When I was eight years old, I lived in L...., a very prosperous suburban town near a city. There were a number of universities in or near this city, including a technical university. My father was a postdoc working in someone's lab. I don't know whose, but I was only eight, so I guess it wasn't the kind of thing that made an impression. That summer, just towards the end of the school year (the main thing I remember about that school was that our female teacher used to come into the boys room, and stand behind us while we did our business at the urinals -- what was that about?), and it was starting to get hot, and there was also a lot of heat in my house.
For several nights in a row, my brother and I heard my parents raising their voices in their bedroom. This was something we'd never heard before, and both of us, I think, pretended we didn't hear anything, because we didn't talk about it then, nor have we ever discussed it since. An awful lot happened soon after that, and maybe we forgot. In any case, that was when my father started leaving the house late at night.
The first time he did that, and then, every time after, I looked out my window overlooking the front yard, and I saw that he didn't take the car. In fact, he did a very curioius thing. We lived on a cul-de-sac, and if you went between the house at the end, and the house across the street, there was a trail that lead to the culvert behind the house, and then further back, into some woods that seemed very dark and deep to me. I didn't know, then, where that trail came out, as I'd never had the guts to follow it all the way.
My father headed across the street, and started walking down the path. It was then, that I noticed the most curious thing. I don't know why I didn't notice it earlier. Maybe it was just the peculiarness of his behavior, and the surprise that he even knew about the trail. But when he walked further away, and I kind of refocussed my gaze, I saw he was wearing a strange contraption on his head. It looked -- well, it was hard to tell in the dark -- but it seemed like it was a hat with some metal spikes coming out of it. I also saw that he was carrying what looked like a very heavy suitcase in his hand.
Did I say that my father was a physicist? He liked making things, and was often down in our basement, working with soldering irons, and instruments with strange dials on them, and machine tools, making small metal boxes that did who-knew-what.
For three nights in a row, the same thing happened. My parents would fight, my father would leave, I would watch through the window, and my father would be carrying this suitcase and wearing the weird thing on his head. By the second night, my brother was there with me, looking out the window. The third night, we decided that we would follow him the next night.
The next night, we did our best spy imitations. Putting our pajamas on over our clothes. Getting our shoes ready to slip on as soon as our mother had kissed us good night. I'd even raided the kitchen, and found a box of Ritz crackers and two bottles of Nehi, that I'd put in my little knapsack, together with the swiss army knife I'd received for my birthday the week before, a flashlight, and the cub scout merit badge handbook. I'd gone to cub scout meetings for a few months, but I'd never managed to earn a single badge. Still, I believed in it, and I must have thought it would be useful.
Everything was ready. Our parents started arguing. Their voices got louder and louder, and then they stopped. But my father didn't leave the house that night. Instead of leaving, he stayed in the living room, staring out the window. I know this because when we came into the living room, we were totally unprepared for him to be there.
When he heard us, he turned around and said, "You boys get back to bed right now, and make sure you fall asleep. Tonight is not the night to get caught out of bed!" He said it in such a steely tone, that we had no choice but to obey instantly. Then, he said a very strange thing, in a totally different tone of voice. "Good-bye, boys," he said in this tender tone I'd never heard before. I looked back, but he made a shooing motion with his hand, but in my memory, I don't know if it's true, or if I just want it to be true. I thought I heard him whisper, "I love you."
We crawled under our covers, but just as I was closing my eyes, a bright light came in through the window, lighting up our room like day. Well, not all at once. It started dimmer, but got gradually brighter and brighter until it was actually too bright to look at, and then it suddenly disappeared.
Neither of us even considered getting out of bed, given the way our father had been. That is a decision I've regretted ever since then. The next day, when we got up, my father wasn't there. In the middle of the living room was a strange helmet that had a couple of antenna-like structures sticking out of it, and very dark lenses -- thicker and darker than any I'd ever seen. I looked around, expecting to see the suitcase thing, but that wasn't there.
Then my mother called us into the kitchen, and she was crying. She had us sit with her at the kitchen table, and when she got herself together, she managed to tell us that we wouldn't be seeing my father again. We asked her why, and she must have said something, but I don't remember what. Later, when we asked her, she refused to talk about it, and in fact, she never mentioned my father again.
Later on, when I got older, I realized that there was a naval airfield through the woods on that trail. And still later, I heard rumors that this facility was listed on the same list as Area 51.
