UFO Floats Over Hawaii

Telescope on Haleakala captures debris of streaking booster, not related to Oct. 24 sighting

A mysterious object shaped like a whale with flashing lights floated over the skies above Hawaii on Saturday, Oct. 24. Many who witnessed the flying object were convinced that it was a space ship from outer space.

"I know it was a space ship from another planet," said one observer on Kauai. Like-minded observers agreed that what they witnessed was an interplanetary ship. 

The occupants of said ship were likely benign visitors checking things out on the magical island chain.

Wait a minute. Could they not have been malicious invaders, ready to take a sampling of the human species home for dinner? That concept was explored by the late great Rod Serling in one of his Twilight Zone episodes.

What appeared to be an opportunity for a gay holiday on a distant planet, turned out to be a grocery run for the odd-looking visitors from space.

Nearly  6,000 strange sightings were reported in the skies of the U.S. and Canada during 2019, according to the National UFO Reporting Center, an increase of almost 2,500 such sightings during 2018.

The Reporting Center simply counts sightings, without further information. No follow up is done. These sightings could be anything from a planet to a red-and-green lighted drone shooting video of your neighborhood.

"Many people are not aware of astronomical goings on in space," according to a spokesperson for the UFO reporting center. "For instance, Jupiter and Venus have been more visible in the night sky."

Space X -- an Elon Musk enterprise -- launched 180 new satellites last year. Satellites currently crisscross the heavens, appearing like bright moving stars at night. The sky is becoming as congested as the Los Angeles freeway interchanges.

The UFO that was sighted over Hawaii was, according to Professor Richard Wainscoat of the University of Hawaii, most likely the re-entry of a spent rocket booster that launched a Venezuelan satellite, Venesat-1.  Venezuela? Who knew?

Wainscoat surmised that the spent rocket has been circling Earth since its launch in 2008, 12 years ago! That's not the satellite itself, but the launcher. Outer space may very well be more crowded than our freeway systems!

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which maintains a database of active satellites in orbit, as of April 1, 2020, there were a total of 2,666 satellites in space, of which 1,918 were in low-Earth orbit. The United States has 1,308 satellites in orbit, followed by China at 356, Multinational 177 and Russia 167. More than half of the satellites in space are for commercial purposes.

Wainscoat says that debris of used rockets, like the one that launched Venesat-1, come back to Earth. The so-called Spacecraft Cemetery, where many of these craft ultimately de-orbit, is located in the Southern Pacific Ocean at Point Nemo, the oceanic point of inaccessibility, farthest from any land.

In the big picture, the Hawaiian islands are practically neighbors of the Spacecraft Cemetery.

These scientific facts are not necessarily fun or mysterious. They spoil the creative musings of the imagination. We would rather believe in something grand and mystical, or dark and sinister. The raft of conspiracy theories today points this out. 

Many of these theories involve UFOs, including perhaps the most curious conspiracy that man did not land on the moon: that first landing of Apollo 11 with Neil Armstrong and Bud Aldrin on July 20, 1969, was merely a simulation filmed in the desert.

We can make a conspiracy out of anything.

Happy Halloween!

Zen in the 21st Century

Nearly completed modern house next door.

Mornings are getting colder, dipping toward the 40s. The swimming buoys are gone. The angle of the sun is changing, staying closer to the horizon. Next door to our 1940s post-war bungalow home, construction of two, yes two, 21st Century Modern homes is nearing completion. 

We have referred to the two-and-a-half-story high structures as the Trump Towers, the Hotel and most recently the Monsters. They are a curiosity on our street when walkers pass by. Sometimes a car will slow down and someone will open their window and snap a photo.

"Is that a hotel?" is the question most often heard. Others include:

"What is that?"

"How many units are there?"

"I feel sorry for you."

"I said a prayer for you."

"It's good you guys are so mellow. If I lived next door I would be going out of my mind."

During construction

As much as the building next to us has blocked the eastern sky from our view, we feel fortunate that our southern exposure has not been lost. Most of the day our home is not shaded. Our backyard feels more like an enclosed courtyard. We have enjoyed more than 30 years of comfortable living in our house that is less than a block from the ocean. It seems ungrateful to complain.

