[Appeared originally in the January/February 2026 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction.]
Have you ever gazed up into the infinite cosmos at night with your family and observed a light in the sky moving in a way it shouldn’t?
Maybe the light stopped suddenly and then started again. Maybe it skittered across your field of vision like a bug across a forest pond. Or maybe it wobbled and danced as though you were its only audience.
Your mom or her boyfriend may have told you it was a weather balloon or a military aircraft, or perhaps they called it a “trick of the light.”
What if I told you that sometimes, perhaps even often, your mom and her boyfriend are wrong?
When you see something in the sky your parents can’t explain, scientists call that an Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO. You may have seen stories in magazines or on TV about them these days because they are becoming more and more frequent as we prepare to enter the 1980s.
Partly this is due to improved technology in optics, making good cameras cheaper for the common citizen. Some of it is because “aliens” are popular right now in the movie houses. A lot of it is just because more people than ever are looking up!
People like you.
You probably found this book on a special shelf in the school library with others like it about ghosts and missing people and Bigfoot. That’s 001.9 in the Dewey Decimal system, and it’s a magical place where curious and open-minded young people learn about things the grownups don’t want them to know.
Are you ready to learn more about UFOs? They’re nothing to be scared of, and with a little tenacity they can become IFOs: Identified Flying Objects. That makes them no less special…perhaps even more, because once we know the truth, we can take our first steps into our destiny among the stars.
What Can a Kid Like Me Do About UFOs?
When you think about how important UFO contact could be to the future of humanity, you may wonder if it would be better left to adults. They are, after all, smarter and stronger and more practical than kids.
But is that true? Think about who is usually saying so: adults. And while they have jobs and cars and big heavy books of laws, isn’t it at least possible that a kid is a better representative precisely because they don’t have those things?
A kid like you, for instance.
Adults don’t build forts in the woods. Nor do they make helmets from the bottoms of plastic soda bottles so their stuffed animals will be safe from falling Skylab debris. Nor do they make their own comic books or mix every flavor at the soda dispenser to see if one of the mixtures will explode.
In other words, they’re effectively dead and too boring for aliens to travel thousands of light years to visit.
What Could UFOs Be?
UFOs are not a new phenomenon. Humans have been observing strange lights and movement in the sky for millennia.
In 218 B.C., Livy reported “phantom ships…gleaming in the sky.” Isaiah 13:5 mentions beings that “come from a far country, from the end of heaven.” Japanese Samurai saw a wheel of fire near Nijo Castle in 1606.
Some suggest even the creatures of folklore, such as fairies, could be visitors from beyond the Earth possessing extraordinary powers and a curious interest in the development of humans.
We describe things with the tools we have. What you call a “flying saucer” was a “wagon wheel in the heavens” to an ancestor of the last century, or a “halo of flame” to one further back than that.
There have always been people of the lights, those who ride them and those who see them.
You may have noticed by now that adults find it difficult to hold a mystery in their heads without explaining it. When they don’t know enough to make a theory, they build an answer from their own fears.
To young folk like you, though, the whole world is wondrous and it isn’t scary to let an experience sort of float unattached to anything in your brain. Seeing a light wavering in the sky isn’t much different than seeing an armadillo trundling across a highway: it happened and it’s obvious and there’s no web of wrongness inside you for that fact to get stuck in.
The difference is that you want mysteries and grown-ups don’t.
That’s why when you tell a grown-up about seeing a light in the sky or a glowing person in the woods, they’re quick to give you a theory.
The most common, of course, is that it’s all your imagination. To them, your mind is an unformed jelly that can’t tell dream from reality. What if there isn’t a difference? What if one is just a reflection of the other? A dream doesn’t come from nowhere, after all—it’s built from your memories and sensations from the so-called real world.
So when you think about it, even if you are “only imagining” a UFO, you’re actually seeing or feeling something your brain is choosing to weave together from real life experience.
In other words, the UFO in your mind may be a delayed echo of one you really saw. Perhaps you were asleep when it happened. Or maybe you saw something from the corner of your eye that your brain decided to identify later.
Adults have long forsaken the logic of the dream, so they’re going to tell you UFOs are just weather balloons, swamp gas, experimental aircraft, meteorites, reflections of lights in the clouds, imperfections in the glass of a window or lens, or satellites.
They are skeptics, and what makes a skeptic feel smart is to think of the least interesting explanation for what they say and stick to that at all costs.
What Do I Need to Go Looking for UFOs?
Luckily, you can search for UFOs with the equipment you’ve evolved after uncounted millennia: the roving light buckets in your face that people call “eyes.” As a young person, you are likely blessed with unadulterated vision, free of cataracts or glaucoma or myopia, but even if you aren’t, your willingness to even look is still your most useful tool.
