by Jean Fischer
“Sshhhh!” Sydney told her. “You’ll wake everybody.”
“We are not going to check it out,” Bailey whispered. “What if the aliens on it abduct us and take us to their planet? No way, Syd!”
But Sydney was already hurrying down the stairs to the beach.
“Don’t leave me alone,” Bailey begged.
“Then come on,” her friend said.
The UFO was just offshore now. The blinking lights faded to black, and the object disappeared into the darkness. Soon a strange whirring came from the water’s edge. It turned into a soft flop flop flop, sounding like a flat tire on asphalt. Whatever it was had landed on the beach. And it was moving!
Sydney walked toward the noise, but she couldn’t see a thing.
The noise stopped.
Bailey had Sydney by the arm now and held her back from going even closer.
Whoof!
A strong puff of hot air hit the girls in the face. Something whizzed past them only a few yards away.
“A wild horse!” Bailey gasped.
“That was no horse,” Sydney said.
“Are you sure?” asked Bailey. She loosened her grip.
“I’m sure,” said Sydney. “It was going so fast that it’s probably to the sound by now.”
Sydney decided to run home to get a flashlight. Bailey insisted on coming along. In only moments, the girls returned to the place where whatever it was had rushed past them. Sydney focused the light onto the sand at the water’s edge.
“Oh my,” she said, “look at that!”
Along the water was a line of strange footprints in the wet sand.
Or were they footprints?
The prints were like big, oval waffles. Their pattern of lines and squares looked like someone had gone along slapping the sand with a tennis racket. The prints came out of the sea and stretched only across the wet sand at the ocean’s edge. When they reached the dry part of the sand, they disappeared.
“Bigfoot!” said Bailey. “You know, that gigandamundo monster that leaves his footprints but is hardly ever seen!”
“There’s no such thing as Bigfoot,” Sydney said. She crouched down to get a better look.
“And until a few minutes ago, you didn’t believe UFOs existed,” said Bailey.
She had a point. Sydney had no idea what they had just witnessed. She had no explanation for the strange thing that hovered over the water or for the way that it had rushed past them on the beach without a sound.
As she looked over the ocean, Sydney saw the sun beginning to rise. It painted the sky a beautiful salmon orange and sent diamonds of light dancing across the lavender-colored sea.
“Bailey, go get the camera,” Sydney said. “We have to get a picture of these prints before they wash away.”
Bailey ran to the beach house. She quickly returned to where Sydney waited. By the time she got there, the water was already lapping at the prints.
Sydney snapped a half dozen shots until the prints had almost disappeared.
“Looking for ghost crabs, Sydney Lincoln?”
A man’s deep voice came from behind them.
“Captain Swain!” Bailey exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
The captain stood in front of them dressed in a crisp, blue jogging suit. Sydney noticed it had a coastguard emblem on one sleeve. He had a dog with long black fur, about the size of Kate’s dog, Biscuit, by his side.
“McTavish and I are taking our morning walk,” the captain replied. “And what brings you girls out so early on this fine, summer morning.”
“We saw a UFO,” Bailey answered. “And then we went to check it out, but it disappeared. Now there are Bigfoot prints in the sand.”
Bailey didn’t notice that Sydney was shooting her a look that said, “Be quiet!” By now, the footprints had been completely washed away.
“‘So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,’” the captain said.
In the back of her mind, Sydney remembered reading those words in her Bible study class at camp, but she wasn’t quite sure what they meant.
“Just God and me talking out loud,” said the captain. He bent and patted McTavish on the head. The dog wagged its tail, sending sand flying in all directions. “Go play, my boy,” the captain said, and McTavish scampered along the water’s edge leaving footprints trailing behind him.
“I thought you said you never come to Corolla Light,” Sydney reminded him.
“I said I rarely come here,” the captain corrected her. “I never come here in the daytime when things are busy unless I absolutely have to. Too many tourists! But often in the morning hours, I hear the ocean calling me.”