Change is inevitable. Santa Cruz has been known for its small cottages, 19th century Victorians, craftsman houses, and vernacular styles blending shingles and stucco. The 21st century has introduced a bold modernism of rectangular shapes, floor-to-ceiling windows, hidden decks and obtuse dimensions.

We have become acquainted with the site manager, a friendly guy, employed by the owner who is a developer from Palo Alto. The site manager oversees the various contractors involved in building the enormous complex of two large houses each with a detached living unit in back. Very little open space remains.

"It's not my style of architecture," says the site manager. Maybe he's embarrassed. He says people have asked about the plans, indicating that they would like to have similar style home built. It's the latest thing. Silicon Valley is moving in from over the hill.

The median price of a home in our once sleepy middle-class neighborhood is more than $1 million. I've heard that the place next door will go for about $4 million. We bought our house in 1990, right after the Loma Prieta Earthquake -- when some houses in town were destroyed. We paid $300,000 for our two-bedroom, one-bath house which had lost its chimney. We've since added space, a second bathroom and remodeled our kitchen.

Our house appears rather meek and unsubstantial on our block of mostly two-story structures.

In an earlier post (Tender Goodbye 7/19), I talked about the house next door on a spacious lot with fruit trees and gardens. It was a  one-story Spanish Revival style with a long front porch built in 1938. It was demolished in order to build the two towers. The elderly couple who had been our neighbors both passed away and their family inherited the property which is 113-ft wide.

Dutra House built in 1938, before demolition

We wrote a nice letter to the family asking if they would sell us a 10-ft strip of the property so that we would have more space for our driveway and possibly enlarge our one-car garage. They declined, feeling that would lessen the value of their lot, which they intended to sell.

The standard parcel size for a home on our block is 50-ft wide. I pointed out that they could sell a 10-ft strip to us and still have lot (100-ft wide) that could be subdivided into two parcels.

"The lot wouldn't be worth as much," said the head of the family.

"We will pay you. Name a price."

"Sorry."

They sold the lot for $2.2 million. The new owner was an engineer for Instagram, a friendly guy. I approached him with our offer to purchase 10-feet of the property. He, too, declined. He said he wanted to build his dream house on the lot. A few months later I learned that he sold the lot to someone else for $2.4 million.

When I asked him what happened, he said,"It was going to cost me so much time and money. And I found a house in Marin County that was perfect, so I bought that one."

We composed a letter to the next owner -- the Palo Alto developer -- asking if we might purchase 10-feet of his new lot.

"No," he said, "My architect needs all of the space for our project."

I have learned over the years to detach and let go of things that pester the mind, especially things over which I have no control. I have embraced a form of Zen Buddhism that focuses on the present, not the past or the future, but what is now, this moment.

People will be people. Our culture has many problems. The three poisons of the mind are greed, anger and delusion. Let them go.

I love my home, my family and the life I have been given. Perhaps I will learn to love the big houses next door. Presently, I can still hear the fog horn and feel the warmth of the sun on my skin on a cold morning in fall.

Now for some primal screaming!  

October Light

Did you see the sun this morning?

It was melting gold as large as a pink grapefruit in an orange sky. Just over the horizon, above the mountain ridge. Beyond the quiet bay.

So many gawkers and walkers and talkers, many with their iPhones pointed easterly to capture the magnificent orb. Air temperature was already above 60 and it's mid-October.

Supposed to be 97 today! Is that possible?

No waves. I had already checked for signs of white water during dawn's early light. The ocean is quiet. No storms yet. Earlier in the week there was talk of rain, but that was... a mirage. A meteorological moon dance.

There is no moon at night, only a round shadow and a disappearing crescent.

Tides, pulled by the moon, are becoming extreme -- highs and lows. A good time for beach combing.

I recall that first October in Santa Cruz, 1978, when the air felt like the inside of a refrigerator. Or so it seemed, as I ran along the foot paths, bare-legged, light-shirted, over sidewalks, through the corridors of the Pacific Garden Mall, over the asphalt roads into the Brussels sprout fields. I was Forrest Gump. I just kept running...

I don't run anymore.

October. 

