It's a chinese curse: "May you have an interesting life." I've been blessed, in a way, for many of the interesting things in my life have happened to other people. I first started to accumulate anecdotes in the newspaper business, and it turns out that I have a gift for interviewing people, in that I ask questions that others don't think of, or don't think of in time, and when I ask the questions, I pay attention to what the other person is saying.

It's amazing, what people will tell you, if they think you're listening to them. Most people shut up and soldier, and they're thrilled that someone thinks they actually know something. What sad lives these people must lead, that they get so little respect!

An Amazing Wealth

My biggest problem, after interviewing someone, was trying to figure out what angle to take with the story. Many reporters know what the story is going to say before they show up; they only are collecting minor details to plug into the same story they've written so many times before, as if they were playing a game of Mad Libs. Look through a newspaper, and take a look at all the stories. You'll see that there appears to be nothing new under the sun - except that if you are paying attention, there's always something new. I typically could write three or four different stories, using facts I had gleaned from the people I was talking to.

One of the oddest stories, though, was one that I never wrote up. It must have been about July or August when Em and I were driving a rural highway through rural Grant County, Indiana, returning from her doctor. I make a lousy passenger, because I feel unsafe if I'm not behind the wheel. In the throes of medical poverty, we were in a junker, and I was trying to pay close attention to my driving, in case something failed. The nice thing about rural highways is that if something does go wrong, there's not much traffic, so you're not likely to collide with another vehicle.

She Tapped Me On My Arm

Em tapped me on my arm and pointed to the sky, telling me to pull over and stop. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, and stopped as quickly as possible. The car would need a muffler soon, so I turned off the switch to hear better. I opened the door, got out and watched as two small aircraft flew overhead at about 100 feet altitude.

Judging heights is difficult for many people, but I measure in terms of electrid lines. A standard single-phase rural electric pole is a "35-5", the 35 being the length in feet, and the 5 being a measure of the pole's stoutness. About 3 or 4 feet get planted into the ground, so the electric lines are typically 30 feet in the air. Three-phase lines tend to be a little higher, and phone lines are a little lower.

The planes were obviously military craft. Think of a Mirage fighter. It has delta wings, and it's only 47 feet long, compared to the 64 foot length of an F-14 fighter. Now imagine it to be painted flat black, no markings whatsoever. Except that these didn't have the pretty shape of a most airplanes; instead, it had a lot of flat surfaces. And I'd have sworn that they were maybe 35 feet long.

A Mysterious Quiet

Airplanes, especially military aircraft, are incredibly noisy, but these planes were almost dead silent. They didn't go directly above us, but they were less than a quarter-mile away, and they were no noisier than a forced-air furnace.

Em and I discussed the planes on the rest of the way home. We were about 50-60 miles east of Gus Grissom AFB, and we couldn't figure out where the planes were headed. We weren't really between two Air Force bases, as far as I could tell then (or now.) As much as we were bubbling over with excitement at seeing these planes, we figured it was our patriotic duty to keep our lips zipped. A relative of mine is a civilian air frame mechanic for the Indiana Air Guard, and I asked him, not for any details, but simply if he was aware of the planes. He wasn't. A quarter century has passed, and that's no longer a consideration.

Later, they published a blurry photo of a "Stealth" fighter on the cover of Time magazine, and we decided that the planes had probably been developed in Area 51 or some such remote location, then flown around to various Air Force bases to let our airmen see them before news broke in the popular press.

Maybe F117-A's - But I Don't Think So

And while we saw pictures of a stealth bomber with angular lines like the two planes we saw, the only pictures we saw of fighters had strange rounded lines, like they were molded of butter and left in the sun too long. The planes we saw were much more like the F117-A "Nighthawk" fighters that were developed by the folks at Wright-Patterson AFB. An F117-A is 66 feet long. Could I have been that wrong about the size? Were the photos of the fighters disinformation? Or maybe we saw some experimental craft. The planes I remember seeing did not look like the F117-A depicted here. It was much more ungainly.

I don't think the Chinese curse really was referring to curious stories like this one. Those planes didn't really affect my life, except to give us a little thrill. The curse has more to do with things like having your wife spend years dying of an incurable illness. That part of "an interesting life" is really crappy. But sometimes, these amusing little tidbits like the black fighters are fun to pull out, inspect, admire, and then put away for safekeeping, in that scrapbook between our ears.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Area 51 - Chinese curse - Grissom AFB - interesting life - interviewing - light poles - Stealth technology - Wright-Patterson AFB