Bailey still wasn’t sure about Captain Swain. Something about him was different. He seemed not to fit in with the residents and tourists on the Outer Banks. She imagined him instead in the days of the ghost ships, hoisting the billowing sails, and standing at the ship’s wheel. He seemed mysterious. From a different time in history.
She decided to come right out and ask, “Are you a—”
“Girls! Breakfast!” Sydney’s grandmother stood on the upper deck of the beach house calling to them. “Come on now.”
“We have to go,” Sydney said. She and Bailey ran back to the house.
“Who was that man?” Sydney’s grandma asked. “And why were you girls on the beach so early?”
“We saw a UFO,” Bailey announced. “And we went to check it out, but we didn’t find anything but Bigfoot’s footprints. And then Captain Swain showed up. I think he’s a ghost because yesterday he disappeared into thin air.” She looked down at the beach, but the captain was gone.
“See,” she said. “He disappeared again!”
Sydney looked toward the beach and tried to come up with a logical explanation.
“Did you see where he went, Grandma?” she asked.
Sydney’s grandmother looked north and south.
“No,” she replied. “But I had my eyes on you and not on the beach. Bailey, UFOs and Bigfoot and ghosts don’t exist. Those are all just stories.” Her brown eyes twinkled as she smiled at Sydney’s friend. “We’re so happy to have you here, but we don’t want you to be afraid of things that don’t exist. We just want you to have fun.”
Bailey still wasn’t convinced. She had seen the UFO with her own eyes, and she had seen the footprints too. And those footprints weren’t from any animal or human.
“But those things do exist,” she whispered to herself. “At least, I think so.”
The girls hurried to their room to dress. Sydney quickly emailed the photos to the Camp Club Girls, telling them what had happened at the beach that morning. Then she and Bailey dashed to the kitchen table. Grandpa said the mealtime prayer:
“Loving Father, we thank You for this food,
And for all Your blessings to us.
Lord Jesus, come and be our guest,
And take Your place at this table.
Holy Spirit, as this food feeds our bodies,
So we pray You would nourish our souls. Amen.”
“Is the Holy Spirit the same as the Holy Ghost?” Bailey asked as she chose a piece of cinnamon bread.
“He is,” Gramps answered, scooping some scrambled eggs onto Bailey’s plate.
“And He’s truly a ghost?” Bailey wondered.
“He’s a spirit, Bailey,” Gramps answered. “Many things about God are a mystery and beyond what we humans can understand. The Holy Spirit is one of them. He’s a part of God, but He isn’t a ghost who haunts or hurts people. He’s the Helper, the One who guides us through every day. Grandma says you’ve been seeing things since you got here.”
Bailey shook some pepper onto her eggs. She didn’t know what to say except that she had seen strange things, and they were real.
“You girls are good at solving mysteries,” Sydney’s grandfather went on. “I think you’ve discovered, by now, that when it comes to mysteries
there’s usually a logical explanation.”
Sydney went to the refrigerator and got a slice of American cheese. She put it on top of her scrambled eggs and zapped her meal in the microwave.
“I think it’s my fault,” she said. “Yesterday, I told Bailey about the ghost ship. Since then, she’s been thinking about ghosts.” Sydney carried her eggs back to the table and stuck her fork into the gooey cheese.
“Ah, the ghost ship,” Gramps said. “That’s an unsolved mystery on the Outer Banks. Folks like to make up stories about it. Somewhere, though, there’s the truth about what happened to those poor missing sailors. You can be sure there’s a good explanation.”
Gramps stirred cream into his coffee. “You know, I think tomorrow I’ll take you girls to the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum. Then you can learn all about the ghost ship and the other shipwrecks off the coast.”
While the girls continued eating and talking about shipwrecks, someone knocked on the door and Sydney’s grandmother went to answer it.
In a moment, the Kessler twins walked into the room, greeting the girls. Grandpa offered them some cinnamon bread, but they declined.
