Leaving Curacao was difficult but necessary. I had work to do at home, books to write, pictures to take, stories to tell. Having packed, all that was left to do was to say goodbye to Chevy, the housekeeper, with a little gift and to climb in the taxi/van for my ride to the airport.
When Chevy heard the van pull up next to the locked gate, she called me to ask whether that was my ride. Our goodbye was swift. Chevy was cleaning my room as I entered the van. Almost immediately, I asked the man sitting in the front passenger’s seat whether he was also leaving Curacao. “No,” he answered, “just riding with my friend.”
Hearing that made me think of the day before when I’d ridden shotgun with Eddy, a local who had ridden with me as a guide to the features of Curacao. I mentioned that to the man in the front seat as I praised Eddy’s know-how. “My name’s Eddy, too,” he told me.
Minutes later, the second Eddy talked about the patent that had yielded him a small fortune. Although it allowed him to leave the U. S. to reside in Curacao, he admitted that “a few million doesn’t last long.”
“Do you still get residuals?” I asked.
He said he didn’t; he’d sold his interest in the product he’d created. It was something most of us know well. Eddy number two had designed the sections of walls used as sound barriers on the sides of highways that border residential areas. He admitted that it was mostly a lucky idea, something unexpected.
Hearing that, I told him about the most unexpected thing that had happened to me. “I wrote a book about it,” I told him.
It was Eddy’s turn to be curious. In answer to his question about what I’d experienced, I told him about my book, the one about having had a very close encounter with a flying saucer, the book that the UFO Museum in Roswell bought for their gift shop.
Immediately, Eddy was excited. “I saw one too,” he told me. His UFO sighting occurred while he was in his swimming pool at his home on one of the east coast islands of northern Florida. I listened as he described what he saw; I didn’t ask questions. Nor did I interrupt him because of one thing he did that no one else I’d spoken to had done.
That one thing allowed me to say that I believed Eddy’s story.
As he was describing the flying saucers he had seen, he made a motion with his hand to describe the way the crafts departed. He depicted a motion that looked like a check mark resting on its side, a zigzag motion.
When he finished, I told him why I believed him. “Eddy,” I said, “the saucer that the four of us saw left in the very same way, a zigzag pattern.” No one else I’d talked to had mentioned that kind of unusual flight pattern.
Hearing that seemed to please Eddy so much that he told me he would send some pictures to me, pictures he had never shown anyone else.
They had been taken on that same night he had seen the saucers come and go.