Director's Notes - 142 - UFO Sighting Reports

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Hello, I’m late with these director’s notes. Sorry. We just came back from our Europe tour, in which fully half of the crew got the flu. Anyway, if you have any questions about throwing up in the bathroom of a Polish train, I am able to answer them. 

But now I’m back in snowy upstate. After I write these director’s notes, I will go sledding. Having grown up in southern California, I am not a fan of winter, but the perfect sledding hill directly outside of my office door does help a bit with the rest of the bleak 18 months that winter lasts. 

This episode came out of a lifelong interest in UFOs and reports of UFO sightings. I should mention that I do not believe in UFOs in the slightest. While I absolutely believe that other life in the universe is a near mathematical certainty, I also think that it is vanishingly improbable that a) other life would become aware of us in the vast emptiness of space, then b) make it all the way to us, and c) having made it all the way to us, decide to hide from us. 

Which is not to say I believe the experience is fake. A professor of mine once asked us to compare eye witness statements of UFOs and eye witness statements of meetings with angels. The language used was nearly word for word. It became clear that these people experienced a profound and very real psychological event, and then interpreted that experience through the framework they already believed. See also encounters with ghosts.

So a UFO report is less about the world and more about the person telling it. It is a person, whether they realize it or not, revealing something very personal about themself. And that is why I find them so gripping.

In Detroit, there is the best bookstore in the world. It is called John K King’s Used and Rare Books, and it is a four story former hat factory stuffed with books that I don’t think exist anywhere else. The last time I was there, I basically bought their entire UFO section. One of the treasures I found was a book called UFOs Over Modern China, which consists only of short UFO reports from China between the years of 1940 and 1976. The usual UFO narrative is made even more arresting with the awkwardness of the translation, and I fell in love with the strange formality of the language in that book.

I decided to attempt to write a coherent short story only in the form of UFO sighting reports. For the descriptions of the UFOs themselves, I borrowed the language directly from UFOs Over Modern China, full of “apparent angles from the horizon”, and crafts that resembled straw hats. This format also allowed me to create cameos for a number of Night Vale citizens we haven’t heard from in a while. I even took a few requests on Twitter, so thank the users there for the appearances of Sarah Sultan and Deb the sentient patch of haze.

Ultimately though, this is a story about Leah Shapiro. It is a story about grief, and about our expectations for how we will feel in a given situation. This also was a chance for me to expand Night Vale’s small but growing Jewish community. If the last name didn’t tip folks off, the fact that the funeral was being planned to occur in just a day or two would cement it for anyone with knowledge of Jewish funeral practices. I hope to continue to learn more about this community. What is it like to be Jewish in Night Vale? I don’t really know, but we’ll continue to find out.

Meanwhile, next up we have a terrifying and beautiful episode by our new frequent co-writer Brie Williams. Brie has picked up on the Night Vale voice with an ease and command like few writers we’ve worked with, and I love the ability she has to take episodes in directions that are not at all apparent from their starting premises. I’m excited for you all to hear that one.

Ok, I’m going sledding.

- Joseph Fink
February 19, 2019