Witches and goblins are appearing, freaky-looking clowns and belligerent pirates with swords _ "arghh"!! Halloween is nigh, bigger than ever. We're dying to celebrate. Anything! The Freak Show in Washington is too scary. We must create our own faux nightmare to replace the real one.

Seventeen days until Election Day. 

Sleepy Hollow. The Headless Horseman. Icabod Crane.

Separated, we stand, amid pandemic and partisan. Together we grieve. We Zoom. What happened to the Beatles? It's been a hard day's night.

The SCOTUS is going 6-3 conservative. RBG has left the room. The originalists are coming! Grab your gun! Hide your children!

Hold on. It's only October. Enjoy the light. Be in the moment.

I am reminded of Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain whose protagonist, Hans Castorp, is a recent college graduate on his way to his first official job. He stops at a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland to visit his ailing cousin. Castorp develops minor bronchial congestion and is advised to stay and recuperate. He meets a cast of intriguing characters and ends up staying in the sanatorium for seven beguiling years! Among his fellow patients is Mynheer Peeperkorn, a boastful, self-absorbed dandy who speaks in riddles and is unable to finish a complete sentence, a Trumpian persona yet worthy of sympathy.

Peeperkorn drives himself to suicide.

We are stronger and more centered than Peeperkorn.

Did you see the sun this morning?

Radio Daze and KFAT

Turn up your radio 

And let me hear the song

Switch on your electric light

                                            -- Van Morrison

 

Before YouTube and MTV, there was radio. My first radio was a transistor, the size of package of cigarettes. I earned it by selling subscriptions to the newspaper I delivered in a canvas bag slung over my shoulders. My transistor radio was bright orange. I carried it with me during my route so that I could tune in Chuck Berry and Fats Domino while I traipsed through the neighborhood tossing papers on porches. But the trouble was, the signal kept dying and I rarely heard an entire song.

Then there was the clock radio next to my bed. I woke up and went to sleep by it -- sometimes listening to a Dodger game. But most of the time it was tuned to KFWB, KRLA or KHG, all AM, all rock n roll. Rock music in those days included R & B, bubble gum, popular, surf, Motown, some folk even a tad of jazz, like "Take Five" by Dave Brubeck. There were no music categories. The songs were mixed together by the DJs.

Then came FM radio, stereo music transmitted over the airwaves. Wow! In early 1970 we were living in San Jose. The hippest rock station came broadcast from San Francisco, KSAN. It was a talisman that kept you informed as well as entertained by disc jockeys with clever names like Dusty Street and an acerbic news reporter named Travus T. Hipp.

The airwaves slowly became more predictable. These were commercial stations. FM radio also introduced publicly supported programing including PBS which offered a news magazine format that helped attract listeners.

This story, however, is about a commercial radio station that suddenly appeared during the mid-Seventies and broke all the "rules" during a time when rules were becoming the radio norm. Music categories had developed and stations were narrowing their playlists, to the point of near automation. KSAN eventually became a country music station. Out of San Francisco!

Enter Lorenzo Milam and Jeremy Lansman, a couple of off-beat "geniuses" who saw opportunity buying and selling radio stations. Small stations with weak broadcast signals that couldn't compete with the big dawgs were going up for sale.

One such radio station was KSND in Gilroy, California. Where and what is Gilroy? Good question. You may have heard of the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Its existence is also part of the story of this unique radio station, renamed KFAT by Lansman and his crew. Their station ID became, "This is K-F-A-T Gilroy, Garlic Capital of the World."

No more than a fraction of an inch away from KSAN on the radio dial, KFAT radio began broadcasting a country-style of music popular in West Texas with artists like Willie Nelson and Rodney Crowell, Waylon Jennings and Delbert McClinton. You might hear a guy named Kris Kristoferson and a gal named Emmylou Harris back-to-back, followed by a racy commercial for an adult bookstore. You knew right away that the horny-sounding commercial was not your typical slick radio ad.

