box. Dane signed the note. A handwriting expert, along with some family, friends and co-workers confirmed that Dane had to have written it.



I tried calling Michelle a few times but her mother always gave me some excuse why she couldn’t talk. I wanted an explanation but I never got one. At school, Jennifer Lazano asked me what I did to my hands. I told her that I punched trees in a drunken stupor. Jennifer gave me her dumb smile and laughed.

Michelle ignored me in the hall. She talked to her friends only, no guys, just Liz, Jolene and Maria. Jolene came up to me later on. I had liked Jolene very much. She and I used to sit next to each other in art class and talk. We would interpret each others paintings. Her boyfriend, Matt, treated her like shit and they had stayed together. Jolene informed me that Michelle stopped having feelings for me and it’s too soon to be just friends. The credo became give her space.

Kyle sat next to me in the Biology class when this happened. He tried to console me but it made no difference., Kyle’s lab partner Marlie, the ugly girl in class, told me not worry about it too much, it’s only a teenage crush, and those never last. I told her to mind her own business, in my own words. She spoke the truth though. It’s funny how much I thought I knew and how much of that was actually true.



They sent the box up and expected Dane to return. He didn’t. They demanded that he return with the same method they used to send him up. When they got no response, they sent up F-15’s to circle it, threaten it. They called it the housefly invasion. But a week later, a Tim Horton's employee spotted Dane walking down Sheridan Drive. People didn’t recognize him at first because all of his hair had been removed and I mean all of it. She had seen this guy walking funny and looking strange. She asked her boss if he looked kind of like the guy that got taken by the aliens. He called the police without answering.

Dane couldn’t speak to anyone. He moved his mouth but no words came out. Even though we had 24 hour surveillance on the craft, no one ever found out what he saw up there and how he got back home. The F-15’s continued swarming. Our trust level with the IT had decreased with the Dane incident. An over eager fighter pilot named Jay Thompson claimed to have seen hatches open and several menacing looking crafts emerge. A news crew from St. Louis confirmed with their footage. Jay Thompson fired several rounds of bullets at them as a warning shot, nothing direct. The craft returned to the IT. Days after, the IT lowered itself almost touching Lake Erie. It stood eye level with the tallest buildings on Buffalo’s skyline and it unleashed a salvo of destruction.



I couldn’t leave my bed. The more time that passed, the more miserable I felt. I couldn't eat right or sleep right but none of that mattered to me. My parents grew nervous for me. Chuckie came in to see if he could help. I told him to fuck off and he told my Mom. Both of my parents hollered at me for the language. I smoked out my bedroom window but it didn’t matter. That smell got into everything. My parents grew even more furious with me and when they got mad at me, the worst thing they could do was yell at me. It made me mad at them for not understanding how I felt. Their fresh-baked cookie and Sad Sack comic childhood had transformed into my Jolt Cola and the Punisher. They considered me to be an irrational punk. They knew Michelle had broken up with me, they just didn’t care. If teen angst were an alternative energy source, I could’ve lit the world for free. By the time downtown Buffalo caught on fire, tension in my household had skyrocketed to an all-time high.



The World’s Army assembled overnight. Everyone feared alien invasion so we sent an onslaught of missiles and rockets towards the IT to show that we wouldn't go without a fight. An attack squad covered the hatches where the menacing craft had tried to fly out. They may have had giant firepower but we had hundreds of thousands smaller weapons. The bombardment lasted for days. The IT had sent a few more blasts out at our planet but the housefly invasion succeeded. The IT retreated into space. The world cheered its united victory. They never showed their true faces. Dane Hudson had been the only human to lay eyes on the aliens but he wouldn’t talk. He died in his sleep two weeks after the IT left. People feared the aliens would return with numbers of their own. A new global committee formed to prevent future alien encounters from turning deadly. They began research on Interstellar Transports of their own and ways to communicate. People from everywhere came to Western New York to help with the clean up and rebuilding of Buffalo. They buried their hearts and souls in its soil and talked about their experiences in the area for decades, not to mention the chicken wings.



Michelle called me over the summer to apologize but talking to her brought back more feelings. I never quite got over that first love until college. Amelie Grant, my college sweetheart. We had a relationship that didn't last very long but it was my first since Michelle. She taught me quite a bit about maturity. How you can’t keep looking back and living in the past, clinging to things that no longer exist. All you can do is build yourself a memorial and move on. My friends separated as a group, as people do. I went away to college but I came back. I now work in the beautifully rebuilt downtown, however the streets already need repaving. Asphalt just doesn’t stand a chance against the climate.

So far, the aliens haven’t returned. UFO, or IT, sightings increased. One thing is for sure, there are now far less alien non-believers besides your government conspiracy theorists.

The world could only stay united for so long. Little squabbles between countries came back, hostilities renewed. A fight broke out between two Middle Eastern nations.

The committee just sent its first IT into space. Humans venturing out past our galaxy, only to find vast amounts of nothingness. They didn’t get to go far enough but they returned home safe and managed the whole trip with expert precision. A fantastic victory for us all.