Blue light special

 I was having a good day today right up to the point where I answered the phone for the first call of the day.  Someone called in wanting to know if we had any reports of blue lights hovering above Tracy Monday night. 

Not again.

My first thought was wondering which one of us was off our anti-depressants.  My second thought was to tell him he had reached a number that had been disconnected but I had already said hello.  I was stuck talking to him and how he saw “mysterious blue lights” (cue eerie music) flying above Tracy.  I asked him if it was near Macarthur Drive? No he  said, he told me it was by a certain street name and later I found it was just a couple of blocks away from Macarthur after all where the rash of UFO sightings have occured.   I tried to tell him more than once it was a model airplane with lights but he would have no part of my government propaganda.  It was a UFO, besides he saw an article on the web that said there were UFOs over Tracy before (oddly the story was in the Tracy Press).  After not finding a razor blade close enough to slit my wrists and end the conversation I endured five minutes or so of UFO paranoia and finally got him to hang up the phone.  One 20 oz cup of coffee later my senses soothed and my curiosity piqued, I wondered what if there really was an alien spacecraft scouting out Tracy as a possible landing site for their invasion force?  It was at least worth a standalone photo.

In preparation for my nocturnal UFO scouting trip I decided to have the lunch preferred by aliens everywhere, a BLT from Gerard’s.  I would be crafty and coat my self with bacon inside and out this time to fully mask my photographer scent.  So as evening fell armed with my trusty Canon camera gear, a bag of honey wheat pretzel twists and a slab of bacon (mmm, bacon) I headed out to Macarthur Drive to see if I could find these extraterrestrial terrorists who have been plaguing our poor city.  I chose a photo position near some discarded tractor tires in an open field and spread out the bacon in hopes of luring in one of the otherworldly visitors.

It had been about an hour when the first alien appeared.  His ship was cloaked in a fiendish blue light surely designed to scramble their detection by the radar dishes of NORAD stations across the country as they made their approach to Tracy.  Then as the blue light came to a stop above the field a robotic sentry was lowered down to survey the land.  Bolts of electricity flickered from his metal claws as he tried to fry a piece of the bacon I left out as a decoy.  Mmm, fried bacon. 

Anyway the sentry quickly returned to the mothership as yet another alien emerged, even more terrifying than the first but with surprisingly good teeth.  They must have an awesome dental plan.  He too surveyed the field searching for any scrap of bacon.  I managed to fire a off a few quick shots with my 70-200mm telephoto.  I should have used a flash but I didn’t want to give up my hiding position near the tires.  With the area secured the alien ship's crew emerged and their hideous appearance was finally revealed.

I ducked down low hoping their quad-pulse balsamic human detector would not catch me as I pushed the remaining pieces of bacon slab in front of me to cover my position.  Thankfully they retreated into the bowels of their ship and with a fiery blast of their spacecrafts’ trans warp FTL jump drive engines they blasted off back into space becoming a distant speck of blue light once again.  And so ended another near-death experience with the hostile alien force from another world.

Then again, maybe it is just a model airplane with blue lights.