My father has always attested that he doesn’t believe in God, but believes in aliens. He believes it was the aliens who were responsible for the creation of the earth, rather than the commonly-held principles of God in 7 Days, or you know, the Big Bang theory. He also believes that the entire human species, in itself, is an alien experiment gone wrong. Humans are an Alien Snafu, with the biggest mistake being our emotions. (This was great during my teenage years when hormones coursing through my body did nothing but make me cry – and here I was cursing my broken composition). My sister, my husband, and my 13-year-old all love to discuss aliens – and their corresponding accessories of the extraterrestrial world, but I would like to keep my aliens at an E.T. level.

You see, as opposed to God, who my father has never personally met (yet?), he HAS encountered aliens – or at least, a UFO. Stay with me here, because I still roll my eyes – even after hearing the story for 30 years.

It was 1965 and my father was 17 years old, attending a soccer game at Kiev’s Central Stadium. He was there with his best friend, who, while I was growing up, always nodded his head vehemently, in between shots of vodka, as my dad told this story.

My father describes it, “It was like a flying mountain covered by a shield of dark brown glitter. It wasn’t round or a disk, like a cliche flying saucer, but seriously, like half a mountain stopped over the stadium and just hovered above us for 20-30 seconds, covering the entire sky, enveloping us in darkness. Then, just as suddenly as it came, “Fyeeewwww,” like warp speed, it took off and was gone like the wind over the river. There was no sound in its departure. Everyone sat there with their jaws hanging open. I wish I had a camera.”

That’s the story. The UFO came, it hovered and covered, froze everyone in shock, silence and darkness – and then it was gone and apparently the soccer game continued. Really.

And my father became a believer.

But out of the other approximate 99,998 witnesses, there is no other documented account of this UFO sighting – and I have done my Google due diligence. I have suggested alternatives; it was Russia after all. Perhaps it was a type of governmental space station test, I have hypothesized, or even some kind of a non-stealth bomber? So many theories I could have concocted other than the UFO. But he doesn’t budge. It’s as real to him as it is fantasy to me. Sometimes I think my father had a very vivid dream or too much vodka at the game – but he swears he was absolutely sober.

I often think he was secretly implanted with a chip at that stadium; some kind of a tracker or subconscious brainwasher. Something that makes it so much easier for him to believe in aliens than God.