I Always Knew

 I was very young when I just knew aliens existed. Early 1960's NASA's missions and goals were not available to the everyday second grader. NASA started in1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law. The purchase of Apollo stickers brought me my first forage into the world of space. 

Rockets and their design perked my curiosity long before the question of alien existence did. Dad built a Cessna Cub airplane in our back yard when I was a toddler. I grew up around talk of past adventures as crew from the Blue Angels came to our home for lunch before Airshows. Dad had been a pilot but lost both civilian and military pilot licensees due to flying shitfaced. He had either flown with or been a crew chief with most of the Angels back in his Air Force days. I remember how impressive they looked in their flight suits. 

I was lifted up and put in the cockpit of a plane I only remember as the Tiger. Seeing the instrument panel for the first time was indescribable to anything I had ever seen. I got to sit in the Phantom once but by then most of his old drinking and flying buddies had aged out of the Angels. The poster in my high school bedroom was of a cockpit. Yet I never had the desire to fly one. I believe the fear of Zero Errors was adequately intimidating. I grew up on stories of arial close calls and as I remember them saying plenty of "shitting of pants".

But I loved up. The out-there of it all. I found most things on the ground disappointing, so my hopes for the future were all directed upwards. About this time the term Far Step Seven came into my head. I had no idea what it meant, and it was another 60 years before I ever got an inkling of what it meant.