James Hynes

My friend Roger Boylan has sent me a very cool link, to a gallery of nearly 60 classic photographs of UFOs from the Daily Telegraph, dating back (no kidding) to a photo taken in New Hampshire in 1870. Most of them, though, are grainy, blurry, unsteady snapshots from the 1940s through the 1960s, most of them in black and white, and if you misspent your childhood like I did, reading grubby little paperbacks about UFOs, you've probably seen most of them before.

I still want to believe, of course, but I have to say, looking at them after all these years, a lot of these old favorites look pretty fake to me now; more than one of them looks like somebody flung a hubcap or a straw hat or a pie plate into the air while somebody else snapped a picture with a Brownie or a Polaroid. Then, smirking like mad, no doubt, they mailed it to their local newspaper, which probably published it under the unironic, pre-Onion headline, "Area Man Photographs Flying Disc." This one, which turned up in most of the UFO books of my childhood, looks to me now like a clumsy double exposure.

The main response these pictures provoke in me now, in fact, is nostalgia, for that row of paperbacks by Frank Edwards, John G. Fuller, and others whose names I don't remember any longer that occupied the bottom shelf of the bookcase over my bed, where I could reach them without having to lift my head from the pillow. I plowed through most of them more than once, provoking a good deal of eye-rolling from my very skeptical father and some flat-out disdain from my mother, who once told me I couldn't buy any more UFO books until I'd read Huckleberry Finn. Of course, I kept buying them anyway, and didn't end up reading Huck Finn until I was in my late 20s. More fool me, I know. I should (as always) have listened to my mother.

And I don't know what it is with the big British dailies this week, but yesterday I got a similar nostalgic thrill from this gallery of photos of the Loch Ness Monster in the Guardian. In this case, the nostalgia dates from later in my life, in 1982, to be exact, during my first trip to Scotland. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend, and like every other backpacker who ever lived, I was trying to walk it off in the remoter parts of the UK. In Inverness, I rented a bicycle from my youth hostel and cycled about ten miles down the side of Loch Ness on a cold, damp, overcast November day. Minus the monster, which of course I didn't see, the road alongside Loch Ness is pretty dreary, just a two-lane blacktop with a dank pine forest rising pretty much straight up a steep hillside on one side of the road, and the underachieving waves of the loch feebly slapping the stones of the shore on the other. If that wasn't depressing enough, the bike was too small for me and I was out of shape, so that by time I finally gave up and turned around, I was sore, damp, sweaty, and pissed off—and still had ten miles to go before I got back to the dank, overlit, and underheated youth hostel (where the warden, whose accent made him virtually incomprehensible, was always trying to pick a fight with me over Reagan and the Trident missile). The one virtue of the experience was that it finally transformed my sorrow and self-pity over my ex into a purgative anger, so that by time I pumped uphill into Inverness again near sundown (which is about 3 in the afternoon that time of year), it was her fault I was wet and cold, her fault my knees ached, and her fault that I cycled 20 fucking miles in the fucking rain on a fucking kiddie bike and didn't even see the fucking monster.  

Which is also probably just as well. The most famous photo in the Guardian collection, the so-called "Surgeon's Photo," which was long considered the canonical photo of Nessie, has since been definitively revealed to be a hoax; it's a toy submarine with a lizardy neck and head stuck on.

Yet I still get a pleasant chill up my spine, even knowing it's a fake, probably because it's so blurry and grainy and crude. The same goes for all those smudgy photos of UFOs: the photo that would convince all the skeptics would have to be crystal clear and detailed and taken in front of a small army of witnesses. It's the dodgy nature of the photos—their clumsiness, their uncertain provenance, their risibility—that makes them so appealingly mysterious. I don't think a clear, hi-def photo or video of a UFO or Nessie would have anything like the power of these pictures, which are like something glimpsed out of the corner of your eye, or something from a dream. I suspect they still move people because they aren't convincing; you have to invest them with faith in the mysterious to make them work, and after you do that, of course, it doesn't matter how silly they look: they're lodged forever in that part of your subconscious that still jumps at things half seen in the dark.

I also suspect that apart from the Fox Mulders of the world and the guys on UFO Hunters, most of us don't want the mystery of UFOs or Loch Ness or Sasquatch cleared up; they're too much fun to look at on the web, or read about as a kid, or watch half-awake from the couch on the History Channel. The day the Zeta Reticulans actually land on the White House lawn, or a plesiosaur washes up in Inverness, or a Sasquatch wanders out of the Cascades and gets hit by a semi on Interstate 5, that day, all the fun will go out of them, and the world will be a little less mysterious, and hence, a little less interesting.

