UFO
I think I saw a UFO by chance when I was in junior high school, more than 20 years ago. I still remember the day my father and I carried a professional reflecting telescope to the coastal pier. It was a hot summer day, but the term "abnormal weather," which has become commonplace in recent years, wasn't as widely known as it is today, so the night breeze made the temperature feel a little more comfortable. While I was thinking about what to do for my summer vacation research project, my mother suggested stargazing. "Well, that guy says he's seen UFOs many times since he became an adult. If you're lucky, you might even be able to see one." One day in early August, as the crescent moon set early and completely disappeared behind the hills, we set off for our destination, the pier. As we slowly walked along the sandy promenade, my father told me little stories about the stars. Apparently, it was a toy rocket that first drew him to the fascination with space as a child. "Of course, I was fascinated by Verne's works, too. His story about riding a cannonball to the moon. But when I was in high school, I started reading Iwanami Shinsho books... and now, we're almost there." A long, narrow jetty stretching out from the dark inlet caught my eye. Eventually, as we reached the tip, we could see the first-magnitude stars we'd learned about in school, Vega, Altair, and Deneb, shining high in the eastern sky. "Hey, Dad, have you really seen a UFO?" I asked. My father answered with a laugh. "Maybe after I graduated from college? I've seen them occasionally. Now, we're ready." At my father's urging, I peered through the eyepiece. There, floating in the vast darkness, was a striped planet, perfectly framed. "Can you see the black dot?" my father asked. "It's one of the moons orbiting Jupiter that Galileo Galilei saw long ago." I nodded quietly. My father told me that the English pronunciation of Jupiter is Jupiter, and that the name comes from the name of the god Zeus in Greek mythology. However, when we observed the surface of this giant gas planet, we saw a red, eye-shaped vortex pattern. "It looks like a Cyclops," my father laughed, referring to the one-eyed giant who appears in the same mythology. After finishing our stargazing, we once again shouldered our telescopes and headed home. We felt like we'd completed a little adventure, but we were a little hungry. My mother warmly welcomed us, a pair of hungry astronomers, and said, "I'll have some midnight snack for you," leading us into the kitchen. There we found two cups of instant fried noodles named after unidentified flying objects. My father looked at them and said with amusement, "Look, this is a UFO."