Are We Alone

The night was getting cold and the ground, already blanketed in snow, was turning into ice, as the young Peter Goldstein, aged sixteen, opened the back door of the house as he grabbed hold of the garbage bags and took them out to the bins.

“It sure is freezing,” he said, as he looked up at the inky, black, coloured sky and saw that there were no clouds floating.

“No chance of snow,” he said to himself, as dropped the bags into the bin and went inside to collect some more. Then a thought entered his mind.

“Are we alone in this vast universe?” he asked himself, as he stopped and looked up at the sky. Then he remembered what he had learnt in Media studies for Radio Production.

“What you have to remember,” said Mr Dempsey, the tutor, “is that, when listening to the Radio, one cannot see what is happening and so words have to be used to create an image in the minds of the listeners. Can anyone think of a good example?”

Students began to mention names of the Radio Dramas that they could remember.

“War of the Worlds by Orson Welles,” suggested one student, Simon Hunt, who had been sitting at the back of the lecture room, as he pushed his blonde hair back and looked up from the desk.


The tutor pointed to the back of the room, as everyone became silent.
“Good one,” said Mr Dempsey, as he looked around, “War of the Worlds by H G Wells and not Orson Welles. The Radio drama was an adaptation of the novel by H G Welles.”

He then went on to explain how the drama had worked out.

“Are we really alone?” Peter Goldstein kept on asking himself, as threw the full garbage bags into the bins and turned to go back inside to collect more bags. Suddenly, from the corner of his left eye, he saw a flaming, circular object, appear in the distance in the sky above. The youngster ignored it and continued with his job.

“It still coming down,” said the youngster, as he put the last garbage bag in the bin and turned to see, from the corner of his left eye, that the flaming, circular object was still heading downwards.

Goldstein stopped and turned around to see what it was.

The circular, flaming object, red and yellow in colour, kept on coming down. The youngster, unable to believe what he was seeing, rubbed his brown coloured eyes and looked again. The object was still there and heading downwards, in his direction.
“What is it?” he asked himself, as he stared at the object that was heading down through the inky, black sky, towards him.


Frozen to the spot, Goldstein heard his mother calling him.

“I am fine Ma,” he replied, as stared in the direction of the object.

“Let me go and get my camera so that I can upload this object onto Facebook and see if anyone knows what this is,” he thought, “But by the time I get back, I may miss it.”

The object, by this time was getting closer and closer.

“What is it?” Peter Goldstein asked himself, as he looked up and saw how near the circular, flaming object looked. He scanned the sky to see if there were any aircrafts nearby. There were none!

“Peter, what are you doing out there?” he heard his father calling, “It’s freezing out there and you’ll catch a cold.”

“I am fine dad,” he replied, as he kept on observing the object with some fascination as well as concern, as it got bigger and bigger, “Just picking up some rubbish that I dropped.

Suddenly it seemed that the object was going to crash directly onto his house.

“Is this a meteor, or is it some sort of a space debris that has burnt up in the Earth’s atmosphere?” thought the young man, as he kept on looking at the object, “Or, is it an asteroid? It will hit the house!”

Suddenly, the circular, flaming, object looked like as if it had hit something invisible and was bouncing upwards and away, leaving a trail of white, grey and black coloured smoke, illuminating the clouds around it, or, it seemed and then disappear.

“It’s hit the Earth’s atmosphere,” commented Peter Goldstein, as he watched it disappear.

“If we don’t enter the atmosphere at the right angle, we will bounce back and will never be able to return to earth” he remembered the dialogue from the movie, “Apollo 13.”

A second later, another appeared in the distance and then another and another and another but all followed the first one and disappeared into the black, inky, sky.

“What’s taken you so long?” asked his mother, as the young Goldstein, ran past her and into his study and logged onto the Internet and went onto the Space Lab Observatory website to see if it had anything on what he had seen. Space Lab was a website that was monitoring items such as asteroids and was also appointed by the government to monitor the space for any “Alien” objects. It, also gave latest information on any space exploration.

“Nothing, ma!” he replied, as he searched the website. But there was nothing.
“Dad!” he called his father, “Do you think that there are Aliens around in space?”

“What kind of question is that?” replied Mr Peter Goldstein senior.

“Just wondering,” replied the younger Peter Goldstein.

Picking up his mobile, he dialled the number he saw in the “contact” and waited for someone to answer. Finally it was.

“Space Lab Observatory,” said, what sounded like an elderly, male professor.

“Sir! I think I have seen some “Alien” objects in Space,” said Peter Goldstein, as he introduced himself and began to describe what he had seen.

“Young man,” replied the Professor, a Physicist and an Astrologer, Henry Hansfield, as he cleared his throat, “The instruments that we have here, have not picked up anything. Can I have your address so I can check on some coordinates?”

The young man gave out his address and for a while there was complete silence.

“We have not seen anything,” came the reply from the Professor, “But that does not mean that there was nothing. It may have been some debris from space such as parts of an old Rocket, or, perhaps parts of an asteroid that has burnt up on entering the earth’s atmosphere. We have some of the most powerful equipment that is searching for Alien life and so I am sure that if it was anything like that, they would have picked it up.”
With that the phone was soon put down.

That night, unable to stop thinking about what he saw, the young Goldstein, got up from his bed and walked over to the bedroom window and draw back the curtains and looked out. The grass was completely white as were the trees. The sky above was cloudless and the stars, in the distance were twinkling away like diamonds.

“One day,” he whispered to himself, “I will be involved in finding them.”