I Want to Believe

Tonight my husband and I shambled out of the Cina 5 in Watertown, South Dakota, after eyeballing the latest installment of the X-Files genre, “I Want to Believe”. I was a bit disappointed. I was hoping a few space aliens would show up. I figured the reason for the sequel would be one of the aliens lost his probe and they stopped by Earth to look for it. No such luck. The movie featured a couple of Frankenstein-style surgeries and lots of Catholic issues, like clergy involved in sexual abuse and doctors using stem cells to treat patients. Really, the plot didn’t make much sense. Especially since Scully and Mulder are still calling each other by their last names even though they live at the same house and sleep in the same bed.
After the movie and a bucket of diet soda, we shambled out of the Cina 5. As my hubby maneuvered the Mini through a perfectly dark, twisting road on the way back to the campground, a creature leapt out of the soybean field on the left side of the road. The black furry thing scuttled towards the relative haven of the weeds in the passenger-side ditch. An eerie reflective pair of green eyes shone in the Mini’s headlamps.
As we paused at a two-way stop on the gravel road, a light suddenly appeared in the eastern sky. Nope, it wasn’t the sun. The light was a hot, clear white, and slowly pulsating. There were no lights visible in any other direction. My husband joked it was a UFO. As we sped up, the light kept pace with us, matching our speed. The Black Sabbath song “Fairies Wear Boots” streamed out of the satellite radio, Ozzy intoning, “On my way home, late last night, suddenly I saw a fright.” Hubby floored the mini. The light weaved towards the ground, and then shot up, its speed accelerating. We rounded a hair-raising turn at 55 miles per hour. The light kept pace. Then a stand of pines in the distance blocked it from view for a few seconds. As suddenly as it appeared, it vanished.
Perhaps the aliens I hoped to see in the movie stopped by to pick up their probe. Or maybe the lights on the radio tower in Watertown played a trick on us. I’d rather imagine the aliens dropped in for a bit to visit South Dakota. South Dakota has many fabulous western wear shops and convenient casinos right in the gas stations. I can see why the aliens would visit. I guess I just want to believe.