There are ways to improve your experience by assembling a simple kit containing these suggested items:
- Binoculars, which are superior to a telescope because they have a wider angle of vision and don’t look suspicious when you carry them around your neck
- A notebook or binder where you can write down your observations
- Sunglasses to protect your eyes from the local star, the Sun, as well as from the dazzling lights on most UFOs
- A light windbreaker or poncho for inclement weather
- A compass to locate yourself and the UFO in relation to Earth’s magnetic pole
- A camera, if you can afford or borrow one, to record what you see…though be warned that UFOs require an imaginative intelligence that film cannot often capture
- Resealable plastic bags to gather samples (burned grass, wilted foliage, mysterious jellies)
- A Thermos of water or Kool-Aid
- A candy bar for energy
- A backpack to contain your UFO spotting kit
You do not need a weapon of any kind, not a pocketknife and certainly not a firearm. UFOs are not hostile, but even if they were, your tools would be useless against them.
Again, we hasten to repeat that, aside from convenience, you need no tools but the ones in your head.
Where Do I Look for UFOs?
First, everywhere. Then up.
That’s a little joke that, like most, contains the truth. People across the world have reported UFOs at every time of the day and every point on the planet, so it isn’t necessary to wait until darkness or visit a specific place to see them.
What is necessary is to be the kind of person extraterrestrials would want to talk to, curious, excitable, open, and strange. It means knowing a lot of peculiar and interesting facts about your world. It means having theories about the mysteries of the universe, like what happened to Amelia Earhart and what’s going on in the Bermuda Triangle.
If you know people like your parents who have never seen a UFO, the most likely reason is they care too much about money and respectability to be caught looking up.
That can never be you.
What Should I Do If I See a UFO?
Can you believe there was a time when human beings didn’t write things down? It’s true. They remembered as much as they could about the world around them (which wasn’t much), and then they made up stories and rhymes to transmit those experiences to other people.
What this meant was most people didn’t know what was weird and what was ordinary. If you’ve only seen a cat once in your life, it can seem like a wondrous being.
Writing things down and gathering them together is called “data collection,” and it helps us understand and predict how the world works. Your not-so-distant ancestors saw lights in the sky just like you do, but after pointing them out to their tribe, they returned to gnawing on bones or hoeing.
In a way, that’s like killing a UFO. It diminishes the knowledge of our whole species.
What the smartest observers do is document their experiences. They do it as consistently as possible so they can compare one experience to the other to find patterns.
When you see a UFO, you can follow this simple procedure to do the right thing:
- Note the time.
- Continue watching the phenomena as long as you can. If necessary, move to the side of the road away from traffic. There is no reason to flee; it is unlikely that brilliant interstellar creatures would travel so far to harm you.
- As soon after the event as possible, complete a copy of the Encounter Form included at the end of this book.
If you don’t have the form with you (which you should at all times), make note of these facts on a sheet of paper:
- Names of all witnesses, including yourself
- Time of day
- Your position on the Earth in latitude and longitude
- Your current speed, if any
- Brief summary of light and weather conditions
- Detailed description of the object, including shape and color
- Your best estimate in degrees of its position above the horizon
- Description or diagram of its movement
- Description of any sounds it produced
- Length in minutes of your encounter
- Description of any visible beings and their behavior
- Description and location of any physical evidence of the experience (such as scorch marks on the ground)
- Inventory of anything you ate or drank within four hours of the event
- Summary of your emotional state before, during, and after the sighting
- Description of any long-term effects of the encounter (fatigue, sunburn, tinnitus, ennui)
The more of these you note for each encounter, the easier it will be to correlate the results to find patterns. Are the UFOs in your area particularly loud? Do they appear at a certain time of day? Do they make you feel the same way each time or is it different?
We suggest you buy a three-ring binder for your observation forms so you can keep them all in one place. If you live among people who are religious or otherwise untrustworthy, you may also do well to hide this binder.
Are UFOs Dangerous?
There are no documented cases of children being eaten by aliens, being turned into monsters, or being taken away unless they wanted to be.
There’s no technical reason an advanced civilization couldn’t do those things, but it seems a long and circuitous way to find prey, doesn’t it? Certainly there are more delicious or monstrous beings closer to home.
UFOs are only dangerous to terrible people.
Do UFOs Prefer Kids Who Are Good in School?
Smart kids who like things like UFOs and ghosts can sometimes have a hard time at school, not only from the little cretins in their classes but also teachers with minds as dead as bricks. To someone with a spirit of adventure, division facts and the notable exports of Belize are no substitute for real knowledge.
Youngsters like you who carry around UFO Reporting Forms in their pockets may also have problems at home which you express in ways your school doesn’t like. If your mom’s new boyfriend yells at you a lot, that yelling has to go somewhere…and it’s no good to keep it inside. Sometimes it makes your foot stick out in P.E. class to trip the boy who always wins.
See? You’re not so alone.
Advanced extraterrestrials care not for human academics because most of them are wrong. What is the use of being the most wrong of everyone else?
Who Should I Tell If I See a UFO?
