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Chapter Five The pool wasn’t ready until August. I thought it was appropriate that the children and I could “baptize” the pool by floating on our rubber rafts and watching the Perseid meteor shower. August 16, 1993: In the subtropics, it gets dark about nine o'clock in the evening, so it would not be until a couple of hours later that meteor viewing conditions would be optimal. The children were excited to stay up late and watch a meteor shower in the pool. They had rushed out at about 10, while I stayed in and struggled to clean up the kitchen before going out to join them at eleven. Three of the five children were out there with me. My eldest daughter was on a date, and the baby was in bed. I slid into pool for the very first time, and was so happy and grateful to have it! I moved to the far side to lean my head against the ledge and float, looking in the direction the meteors were supposed to be found. The viewing conditions were favorable: no moon, clear sky with only a slight upper level haze from the humidity, and the ambient light was minimal. This was no meteor. It was a 300 foot wide black boomerang, emanating a faint reddish glow, moving so slow and low that I knew if I had been standing on the roof of my two-story house, I could have reached up and touched it! We had plenty of time to observe it and note the “brushed matte black metal” appearance of its underside. We watched as it moved ever so slowly overhead, utterly silent, seeming to float more than anything else. It continued south, seeming to skim the treetops. We were looking at each other and all saying at once: “What was that?!” When my son shouted: “Another one!” and, sure enough, just to the west of the path of the first one, there was another. Every detail was identical: altitude, speed, reddish glow, and utter silence! I was, at this point, in sufficient possession of my senses to try to hear something! Dead silence. And that struck me as odd, since there are normally all kinds of night sounds: crickets, night birds, frogs and so forth. But there was no sound, no vibration, no hum. Nothing. Suddenly, my twelve-year-old daughter cried out, “Look! Up there!” We stood there in amazement for a few frozen moments and then the kids began to shout for their dad to come out. He came to the door. “What’s all the excitement about?" The kids were saying, all at once, “We saw a UFO!” “That’s nonsense”, he said.