Years ago, looking west up the Sound from Horseshoe Bay on a very bright summer day, we saw approaching us a glinting, shiny ovoid, not too large, perhaps the size of a cube van, moving through the air at a leisurely pace, its altitude about halfway between sea level and mountain top.

Obviously an alien Terra-watching craft doing the safari-tourist thing (“Don’t open the windows and don’t feed zerbles to the wildlife, folks, it makes them spontaneously combust!”), but we wondered why so brazen?

Well, not brazen at all, as it turned out, just sloppy. As the object came closer, it resolved into the image of a small silver-winged float plane, likely a four-seater, cruising along as innocent as you please.

One scoffer in the group maintained that the original appearance of a shiny ovoid was just a function of distance — too far to see detail — and the reflection of the sunlight off the silver wings, pontoons, and windows. But to the rest of us it was clear that the alien’s telepathic image-projectors were tuned to too short a range for the visibility conditions. This being the West Coast, perhaps they’d expected rain and forgot to recalibrate.

Their technology is pretty awesome, granted, but it’s comforting to realize they’re just as prone to error as we are.

/fantasy