You know by now that telling your mom or her boyfriend at the wrong time is a good way to get shushed or, in his case, smacked. Neither are responses you deserve, but adults are too busy digging their own graves to understand your profound experiences.
Likewise, reporting UFOs too frequently to your teacher or principal can lead to uncomfortable discussions with the guidance counselor about “acting out” or “seeking attention.” For most institutions designed to make people grow up, the capacity for wonder is a symptom, not a sign of beauty.
The police and FBI may be even worse because there are deep tracks in their brains carved by the terrible things they’ve seen, and to them, everything is suspicious or dangerous. Their allegiance is to the powerful, which is why they were nowhere to be found when those boys on the dirt bikes ran you off the road into the pond.
The unfortunate truth is there is no one to tell except perhaps another perceptive young person like yourself. There are more of you than you think, but you must be careful when seeking them, much like spies in an enemy country.
What should you look for? Kids who talk to their stuffed animals or action figures. Kids who stand on the edges of kickball writing in little notebooks. Kids who make whooshing noises on their bikes. Kids who draw even after grownups tell them they shouldn’t.
You are the aliens, and kind knows kind.
Are There Kids on UFOs?
Of course there are, some even from your own planet.
It wouldn’t be accurate to suggest UFOs are crewed by children, but they are certainly crewed by creatures with the hearts of children. No adult committed to the status quo ever built a craft capable of exceeding the speed of light for the specific purpose not to make money or conquer a foe but to find friends.
UFOs are built for the same reason you constructed that raft of plywood and Styrofoam to cross the retention pond: because there might be something—or someone—cool on the other side.
How Do I Prepare for a First Contact?
We can’t deceive you. A vanishingly small percentage of UFO sightings result in encounters with their occupants.
That percentage is not zero.
UFO sightings tend to escalate from the visual (lights in the sky) to the physical (scorch marks in the woods) to the personal (direct contact). Your best chance is to stay in the game long enough for that to happen, much like a fisherman who doesn’t expect every day to be a bounty.
Staying in the game means preserving yourself for the greatest moment in your life. It means playing along by brushing your teeth and going to bed on time. It means doing as much of your homework as you can stomach instead of stuffing it way to the bottom of your backpack. It means sometimes being what they call “good,” even though you don’t agree on the definition.
Above all else, it means preserving the tiny surging pulsar at the center of your body from the forces that want it to go cold and dark. That isn’t easy, and there will be times when you are sad and times when you are scared, crouching under the bathroom sink while the adults rage at one another. There may even be times when you are physically damaged.
During those times, you must keep your eyes to the sky and off the horrible things happening to you on the Earth. Being the kind of person to whom UFOs appear requires seeing Beyond What is Now, no matter how hard they make it.
The best way you can prepare for first contact is to fight your battles where they matter, inside where no one can truly reach you.
Also, it is a good idea to assemble a kit in case a First Contact turns into an evacuation:
- Your favorite book
- Your favorite toy or playset
- A representative portfolio of your creative work: drawings, stories, pipe cleaner sculptures
- A change of clothes
- Comfortable shoes
- Samples of your favorite foods for replication
A good contactee is a prepared contactee.
What Will Happen During My First Contact?
As your encounters escalate, you will begin to feel a strange quivering in your heart. This is the sensation of your body preparing to leave its life behind, and it is the surest sign your First Contact is coming soon.
You may be tempted to announce this to your mom or her boyfriend or maybe even a trustworthy adult, but we advise against it. For one thing, grownups are alarmed when their children grow beyond them. For another, they can place serious physical obstacles (including hospitalization) between you and your rightful place in the stars.
You may also want them to know why you prefer to meet strangers from dizzying light years away than eat another dinner of baloney and ketchup sandwiches with them. You may have grievances to air, injuries to avenge, explanations to demand. You may want righteous vengeance, if only the brief emotional sting that you know who and what they really are.
Your revenge, the revenge of all evolved beings, is to leave the others behind to grow in their own way as you grow in yours. That’s what being evolved means: understanding not everyone is on the same path in the same way.
When you are ready to let go, your people will come for you.
Have you ever wondered why no other child you’ve ever met has heard of this book? Or why it isn’t for sale at Waldenbooks in the mall? Or why it was on your favorite shelf in the library in the first place?
The reason is this is your book. It’s for you exactly and specifically, a young person we’ve been watching for all your life, whose experiences we’ve nudged to make you a superior form of humanity. A more interesting form.
We do this across time and space because the universal constant we’ve discovered is that pain is infectious, and hurt sentient beings—ones with skin, ones with fur, ones with fins–pass their hurt on to others. Your mother was hurt by the loss of your dad, and her boyfriend was hurt by his uncle, and like tea kettles, the steam must go somewhere.
Some special people have the capacity to spare others their steam, and those are the ones we seek. They tend to be imaginative but sad, curious but reluctant. Their injuries make them natural reconcilers of hope and reality, what has been and what can be, which makes them perfect for meeting their neighbors among the stars.
Kind knows kind, and we’re on our way.
