So-ooo, what's up there besides stars?

This, my dear friends and readers, is the night sky over Vilcabamba. Do you notice anything strange? How about the utter clarity of the atmosphere, the lack of smog or air pollutants, the brightness of the mega-gazillion stars blinking their collective light down upon us?

There are said to be UFOs flitting around in those skies, but I have not seen any. It's not that I don't believe they exist …. after all, I was actually living in Roswell New Mexico that fateful day in July of 1947, when the crashed UFO and recovery of its alien crew was first announced and then denied the very next morning, which retraction by the military none of us believed!

I happened to be attending the New Mexico Military Institute as a cadet, and since my parents were off dilly-dallying in Europe, I was stuck in summer school. So you had 750 fairly bright junior college-aged guys hearing first-hand from some of the folks who had been to the scene of the crash, then reading the retraction and all of us saying … "Oh sure. A weather balloon? And the little aliens they recovered were really over-sized gophers?"

A lot of those cadets who entered the military after graduation were members of the US Air Force and reportedly saw UFOs on their own, only to be told by their superior officers that they hadn't really seen what they saw. Well, these guys, and I, remembered that day in Roswell when the military also said that what had been seen had not occurred.

So, I will admit that on these crystal-clear nights my eyes stray upward to search the skies, hoping that I, too, will become one of the "kooks" who think they saw little green men whizzing around in their space ships. Hmm-mm. Now that I think of it, there's a doormat outside the entrance to the famed Madre Tierra Hotel here in Vilcabamba that boldly proclaims "Welcome, UFO Crews!"

"They" say it's the magical water in the Andes Mountains high above Vilcabamba that these alien spaceships like to use for power. Hey, why not. The Japanese are now producing the first water-power automobile, so why not a water-propulsion spaceship? Stay tuned!