Flying over Bridgewater in Bigfoot's UFO

Apparently, the area where I grew up has its own version of the Bermuda Triangle .

This is kind of sad for me to find out now, having moved away from the Greater Bridgewater-Middleboro area about eight years ago. Now I live in Beverly, where the biggest paranormal mystery is the debate of the existence of the “Big Cat” that periodically gets sighted in my part of the woods. In all likelihood, its just a really fat house cat that someone lets roam around during the day. Granted, there is all the witch lore going on next door in Salem, but I was never that back into the ol’ black magic scene.
Nope, when I was growing up, I devoured books on flying saucers, Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. I would have loved the chance to have seen a UFO in my own hometown. Of course, had I really had a close encounter as a kid, I probably would have been scared out of my Tuff-skins, seeing as fireworks scared the hell out of me until I was 12, and, as I recently admitted, I still get a little nervous just going through the car wash.

Still, I probably devoted more time to studying the Big Three of the weird world in elementary school and junior high than I did to science and math. Plus, I was always convinced that Bigfoot would have liked me. Other than kidnapping the random hunter or two, Bigfoot always seemed like a pretty reasonable sort who just wanted to keep to himself.

The closest I ever came to a UFO encounter came years later, when I was working my first professional job at the Wareham newspaper. And by close, I mean that I had several telephone conversations with a drunk guy who was convinced that he was seeing lights flying overhead at night. He tried to get me to come down to his trailer park at night so I could take pictures of his “spaceships”.

“It’s just like, wham, they’re zigzagging all over the place, turning red and blue. I’ve seen them every night for the past week,” he told me.

I never did make it down to the UFO trailer park and I never had the heart to tell my friend that the number of colored lights he saw at night probably had a direct relation to the amount of cheap wine he drank.

But who knows, maybe some day I’ll be driving along a dark highway, and Bigfoot will give me a little wave as he flies by on his way to visit Nessie. It would make me feel like all my early years of reading were worthwhile.