Book Clubs, UFOs, and Marriage

An "out of this world" Love Connection

As a young nerd, few grade school events got me more excited than the Scholastic Book Club. The thought of attempting a pull up in gym class terrified me and on the playground I was never picked first during games of Red Rover (or anything else), but a few times each year when my teacher would hand out those brightly colored [paper book catalogs, my eyes got wide and my heart glowed as bright as E.T.’s.

I’d be lying if I said I was hoping to find classic novels for sale in the catalog, and it didn’t matter because Scholastic knew their audience. I ordered books that explained how to perform magic tricks, books on movie special effects, and of course, Choose Your Own Adventure books. All of my Star Wars and Indiana Jones picture books came from the Scholastic Club. I think educators were happy if kids were reading anything at all, and read I did.

One of the earliest books I remember purchasing from the book club was UFO Encounters, which was published in 1978 and I probably bought in first grade. Although the book is written for children, it literally contains cases that are still discussed today. It tells the story of Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction (recreated in the 1975 TV movie The UFO Incident with James Earl Jones as Barney), Travis Walton’s abduction (which was the basis for 1993’s Fire int he Sky), the Kenneth Arnold sighting (where we got the term “flying saucer” from) and the Hopkinsville case (where we got the term “little green men”). It even contains Rex Heflin’s sighting and the pictures he took which I studied as if they were frames from the Zapruder film. In later years many of the stories and pictures featured in the book turned out to be hoaxes, but at the time I ate it up.

Rex Heflin’s UFO is now suspected to be a toy train wheel suspended by a string

Something from the book that stuck with me to this day was its description of how many stars there are in the Milky Way. The book opens with the following suggestion: if a kid were to use an ink pen and start drawing dots, by the time they were 80 years old and had covered their house and entire neighborhood with dots, they still would not have drawn as many dots are there are stars in the Milky Way.

As a kid, my brain could not handle numbers like that. I also did not have access to Google, which says there are somewhere between 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way.

So, how many dots could a kid make in his lifetime? I was a bit more optimistic in my life expectancy and so I assumed I would start making dots at the age of 8 and continue until the age of 100 — a solid 92 years of dot-making. Assuming a casual pace of one-dot-per-second, based on my math (and ignoring leap years) there are 2.9 billion seconds in 92 years. That’s with no breaks, no sleep, and no accounting for things like pen failure or any other real world logistics. I tried to calculate how much physical space 2.9 billion dots would take up but AI was unable to calculate that. “Too many variables,” it said. Instead, it drew me this picture of a house covered in polka dots.

It is not an exaggeration to stay that the book UFO Encounters shaped my life. At eight years old I was constantly looking up into the sky, hoping to see a UFO for myself. I was the only kid on my second grade soccer team worried about being visited by the Men in Black (the scary ones, not the Will Smith/Tommy Lee Jones duo). In a world where kids disappeared from malls and routinely drank from garden hones and glasses covered in lead paint, being abducted by aliens was just one more thing GenXers had to worry about.

Fast forward a little more than 10 years. Somehow I made it to the age of 20 without seeing a UFO (boo!) or being abducted by aliens (yay!). In the summer of ‘93 instead of finding myself zooming through the galaxy inside a space rocket or training at NASA, I found myself moving into a mobile home with a girl I had casually dated off and on in high school and hadn’t seen in the two years since we had graduated. Things started completely plutonic, with me in the primary bedroom (complete with its own bathroom) and two girls living in the other two bedrooms, sharing a bathroom.

And when that girl began unpacking her things, she pulled the following items out of a single moving box: a Commodore computer, a framed picture of the Three Stooges, an original Nintendo… and a copy of UFO Encounters that she had purchased from the Scholastic Book Club when she was just a kid.

I’ve never told that story to another guy who didn’t immediately say “I hope you married that girl.” Two years later in 1995, I did.

I’ve spent the past 30 years being married to my best friend. We never made it to outer space or started making dots, but we’ve been on what seems like 2.9 billion adventures together, and over the next 30 years I’m hoping for 2.9 billion more.

Happy Valentine’s Day.