I was employed as entertainment editor for a 65-year-old daily legal newspaper, the San Jose Post-Record (which is still being published). I had lots of leeway regarding my choice of stories, and lots of space to fill. I contacted KFAT radio in Gilroy, about 20 minutes south of San Jose, believing this would be an interesting piece. It was. It was also disjointed and strange, reflecting what I found out when I visited the station in a funky upstairs "closet" in Gilroy and later met Jeremy Lansman in tony downtown Los Gatos.

"You can buy a radio station and sell it for a nice profit," he told me when I asked him about his motivation or purpose behind KFAT. He was the most unlikely businessman you could imagine, from his messed up hair to his bare feet. A very un-Los Gatos look.

The type of music KFAT played was termed "progressive country," by his wife Laura Ellen. It was a hodge podge that included old, little-heard records from the original low-wattage Gilroy station. KFAT also introduced listeners to story-teller Utah Philips, whose "Moose Turd Pie" became the most requested "song" on KFAT, ever. 

The real story of KFAT radio is now in book form -- "Fat Chance" -- authored by Gilbert Klein, who was a member of the improbable-yet-lovable KFAT crew. Klein developed his own unique program called "Chewing the Fat." He's a wonderful wordsmith and he's done a magnificent job. "Fat Chance" was published in 2016.

Fat-heads, or Fatties, will want to peruse this nearly 600-page volume of goodies about the station and its characters (includes photos!). I learned that Lansman was an electronics wizard who one night hooked up a transmitter on the highest peak in the Santa Cruz Mountain range, Loma Prieta, which enabled the KFAT signal to reach the entire Bay Area and beyond from podunk Gilroy. It became the most popular radio station in Santa Cruz County and drew a wide audience from the surrounding region.

If you're interested, read the book. Oh, Lansman paid $150,000 for the little station that sold about five years later for more than $3 million! 

Last Wave:

KFAT introduced a new music genre to radio, known as Americana. Although the station is now defunct, its boot prints have been filled by KPIG radio with much of the same off-beat humor and music. And KPIG relies on real disc jockeys, including one or two from those Fat Days of yesteryear.

I Smell a Rat

Every morning for the past several months when I woke up the first thing I asked was, "Does he have Covid yet?"

It was a question I kept close to home. I didn't broadcast the matter, just wondered how is it that he has not contracted the novel coronavirus. 

There was that indoor rally in Tulsa that left a few attendees infected, but not his maskless self. The rallies and insults continued like a traveling nightmare.

When I saw the gathering in the Rose Garden at the so-called Republican Convention with rows of seats tightly filled with bodies of uncovered faces, I couldn't help but wonder. What's going on? There he was again, his jowly porcine face not wearing a mask, his body slumped over a lectern, expounding about all of the hoaxes that plagued him.

But not the virus.

And all those Republicans crammed together like little chicks in a box. Weren't they slightly worried about the contagion of a pandemic that had already ended the life of more than 200,000 Americans.

He's supposedly a germophobe. You'd think he would be wearing a hazmat suit. Behind the scenes, was he scrupulously cleansing himself, with his stewards fussing about him with spray bottles of sanitizer, Hydroxychloroquine and penetrating flashlights. Just last week we learned that he wrote off $70,000 of taxes for hair grooming.

Surely, he was being more careful than he let on.

Or, and that's a big OR, was Covid-19 really a hoax? Fake news? A Democratic Party conspiracy?

And now this. Thirty days before the General Election he announces, on Twitter, that he and his wife have tested positive for Covid-19. Really!? Next thing you know he's going to Walter Reed Hospital for observation, with mild symptoms.

Given his penchant for exaggeration and obfuscation, how are we expected to believe this?

Is this the October Surprise? Trick or Treat?

On one hand, it smells like a dirty trick, to gain sympathy, and with a quick recovery, announce that Covid is no big deal, just like he told us. He even got the "girls" to go in on it -- Hope, Kellyanne and Melania. They all tested positive. Supposedly.

Strange.

On the other hand, the hand that I have been making a fist with all along, it was simply a matter of time and exposure before he of the cavalier macho-man mindset would be victim to the nonpartisan virus, that knows only a 74-year-old obese man is an easy target.

In this unreal year of 2020, I remain a skeptic. I am liable to believe anything or nothing. After that thing they called a debate last week, something's got to shut him up.

At least temporarily.