The UFO Landing Pad
By Monte Thrasher
I went to John Muir Middle School
(“junior high,” it was called then), a beautifully designed work of
architecture, laid out in terraces on the Burbank hillside with a spectacular
view. For many years you could simply walk into it at night. Actually, as a
teenager I saw this as a brilliant idea on the part of the school authorities:
since it was no challenge to get into, there was no graffiti or vandalism to
declare a daring teenage breech of territory. Of course in time they built ugly
iron gates and fences, so I can't go there to gaze out at the city at night and
dream.
Schmucks.
Anyway, I knew a girl who lived right nearby, and Muir was her place to sit and
dream or party at night. There's this gigantic concrete platform outside the
cafeteria that juts like a wing from the hillside, right out into space, so it
seems to hover or float. It's a sheer drop on the North and west sides, with a
magnificent view I've spent many years contemplating by night.
We'd get high and watch the planes land at the airport. They form a long lovely
chain of lights, lining up for miles and miles across the Valley to come in. I
called it the diamond strand, a long wavering string of lights trailing off to
the farthest distance, six or eight at any one time, always being refreshed
with new lights at the end.
When they come in close they turn on their brilliant landing lights. Now, the
landing strip aims straight at the cafeteria platform, so the lights blast
right into your eyes. They look very much like UFO's with lights around their
saucer rim, dazzlingly bright, easily the brightest lights in that whole ocean
of nocturnal lights.
The runway points right at you, so when the planes came down to land, their
long sloping gliding path gets foreshortened to what looked like a slow
vertical drop, as if they were landing straight down. So: brilliant clusters of
lights, landing straight down with slow patient grace that looked like they
didn't care about gravity one bit. There's no noise at all (or so it seems)
like the famously silent UFO's. It took no effort at all to pretend we were
watching The Landing, aliens coming at long last to save us from our boring
teenage lives.
When they do land the brilliant lights go out, and a brief howling roar is
heard; this is the plane's engines firing a braking thrust. You see the lights
long before the sound reaches you, so it seems unrelated to the “UFO.”
I hear that planes simply cut the engines and glide in, nowadays, to cut down
on noise, so the roar may be gone. But the UFO's still land in Burbank, all
night long.