Unidentified Flying Objects
Tales of Unidentified Flying Objects: Old Man Koblish version.
When I was in High School, I had a Drafting Class, which went over the principals of Architectural drawing. I took the class with Adam Hughes’ future wife and a guy named John Barto. Barto really rubbed our Drafting teacher the wrong way, and i remember the Drafting Teacher lifting John up off the ground and shoving him up against a wall, threatening to murder him. Different time, because while we were shocked when it happened, we all went back to our work pretty quickly, honestly, it just didn’t seem plausible that this particular teacher would be able to murder John, even though John was smaller. The teacher regularly told us he had a jar of ears from VietNam, but if I had a dollar for every teacher who claimed to have been in VietNam and cut enemies’ ears off, I’d have about twenty dollars, which was a lot of money back then. I suspect John in general managed to rub a few authority figures the wrong way, because one day he flew a small craft airplane about 40 feet over the ground at the school.
I learned two things that day - John liked to fly, he’d apparently been taking flying lessons and had earned a pilot’s license, which they would hand out to anyone who showed up for flying class, I guess. I think he later told me that he got his pilot’s license before he was eligible to get his drivers license, which, being New Jersey, made a particular kind of sense, after all, I think you could get a license to drive a tractor at age 10 or 11.
The second thing I learned was that the airport communications tower will initially give you the benefit of the doubt and ask politely what altitude your plane might be currently flying. As in “Flight XYF349-er, what is your current altitude?” Also, if you tell them the truth and say “Forty feet”, they will just as politely ask you to return to the airport you initiated the flight from.
As an apocryphal aside, I’d heard John joined the Air Force, but since everyone at my High School worked incredibly hard at vanishing from one another’s sight for decades, I can’t verify that.