“Hey, Nate Wright is down at the beach near Tuna Street, and he’s setting up his chair,” Marilyn said.
“Digger is starting to blow up the helium balloons,” Carolyn added. “And I thought Bailey might want to see.”
“Can we?” Sydney asked her grandparents as she picked up her plate and Bailey’s to carry to the dishwasher.
“Go ahead,” Grandma said. “But when he takes off, you girls stay a safe distance away. I don’t want you getting hurt.” Grandma sipped her coffee. “Cluster ballooning is dangerous, even when it’s done the ordinary way, but when Nate does it, it’s even more dangerous. He takes too many risks if you ask me and is even a bit crazy. And that son of his is an odd duck too.”
Grandma poured a little more creamer into her coffee. “Why, you wouldn’t believe the junk that boy picks up on the beach. One day, I was near their house in the village, and you should have seen the junk piled up by their equipment shed!”
“One night, our dad had to go to the village, and he saw Mr. Wright and Digger welding stuff in their yard,” Marilyn said. “The sparks lit up their place like fireworks on the Fourth of July. He said he heard that they get real busy at night moving stuff around in the dark—”
“And using hammers and power saws too,” Carolyn added.
Grandpa buttered a piece of bread for himself. “Nate says he’s an inventor, but the only invention I’ve seen so far is that silly balloon chair. He thinks he can use that idea to someday create travel that’s fast, clean, and inexpensive. Can you imagine all of us flying around in chairs tethered to party balloons?”
The girls laughed.
“Let’s go,” said Sydney. “Are we walking or taking our bikes?”
“Walking,” said the twins.
The girls joined a small crowd that had gathered on the beach just off the sandy beach access lane. Nate Wright was checking the chair, adjusting the straps and making sure they were secured. The seat looked like it came from an airplane cockpit. It had lots of instruments and a big joystick.
“It’ll never get off the ground,” Bailey said. “It’ll be too heavy with all that stuff on it.”
“No, it won’t,” said Sydney. “You won’t believe your eyes.”
An old beat-up school bus was parked at the edge of the beach on the end of the access road. On its side was a hodgepodge of words:
LASERS
LEVITATING
ELEVATING
WRIGHT &
SON
ORIENTEERING
RACING
“What does it all mean?” Bailey asked.
“I guess it advertises things they’re working on. I don’t really know,” said Sydney.
“Why don’t we ask them?” said Bailey.
“Because they don’t talk to anybody,” Sydney replied. “The only time the Wrights say anything is if they think you’re getting close enough to get hurt.”
Drake Wright, Digger, was on the roof of the bus with a helium tank. One by one, he filled balloons with helium and fastened them to big hooks on top of the bus roof. Each hook held several dozen colorful balloons.
“What’s he doing?” asked Bailey.
“He has to have a place to store the balloons until they get attached to the chair,” said Marilyn. “So he ties them to the bus, because anything lighter than a bus would lift right off the ground.”
“No way!” said Bailey. She took her cell phone out of her pocket and snapped a few pictures. “I’m going to send these to Kate right now,” she said. “She’ll love this!”
Once Digger had filled all of the balloons, he helped his dad slide the chair to the front of the school bus. Then they chained and locked it to the bumper. Mr. Wright sat down, strapped himself in, and put on a helmet, the kind the astronauts wear.
“Now what?” asked Bailey.
“Watch,” said Carolyn.
“Watch,” Marilyn echoed.
Methodically, Digger carried the balloons from the rooftop to his dad’s chair, one bunch at a time. He attached them to special fasteners on the chair frame and the chair soon began to rise.
“Awesome!” Bailey gasped, snapping more pictures.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” said Sydney.
When all of the balloons were in place, the chair hovered near the hood of the school bus. It strained to break loose.
“Get back!” Digger yelled at the crowd.
Everyone took several steps backward.
Drake shook his dad’s hand and released the chains. The chair shot up into the air like a rocket. It kept soaring up and over the water.
“Oh wow!” said Bailey.
Digger disappeared from sight.
