This morning I was reading the news and glanced at a headline about something in the night sky being mistaken for a UFO. I ignored it.
Sena had been baking sticky buns out in the kitchen. Suddenly, she started calling me out to see something and she was really excited about it. I thought it was just about the sticky buns and took my time.
But she insisted I hurry up. I thought, “Sticky buns are good but they’re not spectacular.” What could have been so urgent that I had to rush out to the kitchen? For what; to watch sticky buns rising?
She kept after me so I finally got up and walked out to the kitchen. But she was at the patio door, pointing outside. That’s when I realized we were not on the same page.
It turns out she thought she was seeing a UFO. I looked out and saw a very bright star above the waning crescent phase moon above the horizon.
That reminded me of the news story I paid only a second’s worth of attention to. I got the camera and took a few shots through the sliding glass door. I tried to open the screen door to get out on the covered porch, but we got a pretty good frost and the locking button was stuck fast.
I trotted back to the computer and looked for that news story. It turns out the UFO is Venus, which is really bright now and will get even brighter through this month and into the first half of December.
This reminds me of the old X-Files episode, “Jose Chung’s from Outer Space.” Jesse Ventura (a pro wrestler and former governor of Minnesota) played one of the Men in Black (Alex Trebek was the other Man in Black) who tried to browbeat somebody into giving up on the notion he’d seen a UFO—insisting what he saw was the planet, Venus.
We plan to track Venus for a while. And I want to emphasize—what we saw was only Venus.
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