Persistent Views of the Unknown

Illustration by Liz Priddy

It's past two A.M. at the airport bar. Jan is cleaning up after her last customers, a trio of middle managers for a software company heading home to Chicago after their long-delayed flight has finally been called. It will be one of the last flights out for a while, so the terminal will be quiet for an hour or two until the early-morning travelers begin showing up. By then, Jan will be home, and—if she can sleep tonight, which is never a given—she'll be deep into her dreams.

There are two TVs behind the bar. She has been instructed by her employers to keep them both tuned to the sports channels, so she's listening to some chatter about the opening of the baseball season, which is right around the corner. Onscreen, blond men with blue eyes and big shoulders are talking in loud voices. Pictures of other beefy men flash behind them. Occasionally the action pauses to air a commercial for beer.

As Jan begins tallying up the receipts in her cash drawer before locking it in the safe, she looks up to see that she has another customer, a flight attendant who often stops in the bar on her way home after a cross-country flight from the West Coast back to New York. She has a long drive to the New Jersey suburb where she lives and likes to have a cup of coffee before she goes to find her car. Other than snacks and prepackaged sandwiches, there's no food available at the bar where Jan works; people who stop here on their way in or out of the city usually want to do some serious drinking. But there is coffee, and it's not bad, especially with some Irish whiskey in it.

"Hey, Andrea," Jan says as the weary-looking woman pulls herself onto a stool. She's a copper-haired forty-something in a blue stew suit with a paisley-print kerchief around her neck that is supposed to be jaunty but instead looks like a garrote. "You guys got in really late tonight, didn't you?" Jan can see the arrivals board from the end of the bar and had noticed that the last flight from LA, which must have been the one Andrea was working, was almost an hour overdue.

Andrea accepts the mug of Irish coffee Jan puts in front of her and takes one sip, and then another. "Something happened," she says.

Something often happens. There's a sick passenger or turbulence or an electrical fire in the galley that sets off the alarms and lets loose the overhead oxygen masks so the startled travelers get smacked in the head by the apparatus and babies begin to wail. Even when the passengers aren't aware of it, almost no flight, especially the long hauls, goes without some incident, big or small. Jan knows this from listening to the chatter of the crews that stop on the bar on their way home. So she isn't surprised that Andrea is apparently getting ready to tell her a story.

"We were about an hour into the flight," Andrea says. "I was bringing Eddie—Captain Edwards—a sandwich, but as soon as they let me into the cockpit, I knew something was wrong. He and the first officer, Josh Taylor, they're both very calm guys, usually, very professional, but there was an edge or something to the way they were acting. Josh was talking to Denver International, giving them some coordinates, and he sounded really tense. I asked Eddie what was wrong, and he told me to look out the front window. I did, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. There was something ahead of us, maybe a half mile or so. Something really, really big—and it definitely wasn't an airplane. At least not one any of us had ever seen. It seemed to be moving at the same speed we were...