“Where’d he go?” Bailey asked, snapping a few more pictures.
“He’s probably gone to get the boat,” said Carolyn.
“Mr. Wright can only go so high before the oxygen gets too thin,” said Marilyn, “so he has to start popping balloons to slowly come down. When he splashes down in the ocean, Digger will be there to pick him up.”
“But Digger has to go down the shore a bit to get the boat in the water,” Carolyn explained to the girls. “There’s no dock or boat ramp here, and you have to have a boat with some power to withstand the waves.”
“He usually flies over the sound side of the Outer Banks,” Marilyn said. “That’s where most of the smaller boats and jet skis are because the water is calmer.”
Bailey’s cell phone rang. It was a text message from Kate: READ THE FIRST LETTERS OF EACH WORD ON THE BUS FROM BOTTOM TO TOP. THEY SPELL ROSWELL! K8.
“Check it out,” Bailey said handing the phone to Sydney. “What’s Roswell?” Sydney read the message. “Roswell is a town in New Mexico famous for UFOs,” she explained. “People think one crashed there years ago.”
Pop! Pop-pop! Pop!
As a series of a loud bangs rang over the ocean the girls wondered about UFOs as they watched Nate Wright’s chair fall slowly toward the sea.
Aliens
Dear Syd and Bailey,
Kate emailed me about the Wrights and the Roswell connection. How creepy! Do you think that the Wrights are connected with the UFO you saw this morning? I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but in the movie people tried to make contact with a spaceship by using a code—five musical notes, re-mi-do-do-sol. I wonder if that flashlight thing you found on the beach is some sort of signaling device. Do you think the Wrights are trying to communicate with aliens?
Be careful,
Alex
Alexis’s email, marked “Highest Priority,” was waiting for Sydney and Bailey when they got back from the beach.
“Now do you believe me?” Bailey asked flopping on her bed in the guest room. “Even Alex thinks we’re being invaded by spaceships.”
Sydney sat on her bed fidg
eting with her cornrows. She was trying to find a practical explanation.
“I don’t know what to believe,” she answered. “I mean, Roswell is another unsolved mystery like the ghost ship. According to the story, a UFO crashed in Roswell, in the desert. A rancher found pieces of metal scattered all over his property. He called the authorities and even the army got involved. It was a very big deal back then. They roped off his land and didn’t let anyone inside. At first the government said they found pieces of a flying saucer. Later they said that the pieces were from a weather balloon. No one knows for sure, but just like the ghost ship story, rumors have kept going around.”
Bailey lay on her bed thinking. She was sure the UFO she saw was not a helicopter, boat, or other ordinary thing. If the Wrights were involved, it would make sense, because they were so different and secretive.
“Hey,” said Bailey. “Maybe they’re aliens!”
“Huh?” said Sydney.
“Mr. Wright and Digger,” Bailey answered. “Maybe their spaceship crashed in the ocean, but they survived. That would explain Drake Digger picking up stuff along the shore. He’s picking up pieces of the spaceship!”
Sydney sighed. “Oh Bailey, your imagination is getting away from you again.”
“No, it’s not,” said Bailey sitting up on the bed. “At night, when most people are asleep, the Wrights are trying to reconstruct their spaceship from the pieces Drake finds. That’s why they’re welding and stuff. And meanwhile they’re trying to create an alternate vehicle that could go high enough to meet a rescue ship, or something. That’s why they’re experimenting with the cluster balloons. And that thing we found on the beach? Alex is right. It’s a signaling device.”
“Bailey!” said Sydney.
“And you know what else?” Bailey went on. “I think Captain Swain is one of them. He was on the beach this morning when the UFO was there. He saw the whole thing! He knows what that thing was hovering over the ocean, and he knows what scooted past us in the dark. He knows about those footprints too!”
“Oh Bailey, stop,” said Sydney. “Yesterday, you thought the captain was a ghost.” She got up from her bed and got the coffee mug from the bookshelf.