My lizard brain this morning is still pretty hysterical, but it's a happy kind of hysterical. I was up until 1:30 am last night, but set my alarm for 6 this morning so I could go out and get a New York Times before they were all gone. In the end, I woke up at 5, listened to the radio for a bit while I lounged in bed, then went out at 5:30 in search of a Times. I bought the only two copies they had at my local Walgreens—one for me and one for my wife, who asked me to get her one, too—then I went over to Randall's, my local 24-hour supermarket, and bought one there, too, to wrap in plastic and keep in the closet with my copy of the Times from September 12, 2001.

It's windy and overcast in Austin this morning, which is actually a lot like the weather in Michigan 28 years ago, the day after Ronald Reagan was elected. I still remember very distinctly my feeling of disbelief that day as I walked the streets of Ann Arbor in the chill, November gloom, just thinking over and over again, "Ronald Reagan just got elected president. How did that happen?" I really felt that I was sleeping through some kind of weird, slow-motion nightmare, and that any moment I'd wake up and it would turn out that Carter was still president and Reagan was still just a B-list actor. Today, under a similarly gloomy sky, I feel the mirror image of that disbelief—something giddier and happier, but no less surreal. My brother Mike in LA just sent me an e-mail that said "Pinch me," and that sort of sums up how I feel, too. This is too good to be true, right? Please let me know I'm not actually dreaming.

I took the day off work so I could enjoy this. But right now, I'm going back to bed.

Today is Election Day, and I'm suffering from metaphor overload. My nerves are shredded. I'm as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I'm vibrating with anxiety like a tuning fork. My forebrain, and the poll numbers at Real Clear Politics, are telling me I shouldn't worry so much, but my shrill, hysterical, paranoid lizard brain is screaming constantly at a pitch only dogs can hear. I can't even claim to be unique: you can read all about my condition in the New York Times.

If I were calmer, I might take to heart John Marks' passionate defense of the spirit of Kum Ba Yah over at No Depression. But I'm not, so I can't. No today, anyway. All the caffeine I've had this morning doesn't help (I float through every morning on a sea of Diet Coke). And the fact that I watch Jon Stewart and Colbert right before I go to bed every night. And the fact that I've bookmarked not one, not two, not three, but four electoral maps, which I try not to look at more than once an hour.

I'm not completely out of control, though. In the evenings (before Stewart and Colbert, anyway) I've been trying to avoid watching the cable news channels, and have pretty successfully given myself a couple hours of respite by reading non-election-related stuff. I just got the new NYRB collection of Daphne Du Maurier's macabre fiction, Don't Look Now, selected and introduced by Patrick McGrath, and have been reading a couple stories a night with great pleasure. The title story didn't get to me the way I hoped it would, but that's mainly because it's a plot-driven story, and having seen the Nicholas Roeg film version already two or three times, the story has nothing new to offer. Du Maurier's story "The Birds," however, is a different matter. I've always loved Hitchcock's film version, but until two nights ago, I had never read the original, and was astonished and pleased to find that it's even better than the film—grittier and much, much darker. Hitchcock took only the basic conceit of the story and invented his own story (a middle-class psychodrama, basically), while Du Maurier's version features a rural working-class family living under siege from flocks of murderous birds. It's more elemental and scarier, not to mention more purely apocalyptic. The story is set in Cornwall, where Du Maurier lived much of her life, and her evocation of the sea and the stark landscape make the story a much more evocative and moodier experience that the film.

The other book I'm reading to distract myself from, um, current events, is David Michaelis' superb biography of Charles Schulz, Schulz and Peanuts. I've been wanting to read this book ever since the first reviews came out, and I just bought the paperback edition over the weekend. It turns out to be even more resonant than I thought it would be: Schulz was only a few years younger than my father (he was born in 1922, and my dad was born in 1918), and as I read about his life in the upper Midwest, in St. Paul, Minnesota, I can't help but think of my dad's childhood and young manhood in Michigan, in a small farming community just west of Lansing. There's not a point by point comparison between the lives of Schulz and my father, but Michaelis' evocation of Schulz's mix of keen intelligence, deep feeling, and ironclad Midwestern reticence ("Keep it to yourself," is the Midwesterner's motto) strikes a very deep chord in me, and brings the memory of my late father back to me very vividly. The struggles and complexities of men of that generation hit me especially hard as I sit spang dab in the middle of my own middle-age, and ponder just how much, and how little, things have changed from my father's generation.

And a third thing that caught my eye this morning, and briefly wooed me away from the electoral map: this article in today's Washington Post, about an English actor named Robert Lloyd Parry who's doing a one-man show as the great English ghost story writer, M. R. James, performing a couple of James' classic ghost stories by candlelight. Sounds wonderful. Wish I could go see it tonight, but instead I'll be enjoying the macabre thrills of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

Happy Election Day! Calm down! Go vote!