Aaron and his wife, Cori, stood under the midnight sky when they witnessed something unforgettable. Was it a UFO? A rogue meteor? Or something even stranger? In this episode, Aaron unravels the mystery of that night, diving into the possibility of life beyond Earth, blending cosmic curiosity with a deep pursuit of truth.
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Story created & performed by: Aaron Calafato
Senior Audio Engineer: Ken Wendt
Additional vocals: Cori Birce
Art: Pete Whitehead
Original Music: thomas j. duke
Transcript
Aaron Calafato:
What the hell was that? That's what I asked. Cori, my wife, is standing across from me. She sees the same thing. We're both looking up into the midnight sky, stars everywhere. We were there for a reason, but we didn’t know what we had just seen. We couldn’t believe it. It was like a celestial body flew over our heads, leaving us in awe and wondering: what the hell was that?
Well, I’ll tell you what it was right after the music.
All right, I know you’re guessing. Some of you might be right, some of you are way off. I promise I’ll deliver the goods, but you’ve got to hang with me for a couple of minutes.
We were standing in a park that has an observatory space for stargazing. From time to time, different astronomical societies and stargazers gather there on clear nights, when you can see the Milky Way above because there’s no—or very little—light pollution.
Cori and I were there because the Cleveland weatherman, who Cori loves, said the Aurora Borealis would be visible that weekend. Now, here in Northeast Ohio, we view our weathermen and weatherwomen as celebrities. If they tell you something, it’s gospel—you listen. So, Cori was like, we’ve got to go to this place and look at the night sky between midnight and 2 a.m. It was the weekend, so I packed up a shortwave radio, hoping to catch some strange stations, and we drove out there.
When we arrived, there was just one van, which was a little alarming at night, right? But the guy was safe—just a dude with a telescope. We parked far enough away that we weren’t crowding his space. He was actually packing up for the night, putting his telescope away in his trunk. He missed the whole thing—poor guy must’ve been out there for hours. We show up out of the blue, look up, and…
It wasn’t the Aurora Borealis. We couldn’t see it anywhere. Thanks for that, Mr. Weatherman. But instead, we saw something, at least in that moment, even more stunning.
This giant light. It had blue flames coming from the back and came from the top of the sky. It felt like it was just three houses above us, if you could picture that. That’s how close it felt. And you could hear it—kind of like an airplane landing.
I grew up in the ‘90s as a latchkey kid, which meant I watched a ton of TV. So right after I asked myself if it was a firework—and after Cori and I ruled out that it wasn’t—I thought, could this be a UFO? Here’s why: growing up, I was bombarded with pop culture about aliens. I watched The X-Files, and there were specials every night about Roswell, New Mexico, and Area 51. Movies like Fire in the Sky were all about alien abductions. Plus, I was kind of a radio head and always listened to AM radio late at night. Shows like Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell and George Noory would talk about people’s UFO encounters.
So yeah, my fascination was shaped by that. But the curiosity isn’t crazy. It’s not insane to ask, is there any life out there in the universe?
You can look at it two ways:
On one hand, Earth is tiny compared to the vastness of the universe. Like Carl Sagan said, it’s this little rock—a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam. There are billions of stars, solar systems, and potentially galaxies out there. With all those possibilities, is it so crazy to think there couldn’t be life, even on a cellular level, out there somewhere? It’s just a numbers game.
On the other hand, we know life is fragile. At least in our scope of the universe, it’s rare. We’re not bumping elbows with folks from Neptune or Saturn, and we haven’t found Martians on Mars. So, I get it—life could be so rare that we might be alone.
But things have changed since the ‘90s, when people would just dismiss these ideas as silly. There’s a recent Harvard study that suggests the possibility of alien life or advanced civilizations hiding in secret locations.
Now, I’m laughing because this sounds surreal, but the study proposes these civilizations could be hiding deep underground or even on the moon.
Obviously, this is speculative. The study is going to face skepticism, as it should. But the researchers argue that these ideas deserve further investigation, especially given the ongoing mystery of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) and the increasing global focus on the subject.
So here I am, witnessing what, to me, feels like a UAP.
Now, mind you, all of this is running through my head in a matter of seconds as Cori and I try to figure out what we’re looking at. Meanwhile, the guy in the van with his telescope leaves, having missed everything. Sorry, buddy.
On the drive home, Cori and I barely spoke a word. But just before bed, she shows me an article she pulled from a scientific journal, along with videos of people seeing the same thing we did: a blue streak across the sky.
What it turned out to be—and I’m guessing some of you have figured this out—was just a meteor. Part of the Draconid (or Draconid, I can never say it right) meteor shower. It happened to occur within the few days we were out there, and hundreds of meteors were falling to Earth. We just happened to be right under one of them.
It reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite movies, Contact. Reverend Joss, played by Matthew McConaughey, is asked by a reporter what he believes. Jodie Foster’s character, Dr. Arroway, has been interrogated about her extraterrestrial experience, and the reporter asks Reverend Joss, What do you believe?
McConaughey’s character says, As a person of faith, I’m bound by a different covenant than Dr. Arroway. But our goal is the same—the pursuit of truth.
And I think that’s the key. No matter where the curiosity comes from, we can all get behind the nobility of the pursuit of truth.
But I have to be honest—right before I closed my eyes that night, I could almost hear the theme music from The X-Files. And I thought to myself: If you were an alien, wouldn’t you disguise your ship as a comet or a meteor during a meteor shower on Earth, just in case you wanted to covertly pay us a visit?
