31 Nights of Halloween - Night 25: Terror from the Outer Dark

The sky has always been a mystery and threat to mankind. Arching above us like a great dome, at times lashing down at us with lightning and thunder, spawning tornadoes or blizzards or torrential downpours, all seemingly from a great emptiness, the skies above us have often seemed a threat that was unknowable.

As we entered into an age of technology, when man challenged the sky itself, invading that vast empty realm, the great wide open still retained a mystery. Turbulence, gripping and shaking aircraft like some god punishing the temerity of humans daring to travel into his demesne, is only now becoming understood. Enormous storms can be predicted by some small amount of time, but cannot be avoided. And, sometimes, we see other travelers in that great void, travelers unknown to us, coming and going in ways we don't understand.

After the Second World War, when that great conflict sent fleets of aircraft across the globe, humans began to take to the skies in numbers unheard of before. Unsettling wartime accounts from military pilots of encounters with strange airborne objects lingered in the imagination, until a worldwide phenomenon exploded in 1947. Kenneth Arnold's report of bizarre craft over the Cascades touched off a frenzy of sightings that lasted for decades. The horror they evoke with their mysterious comings and goings, their strange allies and servants, and the kidnappings and bizarre experiments they perform with impunity, all make them perfectly suited for the Halloween season.

Whatever the ultimate explanation is for these sky denizens, mundane or fantastic, the tales of them have haunted the imagination, and continue to do so. Your Humble Host has amassed a library devoted to these weird sky objects. Let us browse through a sampling and wonder about the silent vastness that hangs above our heads.